In space, no one can hear you squee – which is exactly the sound you’ll make when you get into the soft, romantic underbelly of these hard sci-fi novels.

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While the vastness of space makes human emotion seem so small and fleeting in compare, the best science fiction authors know that on this little blue marble hurtling through the infinite void, love is all we got. If you’re looking for novels about physics that get a lil’ physical, these are the 10 best sci-fi books with romance around

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War rips a page out of those old fashioned war romance novels, and then straps that page inside a rocket ship and sends it hurtling across the galaxy. The story follows William Mandella, a soldier who serves as a cog in an interstellar war machine, the business end of which is pointed at a hostile alien species. While galavanting around the stars in pursuit of a victory that, like the expanding universe, feels further and further away each day, poor Will feels increasingly lonesome due to the sad realities of time dilation. For every year that passes for him, decades pass on Earth – which makes maintaining a relationship real hard. Nevertheless, he manages to strike up a romance with fellow soldier Marygay Potter. The pair struggle to keep the spark of their love alive in an increasingly alienating universe, no pun intended, which is made that way due to meaningless warfare and a constantly changing human society, made stranger with each century that passes in the time dilated moments that they experience.