I always thought part of it was that it’s easier to plunk a story in an era where it seems like people could reasonably believe in magic than it is to just have magic show up at a time when most of them can’t.
If I pick up a high fantasy novel, and magic shows up, the characters might be surprised, but they accept it pretty easily, or it’s part of the “rules of the world” to start with. When magic shows up in a more modern setting, you have to deal with everyone’s disbelief, because you know that it’s not likely that they’d just believe in it. For me, that diminishes the escapism. Also, when I read a fantasy novel that follows the medieval convention, I can be confident that (usually) the magic is going to actually be magic, I’m going to get the kind of story I’m expecting (and wanted, or I wouldn’t have picked up the book)and it’s not going to turn out to be technology or aliens or some kind of sci fi. (Now, I like science fiction well enough, but sometimes I just want a fantasy novel.)
If Tolkien was medieval then it’s early, much more Dark Age tribal with one or two Great Towns and it comes with the Dark Age feel of decline from a higher culture. Most of us know far more about 1950s Hollywood Middle Ages than anything realistic.
It’s a great period to throw anything at. It’s modern enough to have some sort of urban life and political intrigue but with no kind of scientific understanding, anything can happen and mostly does. Magic works - like magic. If you actually read ‘modern’ magicians like Crowley, who were in turn going back to the Grimoires, even a relatively simple spell takes the kind of effort to assemble a small nuclear bomb in the garage and about as dangerous - especially as it is likely to be described in bad Latin and Hebrew coded flowery language to be deliberately misleading. James Blish’s Black Easter about a modern Black Magician loosing Hell for a day (and causing the Apocalypse) goes into a lot of the detail of having to forge your own ritual sword at precisely the right astrological moment and so on. He says he did enough research to leave a lot out in case it gave anybody ideas! So fantasy magicians are usually more like shamans from a much less developed era.
When else could you have a magical setting? There’s always antiquity but the great Empires were a bit too organised to have adventurers wandering all over the place starting a fight without falling foul of the law. That’s a requirement: the setting is essentially lawless. That means that a lot of the time it doesn’t even have the kind of warrior codes that actually existed among people like Vikings (who were as well intensely litigious). At the same time it mustn’t be so disorganised that there are no real power structures at all. The exception is ‘historical’ Arthurian when a mixture of revived druidery and decaying Roman towns is acceptable.
OK, nobody knows any laws of science so they don’t know that magic doesn’t work. They are not so completely barbarous that there aren’t a few towns around, so fighting has some interesting weapons and not sticks and stones. The fact that a decent sword probably cost as much as an automobile, so you don’t risk it lightly is neither here nor there: adventurers come festooned with the things and a medley of armor from across the centuries and can still run anything down. Unlike Ned Kelly, nobody ever goes for their legs.
Terry Pratchett says he has a fairly equal mixed sex following. I think that may be because Discworld is essentially ‘modern’ and he’s said that he started from looking at all the bits the fantasists ignore. So he has female characters with more to do than dig the yard or run the castle, which needs an urban setting and his witches are ‘socially acceptable’. But the stories themselves are rarely the typical fantasy yarn - they are essentially modern stories in various fantasy settings. You can follow the fantasy, laugh at it, or get some of the messages (when he’s not getting too preachy determined to get a message across). Whether male or female you can identify with a lot of the lead characters because they are not restricted to boy things reliant on huge muscles and a bigger ego.
There is an alternate kind of far future fantasy ‘explained’ as psychic science. I can’t remember who by but there is a Celtic setting where a powerful matriarchal order runs a secretive magical (ie ‘psychic’) world order in parallel with a more conventional masculine one that seems to have settled into some kind of techno-feudalism. And then there’s PERN.
The natural human order tends to feudal. When things fall apart, powerful men fight over the scraps and the less powerful get caught up in a protection racket. Magic is a kind of back staircase something like the Church in the real Middle Ages.
I think guns mark the turning point. The classic fantasy setting is really just “somewhere technology has not created guns”, not specifically medieval times. There is no effort to actually portray medieval reality.
It isn’t only that fighting with guns isn’t as cool as fighting with swords or magic. It is also that surviving against enemies with guns isn’t as believable.
You can have a “classic” fantasy story in modern times if you explain away the lack of gun use. Wizards don’t understand technology, or gunpowder doesn’t work in Amber.
Quibble here.
If Arthur existed, he existed after the Angles and Saxons migrated to Britain but before they took over the whole island. (Well, they never really took over Scotland or parts of Wales, but you know what I mean.)
I don’t have the link anymore, but I once read an article criticizing Star Wars, Superman, Lord of the Rings and general fantasy /Sci-Fi outlook as anti-democratic. The main argument was that in fantastic stories, heroes are born, chosen, part of an elite. They aren’t elected by the masses because they have worked hard at being competent, they have been chosen by fate and are superior to everybody because of that. (Which also makes it good and easy escapism: the office worker who in real life doesn’t amount to much beyond his coworkers can dream that really, his destination is to save the world with heroic deeds, he just hasn’t been revealed yet).
Also, despite the huge advantages and betterment science has brought to our lifes, there’s no scientific thinking there. In a real modern /sci-fi society, if you have a superstrong hero mutant, a Jedi knight or a ring of power, the scientists would take it apart/ take blood samples to see how it worked, and then make everybody super strong/ gives Jedi powers/ make a second ring or an anti-ring that cancels the first.
But in the false medieval world, only the chosen few get the sword of destiny, ring of power, superhero powers, and the hoi polloi are not important.
I also would call it laziness from the writers - they don’t do research into the real middle Ages and show their bad side, they take the generic Lord of the Rings/ Hollywood Middle Ages and add and subtract the stuff they need for their story.
Of course it would be far more interesting to set a story in another time, because it would be more of a challenge to the author to figure out how to set a band of adventurers roaming the land if there’s a civilsed country/ Roman Empire etc, and you need a permit to kill dragons cause they are endangered.
Or do research, and tell how it’s expensive to buy a sword and armor, and that horses need rest and feeding and shoeing.
I recently read Cynthia Voigt’s YA fantasy novel Jackaroo, which I remembered liking as a kid, and I was struck by her portrayal of a really poor and dirty and unhappy sort of world. I can’t think of any other writer that’s even attempted to show that aspect of living in an agrarian society.
Personally, after living in an impoverished rural agrarian society for a couple of years, I find fantasy novels less interesting. It just annoys me that life is somehow easier for these fictional characters without electricity or modern plumbing than it was for my village in the European Union in 2008. (Unless one is living in a George RR Martin novel, of course.)
This is a really entertaining book. It’s a sort of encyclopedia of fantasy cliches, written in the style of a travel guide. It explains how a visitor to Fantasyland can treat horses basically as bicycles, because they never tire and rarely require food or drink. That’s perhaps just as well, because practically the only thing Fantasyland humans ever eat is stew…despite it being more time-consuming to prepare than say steak.
See also Poul Anderson’s essay On Thud and Blunder, which was IIRC written in the '70s but describes the kind of cliched, poorly-research pseudo-Medieval Europe fantasy setting that remains common today.
As Anderson points out, there are plenty of non-European historic cultures that could be adapted for fantasy settings, but even today hardly anyone makes use of them. I have occasionally encountered “Arabian Nights” style Middle Eastern settings or settings based on feudal Japan or China, but not often. Fantasy cultures based on Africa, the Indian subcontinent, SE Asia, or the pre-1492 Americas are even more rare in fantasy novels. I’m sure for a lot of authors it’s a lot easier to go with the same old pseudo-Medieval European Fantasyland setting than it would be to both research and explain a culture that would be unfamiliar to most American fantasy readers.
I think the turning point is the time that modern science first got started- early to mid Renaissance. Before that tech was empirical- what had been worked out by trial and error- and was as much the work of “artisans” as “craftsmen”. The only other ways of explaining how the world worked were magic and/or religion. There’s a sub-genre around now that might be called “post-apocalyptic fantasy”, where for whatever reason the laws of physics have stopped working or been drastically altered, and people have had to revert to a pre-tech existence or try to work out how the new laws of reality work.
Amen, if i want to read porn i’ll go find some. If Jim Butcher ever starts introducing the whole kinky sex theme into the Dresden Files i swear i will have no choice but to go on a chainsaw rampage.
I dunno; given the recoil, muzzle blast and nearly injurious noise levels of some firearms, like a 50 BMG rifle, I feel quite macho imagining being able to wield one as a shoulder arm and blasting gory holes completely through opponents. Besides, firearms mean you can take on inhuman opponents ten times your mass and win instead of merely three times.
One day, we were walking up a mountain, with snow up to midthigh, and during a chocolate break my brother the D&D DM said “next time a moron complains about 40km being too short for one day’s journey, I’ll snow on the party, damnit.”
Our friends couldn’t comprehend that the reason big villages in Spain are almost always 40km-ish from several others is that, not so long ago, that was a day’s journey, whether you traveled on horse, in a cart or on foot. You get squares or triangles, but if there’s a place where two big villages are 20km apart… there’s a mountain pass in between.
One of my problems with CSI-type shows (and one that I know I share with every scientifically-trained Doper, as it’s been mention to boredom) is that I know they’re breaking the laws of Physics by making things (from travelling to one end of Miami to another, to running a DNA match) last a lot less than they should. Albertus Magnus save us from their scientific exposition :smack:, that’s worse than the FTL travel on I-95.
By setting things in a fantasy world, the writer is automagically transporting the reader to a world about which the reader knows that he knows nothing. So long as the world is internally consistant and the writing is decent, it will work. Mixing fantasy elements into an actual current(ish) country, its legal system, its technology and its social conventions in a believable way is a lot more complicated.
This is exactly what I was going to suggest. I’ve yet to see a magic system which couldn’t be relatively easily defeated/outdone by guns. (Probably one of the reasons the Harry Potter books bother me, it’s a bit of a stretch to believe that no one in the Wizarding world would have just gotten a Glock and solved all their Voledemort problems). And we just tend to see the Tolkein-esque setting because it’s the default Western one; Eastern fantasy stories exist but are less heard of in English.
Even FF7, which Argent Towers mentioned (and I also personally love the setting of), is a bit silly whenever you see someone get hit by a giant sword or fireball and it does more damage than the burst of machinegun that just hit you.
I dont know how they do it in FF7, but getting around that’s pretty easy. Guns don’t have some critical animus that is imparted by holding cold steel in your hand, (since when your sword is touching you you can empower it with your spirit,) or casting magic. Bullets are easily countered by magical protections since they don’t have any “magical spirit” behind them.
My favorite DM made it clear to each new player in his gameworld that gunpowder simply doesn’t work in that world. The gods have decreed that this is so. The players can gather ingredients and mix them up to their hearts’ content, but those ingredients will never go BANG. The DM suggested that anyone who wanted guns should play an Old West, Modern Times, or SF based RPG instead.
My father served in Korea, and after I became an adult, he would sometimes talk about the battles. He was amazed at the way I’d point out flaws, and other ways of working around a particular situation, but really, firepower is firepower, whether it’s planes strafing the fortress or a bunch of wizards casting Fireballs from flying mounts. Sure, the range and damage stats are different, but that’s fairly easy to adjust for. I guess FRPGs really are good military training, given the right GM.
I love the Final Fantasies, but most of them will mix magic and technology…and the male main character, or one of the male main characters, will tend to carry an oversized sword, at least up till FFX, which is when I quit playing the series. The main character in FFIX used a pair of daggers, but that’s the only exception I can think of. And I loved almost every bit of FFVIII, but that gunblade strained my suspension of disbelief, as did the “we’re all from the same orphanage except for Rinoa” subplot.
In one of my worlds, gunpowder is the same composition as red dragon pheremones. You know how moths will fly miles for a female’s scent? Now imagine instead, 5 or 6 randy male red dragons rock up…and find an alchemist rather than a female. Hilarity (brief & blazing) ensues everytime. There are never any survivors for miles around. The formula is now more proscribed and regulated than, say, modern nuclear weapons are.
Possibly it was Norman Spinrad’s essay “On Books: The Emperor of Everything”, originally in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 1988 and reprinted in Science fiction in the real world. In this essay, Spinrad explains the motive behind The Iron Dream, his satire on heroic fantasy.
(Something I read somewhere when I must have been twelve or so, I don’t even remember if it was a novel or a role-playing system, but-)
In some fictional fantasy world there was an extremely simple, common, elementary spell, which even the lowest hedge wizard or village witchwife could do and was universal among all magical creatures. The spell caused the damage done by any blunt impact to depend entirely on the mass of the projectile, rather than it’s mass times velocity. Essentially, the faster something hit you the faster it would bounce off, with the damage it inflicted being constant. So small fast projectiles like bullets (if they had existed) did no more damage than slingstones. Only edged or pointed weapons that cut you, or blunt impact weapons dependent on sheer mass like maces or warhammers could inflict any damage. I remember that one feature of that world was that it heavily favored large body size and mass, which explained the abundance of 6 1/2 and 7-foot tall warriors armed with broadswords and double-bladed battleaxes.
