Meanwhile in China, someone starts a thread on “Why are wuxia novels always set in ancient China?”
The Temeraire series has dragon warriors in the era of Napoleon. Swords are still used for close fighting; rifles are preferred to muskets, as they are easier to reload on dragon back. Some of the dragons are pretty deadly by themselves. Over the series our heroes & heroines have traveled the world, seeing how dragons interact with various human societies.
The Age of Unreason series by J Gregory Keyes is set in the early 18th century–Europe & America, mostly. Quite original. His Chosen of the Changeling novels are set in a world that’s not medieval & mostly non-white.
Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart is the first of a series set in China–“the ancient China that never was.”
I bought a biography of Sun Ra on Amazon & immediately began getting recommendations about Afro-Futurism. Which is fantasy & SF with a non-white background. Of course, I’ve known about Samuel Delaney’s SF for years–& wouldn’t Ishmael Reed’s excellent Mumbo Jumbo count as fantasy?
Short answer: Tolkien & the Matter of Britain are highly influential. Many fantasy writers have been too lazy to break new ground. A few still go back to the well & bring us something original–Gene Wolfe’s The Wizard Knight, anybody?
(I’ve been taking a summer break from my usual history to revisit my lovely dragons–see the first paragraph. But I’m on the last volume published so far–so I’ll be adventuring in post-Colonial fantasy next.)
From the OP: “always”? Nope.
I’ve seen fantasy novels that go into gunpowder as well (or things like World of Warcraft which has guns). Still, for every fantasy-novel-with-gunpowder, I can probably find fifty that don’t. And the ones that do tend to be fairly recent works rather than the stories, movies, cartoons, etc that people grew up with.
Speaking of movies & stories, some of the early stuff people get exposed to is often Greek myth. While not medieval, it’s still a bunch of European dudes with swords, shields and muscles fighting monsters. Between that and Arthurian stuff (and then Tolkien or even CS Lewis), I think most people are comfortable pigeon-holing fantasy into the “Swords, castles and white knights” category.
Aren’t the Chung Kuo novels set in a Chinese-dominated future?
Damn, I came in just to mention these novels. In the not too distant future, china takes over the world, then gradually re-writes history to show that China took over the world about the time the Roman empire began to wane. More SF than fantasy, but lots of fantastic elements…
Still European/American-centric but not medieval, off the top of my head:
The Dresden Files and Furies of Calderon books by Jim Butcher. The former are set in contemporary Chicago, the latter on a multi-species world where the human civilization is based on Ancient Rome.
The Rivers of London books by Ben Aaronovitch are excellent. The protagonist is a police constable with an African immigrant mother and English father who is apprenticing with the last wizard on the London Metro police force.
And, of course, Harry Potter.
There are some Japanese works that could be considered fantasy set in a non-European environment. E.g. the EarthBound/Mother video games could be considered fantasy set in a “Middle America” type world which was certainly foreign to the original audience.
I seem to recall someone writing a Sumerian fantasy novel once - anyone recall the title? No I don’t mean Gilgamesh, I mean a modern fantasy novel that was supposed to be set in ancient Sumeria.
You could make an argument that the Book of Mormon (the book) is a fantasy novel with Middle Eastern and Native American settings.
Good point. You could make an argument that Steampunk constitutes a kind of fantasy with a Victorian setting, but Steampunk tends to be classified as science fiction instead due to the strong emphasis on extrapolations of the technological and scientific discoveries of the era. E.g. let’s make a huge badass steam-powered walking tank and have it stomp all over London.
Kai Lung Unrolls his Mat.
Bridge of Birds By Barry Hughart is fabulous. It has two sequels. I wish it had a dozen.
Because modern fantasy literature, like modern SF, is a genre mainly rooted in Euro-based culture and specifically in Anglo-American culture.
Classic fantasy had a more varied setting. Think of the popularity of A Thousand and One Nights. Or the tales set in fairyland.
More modern classics include books like Gormenghast, which if anything is influenced by the Chinese forbidden city.
What changed, is the popularity of Tolkein and his imitators, which swept the field.
I think it’s mainly a combination of these two reasons. LOTR is basically the granddaddy of fantasy fiction as generally know it. And people tend to write what they know - and they generally are more familiar with Western European history than Ancient China or Native Americans or whatnot.
That said, there have definitely been a number of Arabian-ish settings recently. And you can find some set in Asian countries as well. (Native American ones, not so much, though I wager that’s somewhat because of Sherrerd’s reason - it’s just not as glamorous to most readers.)
Two new anthologies, Spindles (for adults) and Spellbound (for kids) are coming out shortly. They’re composed of fairy tales rewritten to be about people of color, the LGBT population, and people with disabilities.
The publisher, Eggplant Literary, specifically accepted only submissions as above.
I hate this. Leave my folklore alone, write your own damn folklore.
The Empire trilogy (Daughter of the Empire, Servant of the Empire, Mistress of the Empire) by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts is set in a pseudo-Japanese culture, with the added wrinkle of a second sentient species alongside humanity.
Glen Cook’s Black Company series starts out with a (stereo)typical European-ish setting, but by book four or five begins migrating to an eastern-ish cultural setting.
The “shift” starts with an India-analog, essentially, with a religious mash-up of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. It progresses with elements of Thai/Cambodian/Vietnamese influences, and then eventually Chinese/Japanese ones as well by the very end of the series.
Fantastical settings based on Medieval and European settings and culture.
European cultures are connected to American due to history. America culture is somewhat inspired from Europe, since most people from here have ancestors from there that brought there traditions to this new world. Since we have a lot of Eurocentric movies, books, and stories shown so much to kids it can be seen so popular due to a self-fulfilling prophecy of some kind.
The fantasy genre has a male in setting with: sex, violence, hot princesses and dragons, it can attract a lot of males to that particular awesome genre. Many fantasy fans are straight white male and many Europe Fantasy stories have straight white male protagonists of which Hollywood notices and use it, since it attracts them plus put them in that fantasy, in order to make more money.
All hope is not lost though, there are a niche of genres that have gotten popular that show Asian fantasy like Martial Arts movies and Anime.
…which is only to say that the target audience for stories (books, short stories in magazines, movies, TV series, etc)* tends to prefer stories with characters whose features (including cultural background) is similar to that of the target audience. That’s just a matter of publishing and marketing. If you’re writing stories for children, they’ll be hooked more if your main character is a child (or an anthropomorphic animal). If you’re writing stories for teens, you can hook them better if your characters are (at least at the start) also young – but not little kids because they think they’re beyond the little kid stuff. If you’re writing stories for adults, you can usually skip over the talking animals and teen angst (except as set-up for the main tale) and deal with adult concerns.
That said, I’ve seen some awe-inspiring fantasy stuff from Korea, Japan, and China. They all had the genre staples of magic and gun-less combat but the characters were Korean, or Japanese, or Chinese respectively – probably because that’s where their writers, audience, and actors were. And, for that matter, one of our most famous contemporary works of Fantasy worked hard at having an international cast and lots of races – really races, beyond humans. We know it as Star Wars. It’s space fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless.
I would venture to say that it’s more because modern fantasy media are dominated by Euro/Anglo-American producers – the film industry started in America and Dutch and British publishers dominated their early industry. And Hollywood naturally turned to its people’s familiar literary roots for source material to bring to the screen. Walter Disney was the epitome of this, turning classic Anderson’s Fairy Tales into Classic Disney Animations back when Animations were just another form of movie and not a specialty field.
…and Anderson’s.
And Tolkien’s works, of course, were immitative of (derivative? Borrowing from?) the Eddas. They feel to me like Eddas mixed with Grimm/Anderson and Biblical tales. They don’t feel like there’s much Arthurian mythos influencing them.
Elizabeth A Lynn’s Chronicles of Tornor series seems to have been an early pioneer.
Actually, Mr. Feist claimed to have borrowed the Tsuranuani culture from Japanese, Chinese, and Korean culture – with the encouragement (aid?) of Ms. Wurts. Ms. Wurts later wrote her own tales, showing The RiftWar (Magician: Apprentice, Magician: Master) from their point of view.
–G!
*I’ve noticed, by the way, that a lot of story-based video games are coming out with international casts and character choices. The difficulty seems to be in finding shoot-em-up games with female characters, apparently because it’s rare that women like blowing off other people’s heads in a superbly graphic manner. [It’s a matter of socialization stereotypes.]
And the characters in Earthsea aren’t white (except Tehanu, IIRC).