Patricia C. Wrede’s Frontier Magic series is set in an alternate America in a world where magic is common, and where there never were American Indians but instead there is an entire menagerie of prehistoric and magical wildlife. Steam dragons, mammoths, swarm weasels, that sort of thing. It’s set after their version of the Civil War and they still haven’t reached the west coast.
The Leopard’s Daughter by Lee Killough is another good fantasy novel set in ancient Africa.
Yup, she describes them as copper skinned. The description of the people and of their boars is really similar to what the people and boats in norhthern Sumatra look like. Her parents were prominent anthropologists who did a lot of work in Indonesia.
Indeed they do. That series was based on a North American background. For instance, in the 3rd book, the characters take a trip on a flatboat. All the river stuff, including the clearing out of a band of river bandits, was based on late 18th/early 19th century (before the steamboat) river culture and history. She even based one of the characters on Daniel Boone. However, the city at the mouth of the river was based on Nachez, not New Orleans.
BTW, in support of the OP, she’s had readers complain that this or that animal or plant[sup]1[/sup] was not native to Europe. Obviously these fans were assuming the usual European-based fantasy.
[sup]1[/sup] Tolkien was guilty of this (pipeweed and potatos) which no doubt sensitized fans to the potential problem.
Just to answer this, you’re probably thinking of Between the Rivers by Harry Turtledove.
madmonk28 writes (about Ursula Le Guin):
> Her parents were prominent anthropologists who did a lot of work in Indonesia.
Alfred Kroeber was an anthropologist, but I can’t find anything saying that he did anything with Indonesia. Theodora Kroeber studied some anthropology, but she apparently never worked as anthropologist, and her graduate degree was in clinical psychology. Yes, she wrote Ishi in Two Worlds and Ishi, The Last of His Tribe, but that makes her a writer, not an anthropologist:
Guilty of what? That’s Middle Earth, not Europe. They also had athelas, etc.
I’d like to recommend Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin, which is set in a world of islands and archipelagos, and The Sharing Knife by Louis McMaster Bujold which is set in North America.
Arabian settings were the thing in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, but a lot of the stories are out of print. If you can find the titles you might be able to locate some on Project Gutenberg.
Since it is a setting for gaming first and foremost they made sure to populate it with a wide variety of environs and Governments to help provide whatever setting someone would want for their adventures.
Elizabeth Bear’s recent Eternal Sky trilogy (Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars, and Steles of the Sky) is set in a fantasy-analogue of 8th-13th-century Central Asia. The main characters are from the Mongol-analogue and Imperial Tibet-analogue cultures, with the religious fanatics from the west (who worship a female Scholar-God) and a crumbling empire of scattered princelings to the east playing supporting roles. The only white characters are brought in as an afterthought (Rus-analogues who inadvertently get a village or two attacked in the course of other events). It’s a really, really, good series.
But “lord” is a common medieval title, and Tolkien wrote a version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His fantasy setting seems quite medieval to me anyhow.
The Shire always struck me as being similar to rural England about 1800. Sure, it has lots of things that seem like vague left-overs from a Medievalesque time, but so did England of about 1800. (And the mere word “lord” is only vaguely related to Medieval times. It still exists today in the U.K. That doesn’t mean that the present-day U.K. is stuck in the Middle Ages.) Yeah, Tolkien was a scholar of the Middle Ages. That doesn’t mean that he couldn’t write about a setting that was broader in scope than that.
From the authors notes:
Feeling that my memories of houseboating on the Ohio River in my youth weren’t quite enough to support my tale, I turned with great reading pleasure to additional sources. I quickly found that while material on steamboating ran the length of the Mississippi, the earlier era of keelboats, flatboats, and muscle power was much less widely documented.
Especially worth sharing with the reader curious for more are: The Keelboat Age on Western Waters (1941) by L.D. Baldwin; Old Times on the Upper Mississippi: The recollections of a steamboat pilot from 1854 to 1863 (1909) by George Byron Merrick; A-Rafting on the Mississip’(1928) by Charles Edward Russell; A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, by Himself (1834) (Bison Books facsimile reprint 1987); and, rather a prize because it was only printed in a limited edition of 750 copies, The Adventures of T.C. Collins—Boatman: Twenty-four Years on the Western Waters, 1849–1873, (1985) compiled and edited by Herbert L. Roush, Sr.
The Merrick, the Russell, the Crockett, and the Collins were all authentic firsthand accounts, immensely valuable for the kind of detail that cannot be found in general histories. I owe Russell for Whit’s memorable phrase when falling in love at first sight with a great river because I could not sum up those feelings any more perfectly and Crockett, not only for the flatboat-sinking incident, for inspiration for the charming character of Ford Chicory—himself. I heartily recommend this autobiography, which seems to have been penned as an early political memoir; its politics have been pared away by time, but its personal aspects remain riveting to this day.
[and her father is Robert Charles McMaste[URL=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_McMaster_Bujold#cite_note-5”]r the editor of the monumental Nondestructive Testing Handbook[URL=“Lois McMaster Bujold - Wikipedia”] generally referred to as McMaster on Materials.]
No idea why they assume that it is set in europe, it is pretty plain if you start at the beginning of the series that it is set more or less in the Ohio/Mississippi River valleys and the area just south of the great lakes - in a fairly post apocalyptic time - though it could be an alternate Earth as it had genetically created ‘mages’ that caused the whole problem they were trying to clean up.
Tolkien’s LOTR fantasy setting had quite a bit of medieval influence. The characters dressed in medieval attire, Strider was a ranger which is based on Robin Hood, the Prancing Pony inn, and the final parting by ship back to the isle of the elves is reminiscent of the Arthurian longship to Avalon.
Yes, as I said, it had lots of leftovers from quasi-medieval times, just like you might expect in about 1800. How can you say that all the characters dressed in medieval attire? Where are the clothes described? I’m talking about the book, not the movies. Strider has only a minor resemblance to Robin Hood. There are pubs in England today with names like The Prancing Pony.
If you don’t know anything about the Ohio valley that is not obvious.
It was obvious to me because I’ve live around the Great Lakes most of my life, but someone who, for example, lives in California or Florida without a good understanding of US geography (sadly, all too common a case these days) might not pick up on that. Worse yet for someone from Europe or Australia or wherever.
I know about modern pubs, but these things, heraldry, edda, mainly go back to medieval settings. I read somewhere that Tolkien based his Shire upon England circa 1600-1800, so you’re right about that. I was responding to a post, that noted it as a European setting rather than medieval per se, that made me think more of Harry Potter. I suppose the LOTR characters could have dressed like Harry Potter, Narnia, Alice in Wonderland or something like that, the buckle shoes would be post-medieval, but I think people generally view LOTR as a medieval fantasy setting.