So really why does it always have to be set it a medieval type society. Is it just because we are so used to everyone doing it our minds won't take any other?
And also why is it that everyone won't use any technology more advanced than the windmill?
I've never read a fantasy that was not medieval in nature I assume there are some but I've never read one. I think this could be really cool but it's rare.

So what you you think, do you think that fantasy works in a society with more advanced technology? Steam, electricity, guns, cannons, cars, etc.

Do you think it can't? Care to explain why?

My book is set in present time on earth.

A girl with powers she can't explain runs away from an orphanage and hides in the woods; using her powers to make shelter and food.
The book starts with her being pulled through the woods by a force she can't understand. She finds five dragon eggs; one of which hatches for her.. .
Anyway, the story goes on with the dragons being shape shifter and a rider being drawn to each egg.

So it's not medieval, though they use swords. For plot reasons they don't leave the woods, so there isn't much use of techno-, but in principle it's what you're talking about. . .

For the second book, which is just a thought process at this time, I'm leaning towards partly medieval with techno parts.In the beginning, the original dragons from the first book will still be in our world; learning how to fit in in their human like form and going to school. Then they will find out they can get back to their world. The dragons will be in civil war and will have technology to contain each other and use in fighting. I like the idea of them fighting in the air without techno weapons, but they may have things that cause the enemy to falter while flying or something.



Any way, I think using technology is fine, so long as you know what you are doing with it and keep things consistent. Most people seem to go medieval because they know what is expected and how to work with it.
For me personally, I don't prefer to do much of it unless I understand it. I understand enough about cars, electricity, phones, and such to fit them in a story. They don't need to be explained. But have me explain something too technical, and I don't know what would happen.

I hope I answered ok.

~ Ophelia - Marie

I think a big reason we see this, Joe, is because people like Fantasy for the medieval, old world feel, and they like Sci-Fi for its techno advances. The two genres can often be very similar, but they are clearly separated by technological advancements. If people want to write about high tech stuff, they generally go for Sci-Fi. If they want to write in a more of a natural ability, old world realm, they swing towards Fantasy.

A good reason might be that Fantasy typically has cobha or magic, whatever you wish to call it. And you can't have a high tech society mix with magic very well because along with the technology comes a greater want to find the "science" behind everything. Thus the traditions we use in fantasy (religions, prophecies, beliefs, etc.) become less engrained in the culture and harder to incorporate into the book.

Of course, it might be possible to make a Fantasy book with a higher level of technology than normally is expected, but I do think it would be harder...especially if you want to add dragons or gryphons etc. due to the fact that they might be extinct because scientists are busy dissecting them.

My primary fantasy world eventually does hit a sci-fi sort of time period, although I don't have much set there yet. Mostly, though, my fantasy is medieval setting, because I like the setting (and especially swords). I'm not as interested in the technological aspects of a setting, so I think I'm just not as likely to end up with a higher-tech society.

...On the other hand, I do have more than one fantasy/sci-fi blend stories sitting in my mind. So maybe I'm just strange.

I'm not really talking about advanced technology. I'm talking about just more advanced stuff. Say steam power or electricity.

Why would magic mess things up? I think the two would work well together.

*nods * I could see steam power working, and also electricity, to a certain extent. Like, for instance, I once considered having a race harvest lightning, in order to use it for electricity, basically. It powered things, and would be 10 times stronger than electricity.

Actually, a good deal of fantasy is set in modern times, the Harry Potter books being one obvious example, but by no means unique in that respect. There's a whole genre of "contemporary fantasy," including notably the Percy Jackson books, among others.

Wikipedia link on the subject:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ry_fantasy

I think my style of writing would be called a "Purest" (AKA medieval setting and such forth). However, I plan on writing a short story some time about a mercenary that gets somehow stuck in England (cause North America is a cliche) . I think the setting would be either colonial times or in the 1940s, just because I have not seen anything in that time regarding fantasy. (And it's a awesome time) . I even thought of a title, "The Mercenary King".

You would like the 'Dragons in our Midst' series.

I have an answer! Medieval or high fantasy is a genre convention of the genre of fantasy. That means that many fantasy stories will have this Element. It's part of what helps define a story as a fantasy story. That doesn't mean a novel can't be fantasy unless its technology is in the medieval era, not at all! There are other defining factors which can shape a novel into a fantasy tale, all of which are not present in every single fantasy story ever told.

Because it is a major part of Fantasy and what makes Fantasy fantasy (speaking of high fantasy and fairy tale sub-genres of course). If the world is based on technology it makes the story science fiction in most cases.

Why? Because it sells. ~_^

I think that authors are branching out more lately, though, precisely because of this question. I've got five works in progress - one setting's fairly Victorian, one Regency, one vaguely 19th Century Appalachian (so primitive technology, but not medieval - just back-woods poor), one where the MCs are modern and tasked with keeping magical influences from seeping into their world from the neighboring one, and one where the MCs are modern but go to a good old fashioned age-of-chivalry fantasy land.

Most fantasy lands just fall into the "time before electricity" category, and unless the author is making a big deal out of the presence or absence of certain amenities or cultural elements, we may not be able to tell whether their setting is in the Dark Ages, Elizabethan era, Colonial times, or just prior to the Civil War. You can write what you've read and what it's easier for the genre-savvy readers to imagine, or you can do additional worldbuilding and possibly not get much payoff for the extra work. ~_^

I have some ideas - kinda - for non-medieval. Nothing developed, but it'd be fun...

As for why it's that way: it...just...is.
God bless,
Crushmaster.

I think a lot of fantasy tends to be medieval (but vaguely, and in fact make that very vaguely, medieval, rather than an even remotely accurate portrayal of the period) because copying the superficial features of wildly successful, seminal, previous works seems to sell. (That is, I speculate, their self-justification is "If it's good enough for Tolkien, it's good enough for me.") See also Sturgeon's Law. I haven't read much Christian fantasy, but I suspect that the effect is worse in that sub-market.

But a significant (and, as the trend becomes increasingly obvious, more and more of the hacks are jumping on the bandwagon) segment of the universe of written fantasy isn't quasi-medieval in setting. Several examples leap immediately to mind:

• Diane Duane's Young Wizards and Feline Wizards series, starting with So You Want to Be a Wizard, are explicitly set in the present day (subject to time travel on occasion).
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife series (which I hesitate slightly to recommend in this forum because it's also a romance, with all that implies nowadays) is vaguely American-West-ish in the same way that a lot of fantasy is vaguely medieval-ish. Her Curse of Chalion is roughly early Renaissance-era (unification of an alternate-universe Spain-analogue).
• The setting of L. E. Modessitt's Recluce series is sort of medieval in some books, but more usually Renaissance-driving-toward-industrialization.
• Patricia C. Wrede has a new series (which I so want to read!) set on "the American frontier plus magic", beginning (if I recall) with the protagonist's father being brought "out West" (to Illinois) to teach at one of the new land-grant colleges. She also has a brilliant collaborative series with Caroline Stevermer, beginning with Sorcery and Cecelia: or, The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, which is set in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. (One of the male leads was an ADC to Wellington.)
• There's a series I read last (the first three books of) last year by Dave Duncan, beginning with The Alchemist's Apprentice, set in Renaissance Venice.

And so on. (Another couple of examples leaped to mind as soon as I decided to stop!)

Bujold's The Spirit Ring is also Renaissance Italy, for what it's worth. The fantasy element is Alchemy, and due to certain elements I'd mark it a read-at-your-own-risk.

I'd forgotten about that; it's also an early work, which shows (though her lesser works like this are still better than a lot of authors' best). But on the other hand, of Bujold's fantasy, The Spirit Ring may be the farthest from anti-traditional-Christianity propaganda. Chalion, despite its (numerous) virtues, is premised upon rejection of such ideas as that God is one and (so far as we can understand such things) male, that his election is irresistible and limited, that things like homosexuality might actually be morally wrong, etc. And The Sharing Knife is, among other things, a rejection of Tolkien's idea of eucatastrophe---in The Sharing Knife, the task of saving the world is not something that can be accomplished once for all with things falling together just in time, but rather a long, slow, arduous, and thankless slog.

Ah but it's only a major part of fantasy because we have said so. That is not the specification for fantasy at all.

Very good point!


and another good point!

How could I forget Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence? Published in the sixties and seventies, and set in that general time frame or slightly before.

Re: Chalion - ugh. I couldn't get past the first few chapters, and now with that review I'm glad of it. I've collected Bujold's space opera, but didn't find her fantasy appealing past Spirit Ring.

Personally I don't really like the general medieval fantasy stories. The people writing them a lot of times don't research well. I think that a lot of people write medieval fantasy just because that is how it what is done. I mean medieval and fantasy are like peanut-butter and jelly you don't ask why they go together they just do

Isn't that part of the appeal of fantasy for writers, though? If you want to use a classic (or idealized) castles-knights-and-maidens setting but don't know a lot about the actual time period (or don't like the stark reality), you can make things up to suit your fancy.

As for the medieval setting being "just how it's done," the fantasy tradition grew up out of fairy tales and ballads, which solidly predated the industrial revolution (and when you think about it, it can be fairly easy to lump the feel of anything in a pre-industrial revolution, quasi-European setting in under the "medieval" heading). Early fantasy writers wanted new fairy tales, and based their stories in classical fairy tale settings. Haggard, Kipling and Burroughs developed the "Lost World" setting for their fantastical tales, also with lower technology levels than the era in which they lived and wrote. Lewis and Tolkien were dismayed by the effect the Industrial Revolution had had on natural England and yearned for a simpler time without complicated, noisy, dirty machinery. Where the pioneers went, scads of writers followed.

Odd. I find The Spirit Ring to be, for her, almost mediocre, and I don't much mind not rereading it more often than once every five years or so; Chalion is in my opinion up there with A Civil Campaign as possibly-her-best-work. And note that when I said that it

none of this is explicit (the way Mercedes Lackey's anti-Christian bias comes through in her Valdemar series, for example); it's just that she built those worlds the way she did because of her presuppositions, which also come through about as clearly in the (SF) Vorkosigan series. And I (being usually dense when it comes to such things) would have missed much of this had it not been pointed out in discussions (which she occasionally contributes to) on the mailing list (which I lurk, but don't post, on) nominally devoted to her work.

And, like I said, despite her prejudices I think Chalion is well worth reading. I cite the brilliance of her treatment of spiritual themes in the novel, particularly the depiction of the aftermath of a theophany in the denouement, as an example of common grace---she's nominally agnostic, but the description of a character shattered by a brush with the divine is both credible and compelling to a degree that I haven't yet seen from a Christian writer.

But, of course, "de gustibus non disputandum est" (there's no arguing with taste"), and what seems a minor annoyance to me might well be a fatal flaw to you.

In my opinion, a highly undeveloped area of fantasy is early technology. i.e. not exactly stone age but just as people are starting to come together in people groups and go around the earth: Biblical times. I haven't seen much good fantasy in this time period, and I'm planning to write a book in Enderion on this time.

eru

That's a very good point. I think a simple change in setting can do wonders for the originality of a fantasy story. I actually read a really good article on this subject recently--I'll post it here in case anybody's interested...

http://authorculture.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-to-add-instant-originality-to-your.html

True.

My latest project is probably going be more like the John Carter series. Somewhat medieval, a lot not.

My world is more of a Middle-earthen advanced ancient era. The civilization was on the brink of the medieval, when it fell into collapse. Thus, you have a few castles and some pretty beasty walls, a fair amount of classical knowledge and such, and yet an ancient economy and social structure.

As regards why fantasy in general and why it is so often medieval; medieval can't be said to have started with Tolkien. His wasn't medieval; it had a very different flair. Lewis wasn't quite medieval either, though somewhat closer with his descriptions of the government of Narnia and such under the kids whose last names I can never remember. I know that it is common today though. It probably came about because fantasy has come more to a "low fantasy" level of Eragon and Batson, and since that caters to a less intellectual group than The Lord of the Rings, it chose a very well stereotyped era as its setting to help with readers who might struggle with other ones.

One of the things that's always interesting is to mix and match elements and pick and choose what you like. Like you pointed out, Reiyen, Lewis and Tolkien both did this, and neither really fit into a single categorization.

Myself, I have more advanced political processes (though I am scaling much of that back soon), and more medieval-era weapons and such. Yet at the same time, chivalry and feudalism have been mostly passed over.

Andrew

That actually sounds very much like Tolkien's Midle-Earth ...


Really? I agree that it doesn't match most vaguely-medieval-feeling fantasy of the last couple of decades, (if nothing else, he put effort into designing and describing various, and plausible, political systems), but Gondor seemed to match medieval Europe fairly well ... For example, remember that both the societies of both Gondor and Rohan were based on oaths of personal loyalty, much like the feudal system of our Middle Ages.

I don't remember the end of Wardrobe very well, but my vague memory of the descriptions of the Pevensie government felt more like a Renaissance-era government being established.

*nods*
The Pevensie children instituted government run school systems and brought paper into use, among other things.

A minotaur elementary-school principle. Now that's a scary thought.

Except that minotaurs are only "redeemed" in the movies ... and we get the impression from Aslan's miracles at the end of Prine Caspian that what the Pevensies instituted was a lot less formal than modern Westerners might expect.

My story is not set in a medieval time. Swords don't make something medieval. It was only a few generations after Seth that mankind developed metalworking so to lump everything before the seventeenth century as medieval is somewhat hyperbolic and misleading. Yes, Native Americans didn't have metalworking but that's a subculture not a time distinction and the two cultures can exist simultaneously.

So there you are, it's not always medieval, I have very few castles, no feudalism, and the equivalent of the Roman Empire hasn't even risen. And I am working on something of a modern fantasy but it won't have swords. Swords are cool.

Took the words right out of my mouth!

Fantasy is defined by the fantastic, not by our own very dull dark ages.

Some of the best fantasy works ever written have been set in modern times... Narnia, Harry Potter...

Tolkien's work was more mythology than fantasy... he claimed it was during the distant ancient times that his stories unfolded on earth.

I suppose high fantasy typically takes a very medieval form because the fairy tales fantasy emulates found their birth during that period, for the most part.

The world of Narnia itself is very medieval though.
The same with the Inkheart trilogy (excepting the first book.)

Not necessarily. Narnia's ships are advanced, they have 1800s-era sewing machines, and all sorts of anomalies. I don't think Narnia can be defined by one of our ages - if anything it's closer to ancient Greece than the middle ages.

I would have to disagree though like you say there technology is all over the place there ideals, culture, government, and warfare are very medieval.

Culture ... is hard to tell; if anything it's most similar to what we see in the heroic/chivalric romances, which is not necessarily what medieval culture was actually like.
Government ... The single most distinguishing feature of (European) medieval government was the feudal system, with several links in the chain of fealty between monarch and (most) subjects. And we don't see that at all in Narnia; in fact by contrast we see direct allegiance from subjects to monarch.
The warfare is a function of technology (and the "people"---horses with human-like intelligence, great cats that you can be sure won't attack your side, centaurs, unicorns, winged horses ... Any of these would have changed the medieval battlefield significantly!). But it also draws more from the chivalric romances than from actual history.

This is what I actually mean about being medieval in substance. I agree most stories aren't really "medieval" that would exclude most fantasy stories which are more based off of the romantic concept of the medieval era. There are a few fantasy that reflect the medieval period in a more accurate light. (the only one I can think of off hand would be Game of Thrones) (which I do not recommend by the way.)

Hmm ... I disagree. Most "quasi-medieval" fantasy, in my experience, seems to be closer to a truly medieval milieu (if somewhat romanticized) than to what one would expect if they were drawing primarily on the chivalric romances. There's a lot of dealing with peasants and mid-level lords, which one doesn't see much of in the romances, but which fit quite well with the model of "medieval fantasy as imitators of Tolkien." And when we can detect an influence of the romances on most modern fantasy, it's often something being rejected or turned upside down, since so much of the values that were assumed and promoted by the troubadours. But Narnia doesn't fit that model at all---there's no dealing with peasants, there are no links in the chain of fealty, and where Lewis echoes the romances it's usually because he believes as they did.

*sits down to listen to the guys discuss this *

I see where you're coming from. I still somewhat disagree about how much medieval-ness is in Narnia but I think it's a matter of opinion.

Every good fantasy story needs rifles. Or at least muskets.

Tell that to Tolkien.

Well there is blasting powder in The Two Towers.

Blasting powder was around back then.

If you have blasting powder, you can make muskets or cannons.

Not necessarily. One, you have to have good enough powder, and two, you have to have good enough metallurgy. Oh, and someone has to actually come up with it, too. The Chinese had gunpowder for a long time without having any guns.