How do I break out of those weird tropes but still write something with gnomes and shit? What does it look like when wizards control the means of production?
How do I break out of those weird tropes but still write something with gnomes and shit? What does it look like when wizards control the means of production?
Not as much fantasy as you think is reactionary. Read a lot of the hits of the last decade or two. Fantasy authors are well aware of the old tropes of the genre and are more critical of them than anyone else. You're not the first would-be writer this thought has occurred to.
Human-only fantasy is the norm nowadays, with the classic fantasy species going to the wayside except in specifically meta works like LitRPG or deconstruction.
If you want to see how a communist writes multi-species fantasy, check out Perdido Street Station and its sequels by China Mieville. Not only politically good, but just absolutely fantastic books top to bottom.
In my book I'm working on, I'm approaching it like a work of history from below, so I'm exclusively writing from the perspective of normal, oppressed people. There are no rich people learning lessons or anyone with a secret royal birth; just a poor family trying to get by.
This is a valuable tip. A lot of fantasy will fail this unintentionally and become pro-feudalism, even written by an author who is not a reactionary.
I can think of a good example of exactly this in an otherwise politically excellent and quite anticapitalist books I read this year, Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. Light, early book spoilers below (they are really not significant spoilers):
spoiler
There are two primary perspective characters. One is a poor former slave just trying to get by. She rules. The other is a dude who's (somewhat) secretly the son of the wealthiest woman in the world, who is pulling all kinds of strings, and he's supposed to be the heir to her fortune and corporation, but he refuses. He's a good character, but I just had to wonder: why, in our tiny selection of protagonists, must one of them be so outrageously priviliged? It's a distraction from the point of the story.
Good book though, and I recommend it. That author's other work is good anti-imperialist fiction, but similarly, it's from the perspective of the imperialists, including some people of outrageously important birth.
Exactly. I do enjoy stories that follow lords and princes, but I hate hate hate the current trend of showing "good lords" by making the peasants dumb. The new lord shows up and uses his fancy knowledge to increase production 100%, yes this wealthy noble definitely knows more about land production than the people living on it.
I like noble characters since they're the ones who have armies in medieval-like fantasy, but the story should not go out of its way to justify feudalism. If your character is a lord and wants to be a good person, they should either have cognitive dissonance or want to reject the notion of lordship.
I've been working through Malazan for a while and while the characters represent a hodgepodge of ideologies and it's certainly not always written from the perspective of common folk, it does feel refreshingly grounded in not being "The Wheel of Time."
I'm interested in revolutionary fiction, trying not to be too on the nose about it but I'd definitely like to port some aspects of 1848 or 1917 to a different setting. I wrote a chunk of a sci-fi novel set in a (you guessed it) post-climate setting. Everything terraformed to Hell trying to cool the planet, concrete mining as basic subsistence, huge lighter-than-air tubes extending into the stratosphere pumping constant SO2 to keep up with a runaway greenhouse. Revolt was brewing, but ultimately though I got too down writing in that world, and I've never finished a book besides so it was time to move on.
Maybe a light Pratchett style world with very serious political movements is due? That let's me keep some classic tropes because of right of satire, then destroy them through a proletarian uprising.
Malazan is great, especially when you get to the America analog. Erikson is a vocal leftist and it shows.
For revolutionary fiction being "too on the nose": nonsense. The more on the nose your writing is, the better. Most political work cloaks itself in layer after layer of abstraction and metaphor, and everyone just ends up missing the point. In my book, the good guys are communists. The bad guys are cops and capitalists. Connecting it directly to the real world doesn't distract from the writing; it gives people context, grounds the story, and lets you spend more words on your characters and plots than world building that just recreates what people are already familiar with.
Yo I love this advice thanks, time for Shmoseph Shmalin to make his debut.
And I'm on Dust of Dreams right now - so good - this has been the best series I'm glad I didn't walk away from when the first book hit me like a wall.
No problem! I have a Shmarl Shmarx type person that's long dead as of the book taking place but it's pretty clear who they're supposed to be if you're familiar. I'll probably add in a Shmao Shmedong in my rewrites as well.
Also, I stopped Malazan during Toll the Hounds, but one day I'll get back to it.
So much this! I think the subtle form of implied ethics in a narrative has become subservient to aesthetics in so much literature and other popular media forms. This is why Parasite hit so hard for many people, it didn't concern itself much with trying to be so damn subtle about the message.
Uncritical support for Tehol Bedict crashing the Letherri economy.
Wheel of Time isn't the worst (Sword of Truth has it beat on all counts), but it is still dreck that is heralded as great because people grew up reading them when the alternative was that or sword of truth.
I read the first few of those Goodkind books and goddamn they were dreadful. A friend insisted they were great, which is why I kept trying, but holy fuck they were so bad.
The main thing I know about the Wheel of Time is that it's super gender essentialist in a way that's impossible to ignore, which is enough to make me not want to read it.
Good call. I got into them before I developed any sort of analytical capacity to recognize horseshit, but I dropped off in the middle of the series because damn they were not very good and Robert Jordan was a clearly a very trad-horny man.
I still haven't haha and would love to know more of your thoughts on what makes the series bad if you don't mind.
Seconded.
I will definitely check this out. Trying to write a multi-species fantasy and you're absolutely right that they've fallen out of fashion these days.