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?
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.