Cool Settings for Historical Fiction/Fantasy

 I did not know if I would have time for a Saturday Note this week, and I don’t really have that much–so forgive me that this one is a bit hasty.

Once again, the urge overcame me to create a website of annotations for certain books, much like we see with L-Space or the 13th Depository. I like making book annotations! And at times I feel like I have contributed very little else worthwhile to the Intersnet.

Cool Settings for Historical Fiction/Fantasy

I’ve talked about this a lot, and I know it’s a popular topic for essays on fiction, but there are a ton of settings out there that are ripe for great storytelling opportunities that almost no one seems to be touching.

Someone should fix that (and National Novel Writing Month is next month so maybe you can use these)! Either by writing stories in these settings, or in fantasy worlds that are based on these settings.

Appalachian Frontier

One of the richest places in folklore in the United States is Appalachia. It’s gotten some attention in horror fiction because of that (the Hellboy story “The Crooked Man”, for instance!), but I’ve yet to see that many fantasy settings that use it, or really that many historical fiction stories set there. Which is a shame! That’s where, for colonials, you were reaching into the great unknown, places that hadn’t been fully mapped, and might contain peoples and creatures, the likes of which you’d never seen before.

There’s a REASON that there are still stories about creepy critters out there.

I am also, in general, a fan of fantasy that uses flintlocks and such. Most of those are in settings like the American or French Revolution, or in pirate stories, and those are fine! But imagine a fantasy with flintlocks that’s set in a mountainous forest, off the map somewhere.

Prehistory

Okay, some of this exists. Paver’s Chronicles of Ancient Darkness comes to mind. The lack of metal weaponry is probably a turn-off for a lot of people, but I want to remind you that the people in prehistory weren’t stupid just because they didn’t have writing or metalwork, or lived thousands of years before those things. Because this is before recorded history, writers have the chance to do a lot of big events without needing to worry about contradicting real history, unless they put in a kaiju or dinosaurs or something.

[I’m glaring at the fun-but-historically-messy animated series Primal here.]

Wilderness, magic, warfare, mystery, and really, really cool art–all of these could be YOURS if you use this setting.

Arctic Circle

I may have recently spent a, uh, surprising amount of time on the TV Tropes page for The Terror, so I have had recently been thinking that the Arctic Circle. Apparently, I want to see a lot of fantasy set in the wilderness? In this case, I think in part because there’s a lot you can do with the Inuit, which would be great! They’re underrepresented in fiction.

See, this place is sometimes used in fiction, but as something like the extreme part of the story. Like, here to put the exciting conclusion, but the rest is somewhere else (Frankenstein). I’d like to see something like Assassin’s Creed: Rogue, where it’s an area where characters who aren’t familiar with the place wander in, and have to adapt themselves to survive and face off against the enemies they’re facing.

And if you do a fantasy version of the Arctic Circle, that’d be awesome! You can put all kinds of crazy creatures and magic in there!

Incan Empire

Oh hey, not the wilderness! Sometimes people do stuff with the Mexica Empire, and think they’ve covered this, because they don’t know the difference. That’s silly. The Incans had a mountain empire, and had llamas! Put llamas in fantasy. We need more of that.

I didn’t have much on this, other than that. The Inca were more than just another people conquered by the Spanish. They were the big empire in South America!

Spheres of Heaven

The medievals had WEIRD ideas about space. And weirdly, no one wants to do a fantasy book about that? The closest I’ve read are the Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, and The Divine Comedy when it gets to Paradise. But I want to see a modern author tackle it. Something like how when Baudelino gets to the world of Prester John, and turns everything insane using medieval mythology, but with space.

Medieval space travel! Think about it! They believed that the heavens were concentric spheres around the world, with the planets floating around in a sort of ocean type thing. Imagine medieval characters building a ship to get there, and all the strange peoples and creatures they’d meet on their travels!

Aaru

I just started the “Curse of the Pharaohs” expansion on Assassin’s Creed: Origins, in which you visit the Egyptian afterlife, and gotten to Aaru: the Field of Reeds. It’s the nice afterlife, where righteous souls go, and it is… well, a field of reeds. I’d like to see Egyptian mythology used more in fantasy in general, but I think it’s weird that we have a ton of modern stories that show characters going to Heaven or Hell, or Greek ideas of the afterlife, but not so much Egyptian–or if they do, they don’t get further than the part where you weigh the heart.

What do people do in the Field of Reeds for eternity? How is it different for normal people than it is for the pharaohs and high priests? Is it heavenly? Is it dystopian? Can you hang out with the gods there? Are there borders or guards to stop people from leaving or getting in? And so on, and so forth.