American Fantasy

 Camp NaNoWriMo has begun! And I’m probably screwing it up quite terribly. But there we are.

I have started the next Wheel of Time book. So far it’s going okay. The prologue actually felt like it was moving Plot forward, instead of setting up more stuff. This was the last book Robert Jordan wrote before he died, so I think he got the hint that he should get a move on with things.

Started up Horizon Zero Dawn again. I will probably come back to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla for an expansion or two, but right now I think I should step away and try to replay one of the greats again.

---

American Fantasy--Where Is It?

I did lists for Celtic, Greek, and Roman fantasies, and about what I would expect in those. But because the 4th of July is coming up, and also I read this blog post, I was thinking about the fact that while there are plenty of American authors writing fantasy, there isn’t that much fantasy that’s overtly influenced by American history.

This is a bit weird and simultaneously not.

See, even though fantasy can technically be anything because it’s fantasy, there are some expectations about fantasy, and they tend to fall into certain trends. And so that leans towards stories and settings based off of medieval European societies. And even though we have seen plenty of fantasy stories branch out from that to historical periods of Africa or Asia, I still don’t see that many fantasy settings that have much American influence.

There are exceptions--but they’re rare. I know Soldier Son trilogy by Robin Hobb draws on American expansion and colonialism, especially in the west, though the government structure is a monarchy. Children of Blood and Bone is set in a fantasy analogue for historical Nigeria, but the author explicitly admitted that a large part of the setting’s conflict is based on law enforcement killing black Americans. And the republic of Republic City in Legend of Korra ends up becoming something closer to an American republic by electing a president.

[For a kind of ‘barely there at all’ example, Paolini was inspired for his setting by living in the mountains in Montana.]

Still, there are a lot of separate elements but not really one that you look at it and say, “That’s based off of a part of American history!” Soldier Son comes the closest, because it very clearly has American army and Native American parallels, but the laws of inheritance that drive a large chunk of Plot and give the series its title don’t connect to American ideas of class that well.

To be clear, that doesn’t make any of the above-mentioned works bad (though Soldier Son wasn’t very good, in my opinion), but it does mean that we don’t really have any fantasy worlds (that I can think of) that contain really good fantasy counterparts to American history. And that’s a bit weird, considering how many fantasy authors and readers are in the United States. No, we don’t have a medieval past, but we don’t need one.

I want to be clear that there is plenty of urban fantasy set in the United States. But high fantasy is what I’m talking about here, where the entire world in question is fictional, rather than fantasy elements in the “real” world. There are also plenty of science-fiction stories that feature more influences of American history and culture--in part because I think that it’s a genre more obviously known for social commentary, and people talking about American history, because it’s more recent, tend to make some commentary about the country, its values, and its politics.

There’s no reason that governments in high fantasy worlds can’t be republics. They don’t have to be monarchies! Republics existed before the Enlightenment! And you would think, with talk about using fiction to talk about current events being a very popular notion, there are a lot of things you can do in fantasy worlds to talk about racism, class struggle, immigration, colonialism being painted as not-colonialism, and all kinds of other things that affect Americans today.

I want to see fantasy with republics. I want to see fantasy based off colonial America, and the Wild West, and gangster Chicago, and Southern Gothic stories, and weird cryptid stories, and Applachia, and Spanish California, and any and all of Florida. It doesn’t have to be the same as the historical periods with the names switched out or anything, but I think those are great inspirations for settings and no one’s really doing anything with them. And I think using the structure of the US government, or something like it, would be an interesting addition to a fantasy setting.

---