/lit/ - Literature

I feel like, in my experience, fantasy isn't really reaching its potential as a genre. Fantasy could be used to explore themes in a different way to literature set in modern times, like good sci-fi writers do - Philip K Dick and Richard Matheson, for example.. However, most of the fantasy I've seen just seems to be about a human a dwarf and an elf wandering around not-europe murdering dragons and orcs, pure entertainment fiction with no deeper meaning. Similarly, it could be used to explore interesting societies and cultures, perhaps as a satire of our own or just as an intellectual experiment, again like some good sci-fi writers do (dystopian fiction is perhaps the most obvious example), but again little fantasy seems to do this.

However, I don't pretend to have a comprehensive knowledge of what fantasy is out there, and I'm confident there should be at least some authors that write stuff that doesn't fit this mould. Apparently China Mieville is good, but I haven't got around to reading anything of his. Any recommendations?

Pic related because Magic the Gathering, while obviously not literature, regularly has far more interesting settings than the majority of actual fantasy novels.