/lit/ - Literature

I think I'm onto something here. I'm going to start world building for some modern epic fantasy. I want to avoid spergy shit like "dragons vs tanks" and shit like that though.

>>4029448
Shadowrun.

>>4029437
Medieval settings are more romantic.

modern fantasy settings are by definition retarded.

>>4029508
you're holding the genre back mate.

most modern fantasy is shit like Twilight so...

Because actual epics have not been written since the 17th century, and even then they weren't actual epics but meta-epics that often recycled each others' material wholesale.

>In before someone posts something more recent they think is an "epic".

>>4029530
but technology doesn't go well with magic and most other fantasy elements
>why didn't harry not just shoot voldemort?

>>4029556
Because Harry is a pussy.

The Dark Tower comes to mind.

please stop talking out of your ass with these generalizations

The world in Way of Kings has power armor, and a few stuff that are remnants of a higher tech level from past ages.

In the Abhorsen Trilogy the tech level is at world war 1.

In the Mistborn trilogy the tech level is medieval, but in the book the Alloy of Law Sanderson advances the tech levels to guns and trains.


I can understand how retards with these preconceptions about this genre will skip a lot of great books. It doesn't make you any less retarded though.

>>4030797
I also want to say that in Wheel of Time handcannons and regular artillery appear later in the books.

And there are other examples, if you bother to look beyond the top 3 bestselling series.

>>4029556

Magic > Guns

You fucking maroon.

>>4029556
>why didn't harry not just shoot voldemort?
>why did not harry not just shoot voldemort?
That's what he did though.

I hope you've learned from this, OP. Before asking 'why is A the case?', take the time to find out whether A is in fact the case.

Joe Abercrombie's universe is definitely not medieval.

>>4029437
Because a world without modern transportation is by definiton epic. The very moment steam boats, rail roads and the bicycle hit the stage, the world got a bit less epic.

>>4030843
Cannons appear in that universe too, just not during the trilogy. It's during The Heroes that you first see cannons.

>>4030847

Even before that the universe isn't medieval.

Well, medieval cultures had a place for magic: they even believed in magical explanations for things. They had witch-hunts and ghosts and fairies as part of their everyday lives, and guys running around claiming to have the power to summon demons and turn lead into gold.
They also had epic battles and wars, knights, pilgrimages, quests and outlaws in forests. These are very romantic elements and when you add traditional fairy-tale characters like dragons and clever young sons and lost heirs and talking animal and whatnot, it's easy to craft an interesting story.
The problem seems to be that quite a few of these elements have become conventionalized by popular culture, games, novel series and such, which can create useful shorthand for writers, but also s a deadly trap if you're trying to avoid cardboard scenery and wooden players. It's pretty easy to become a parody of yourself, in the way that westerns did, filtering through pulps, movies and television shows to the point where it has become almost impossible to take them seriously.
Some writers try to break out of this trap by moving their settings from europe, or further forward or backward in time, or to another world entirely, or (the very best way) doing actual research into the conditions, traditions, works, languages , trades and every day lives of their characters.
I don't see us losing the medieval setting anytime soon though, and mostly because it fits. Magic is hard to explain in a modern setting, and the closer you get to the present time, the harder time you have with it. Anything truly epic would disrupt social structures so much that you'd basically be writing alternate history. In Medieval stories, and even historical documents, dragons, curses, werewolves and goblins were taken seriously. Necromancy was a criminal offense and people were prosecuted for it. If you had showed up in Richard III's court and offered him dragons to fight Henry Tydder, or a crystal ball to spy on him, he'd have thanked you and asked what else you had, and not have been at all surprised.

Hyperion comes to mind, so does "Saga of the seven suns"

>>4029437
>Foundation
>Not epic
Yeah, nah, youre a cunt.

>>4030872

you're talking out of your ass without mentioning the church and religion which was paramount

medieval times doesn't equate people believing in magic, if they heard of fantastical elements it would most likely been seen as evil

>They had witch-hunts and ghosts and fairies as part of their everyday lives

there were fairy tales sure, but a lot of what you say is exagerations or simply not true

people accused of witch-craft for example, most of them were aquited in medieval england or given penances for devil-worship

towards the modern period or whatever it's called when you had the fanatics that came to america, that's when witch hunts emerged in truth

shit I know for a fact the belief in witchcraft alone could get you killed at a certain time because it was against christian belief

only religious fanatics would put people to death for reasons such as witchcraft

>>4029437

As a reader and artist, I do find the aesthetic of 'medieval' boring as fuck. It's always a western Europe England/France dingy raining place. Always using broad sword/long bows or something else spergy.

Couldn't we get some mediterranean feel going? Or Andolosion? How about some Cossack style riders?

Good god I'm so fucking BORED of medieval settings in my fantasy. Or better yet! How about we do some fucking ROMAN fantasy stuff! Have a Caesar take down a dragon or elder thing from Lovecraft.

And how about we quit using all the trope races and make something new? No more fucking elves!

And the plot needs to be about something other than 'Saving the world' or 'stopping the great evil' There is other shit to do that's just as important!

And fantasy writer's.

It's okay to do a damsel in distress. Its okay to have a gray area hero without a tragic back story. And stop putting destiny or prophecies in your stories. Its REALLY pissing me off.

That's my rant.

>>4030946
I didn't mention the church and religion because i asssumed it went without saying. Especially since the church and religious groups within it were responsible for propagaing a lot of the magical ideas. When the church endorses stories of saint Dunstan fighting the devil or St. Ursula casting out imps, or St. george killing a dragon it would have been heresy to contradict them. And the ordinary people really did believe in curses and fairies and such: there are plenty of recorded incidents in official papers where the actions of these creatures are credited by official bodies. Medical men spoke of diseases brough about by the arrows of invisible sprites, and until the nineteenth century there were plenty of Irishmen tipping their hats to dust devils.

What am i exaggerating here? Or mistaken about? I'm not sure where your problem with what i say comes from. medieval people were superstitious and some of those superstitions were elaborate, and belief in them extended from the peasants to the kings.

>>4030946
>eople accused of witch-craft for example, most of them were aquited in medieval england or given penances for devil-worship


You're wrong too.

The word 'Witch' comes from the British word 'Wit' which simply denoted a village elder wor wise person. The moving in Catholic church didn't want to compete with these people so used the buzzword 'Witch' to remove their influence and take over.

That's why satan is depicted as a man with Horns and hooves. Pan was a popular god among Western Europeans so the church needing to decrease that popularity said he was not a god, but in fact the devil incarnate.

You're speaking in half truths.

>>4030850
It's like a mix of Renaissance tech, with early medieval warfare and modern political thought and philosophy.

>>4030982
Wit, Witch
Grammar, Grimoire
Spelling, Spell casting
Let's call the whole thing off.

>>4031025
You have the ability to search a dictionary on the internet...

Good for you.

>>4031027
I don't even know how I'd have done that search. What magic is that?

>>4031029
A level-3 search phrase

>>4031029

If you use the word's 'M'lady' I will hunt you down, slit your throat and shit down your neck. I FUCKING hate that assburger phrase!

>>4031034
What is your opinion the phrase "ode lolly"?

>>4030916
>Foundation
>Fantasy
Huh?

>>4031046
Science-fantasy is still fantasy surely.

>>4031038

Reminds me of Disney Robin Hood with the Rooster playing the lute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=aTej24Xg-74&t=34

>>4030806

According to Rowling it's actually the opposite. The average person with a shotgun could beat the average wizard. It takes less time to pull the trigger than to state and incantation or wave the wand in a specific way.

In terms of their depictions of society and politics, most fantasy is a weird blend of classical, dark ages, medieval, renaissance, and even enlightenment shit. I would say the stigma that it's all "medieval" is that we associate "medieval" with "armoured dudes in a Northern European landscape", which tends to be the aesthetic.

But socially, it's usually just a vague melange of premodern shit. Kings and kingdoms but massive capitals? Cosmopolitan empires? Is that late 17th, or early 3rd, with the trappings of 12th?

>>4031047
Science-fantasy can be considered a form of fantasy (and science fiction, since it's essentially a crossover) but Foundation is not science fantasy, so...

The reason medieval settings keep popping up is because feudalism is an awesome social background to write in, because in it, petty family drama has world-shattering consequences.

In the modern day, two brothers falling out with each other doesn't lead to a civil war that drowns a continent in blood. In medieval times, on the other hand, the simple human drama of a noble family has massive consequences for the entire setting.

>>4030966
just pray for my book to actually be published

>>4031054

Fucking furries.

>>4031083
>because feudalism is an awesome social background to write in,

This is correct, but realize Feudalism happened IN OTHER PLACES THAN DINGY GREY SKY EUROPE.

Japan! Turkey! Sumaria! Fucking Greece! Just somewhere other than fucking england/ germany/france!

Feudalism is not EXCLUSIVE to one era or place! Its even still going on in parts of the world now!

>>4031109
People have more knowledge...cough cough cough...sorry, I can't finish that sentence.

People THINK they have more knowledge about how medieval europe worked than Turkey.

>>4031109

I think the problem with a lot of fantasy worlds, at least those I've read, is that there isn't much variety in the world. Tolkien, for instance, never got to expand beyond the west areas of Middle-Earth, and there are supposedly much more exotic cultures beyond those areas.

I'm currently building a world that is going to have a lot of variety in the cultures, and I'm planning on writing different stories set in each place. I'm also going to have it be a bit more upbeat instead of crapsack even in the more European areas.

>>4029437
>feudalism
>torture
>mysticism
>magic

perfect setting for epics.

>>4031126

Let me translate that better

>imagination bankrupt author.

>>4031121
There IS variety in most fantasy worlds, it's just that variety means "Here is the Country of Africa, here is the Country of Arabia, here is the Country of Coreojapchina, and also England, France and Italy."

>>4031138

You state that as if you have some kind of problem with it.

>>4031071
I thought it was. Those psychohistorians were like Wizards, not to mention the Mule...

>>4031138
>>4031121

try Chronicles of Thomas Covenant if you want lotr but oriinal settings, cultures etc.

>>4031109
there's dozens if not hundreds of fantasy works that don't take place in faux-1100-england. just because grrm sort of does it doesn't mean that it's all that common nowadays.

>>4029437
>it's not as huge in scale as say ASOIAF or Wheel of Time.
There was a full-on war going on in Harry Potter. What the fuck are you on about?

>>4031205
Thomas Covenant has literally nothing in common with LotR except they both involve a ring because both authors liked listening to Wagner.

Are there any epics in modern settings?

>>4031205
Thomas Covenant was the most unlikable, self serving, cowardly, whiny protagonist I've ever encountered. Every misfortune heaped upon him was deserved.

>>4031236
>a handful of baddy bads go around sulking
>full-on war

Wrong. Moldy Voldy should've revealed his identity to muggles and zapped the fuckers

>>4031245
Assless Tug by Ann Randy

>>4031212

Bullshit. I'd even venture to say modern fantasy is even MORE generic as time goes on!

Lets face it. The spergs in the author pool don't have the imagination to move forward cuz their vidiya and movies made them think these are the only things in fantasy.

I constantly run into this brain dead people without an original thought in their head!

>>4031248
he is indeed an anti-hero

>>4031238
only associated it with lotr because of the scale

What about urban fantasy like Bas-Lag?

The Malazan books have extremely schizophrenic tech levels because there were many ancient civilizations. The Malazan Empire has explosives, while the Tiste Andii use a giant flying city powered by magic and electricity.

>>4031417
pretty sure sky keeps are powered by technology, not magic

>>4031419
The K'Chain Chemalle and K'Chain Nah'Ruk were fucking weird and ambiguous.
>They had magic
>No they didn't
>They're all dead
>Nope lol, some are alive

>>4031426
I think it's more an effect of every character having faulty memories. Lots of contradictory stuff. Arguably a nice cop-out for the author (but I suspect not; I think he just likes fucking with people).

>>4030806
GOKU VS. SUPERMAN

WE ARE HAVING THIS ARGUMENT RIGHT NOW


RIGHT FUCKING NOW


GOKU WINS AND IF YOU DISAGREE, TAKE THE PLETHORA OF DRAGON DILDOS OUT OF YOUR ASS SO THAT YOU THINK CLEARLY AND WEEP IN SHAME AS YOU LOSE YOUR OTAKU LICENSE

>>4031686
>goku
>beating an invulnerable creature

nice laff m8

>>4029437
isn't "modern fantasy" essentially magical realism?

>>4031686
Superman is like a really strong guy. Sometimes he's really really really strong, like planet moving strong I guess. But Goku is still a million billion times stronger, especially if you're counting GT.

>>4031426

I like the fact that they're dinosaurs who didn't go extinct (or did I don't fucking know) but developed high-technology and became a modern civilization.

And T'lan Imass the neanderthals who became undead.

Shits interesting.

>>4029530
my question is: in what genre would you place a storyworld which consists of modern technology, but everything about the world's geography, cultures, history, anthropology, (possibly even animals) are made up by the author - but entirely plausible and based on 'hard' science.

No vampires. no magic. Nothing to suggest it isnt our world other than the culture of the people and perhaps things that *could* exist in our world but perhaps don't (air ships; particular giant engineering projects; moon base; etc.). No supernature elements whatsoever, other than the world itself is a fiction.

This is the basis for my current worldbuilding efforts. The stories themselves are 'epic' in the sense that they take place amongst long war campaigns that cover continents; complex family sagas that span decades; etc.

>>4031034
http://youtu.be/LWnP9r222DY

What about 'Weird Fiction'? Has someone written something like that, but as an epic?

>>4031747
Nah, man, I used to think the same way, but. Superman is really, really, really fucking strong. So is Goku, but Superman is seriously on a completely different level.

In the current continuity there was an issue of Superman where to help Dr. Veritas study his physiology, he'd been in a machine for five days, that was essentially equivalent to him supporting the weight of the entire planet for five days.

Contrast this with Goku, who had to go Super Saiyan just to be able to move around while supporting 20 tons.

Guns and modern weaponry/technology usually don't work well with magical elements. Though if you can do it well I'd be down to try your work

>>4031758
Something like "Islandia"?

>>4029481
This nigga gets it

>>4031417
>>4031426

>tfw every time you think you've come up with something original in your world building you eventually find out it's been done before

Has the world run out of original ideas?

>>4031236
Harry is the only POV in the entire series.

>>4031758
I like this idea. Good luck writing.

ASOIAF is War of the Roses with dragons and undead creatures.

My series is the Cold War with magic and stuff.

>>4032920

What about Nagini? What about Voldemort? What about Dumbledore?

>>4029556
Why didn't the Nords just shout Voldemort?

>>4030845
Huh, I've never actually thought of this.

Sort of makes sense, though. Hard to have a far off, mystical land when it's a day's flight away.

>>4033081
And then there's telegraphy. AFAIK, the closest thing in Westeros are the ravens.

>>4033137
Quite a few stories have bird-messengers for quick communication, though.

Making the world a little bit smaller is a decent price to pay for plot-convenient telegraph substitutes, it seems.

>>4031686
>>4031747
I hate both but supes is super bullshit his power level is all over the place, but at his strongest, supes would win.
Batman would beat both because he his even more bullshit though.

>>4031686

>>4033081
Especially when authors have absolutely no fucking sense of distance or scale. "Armies march immediately to their destination, often out of nowhere! Horses can be used like cars! Walking is what the inexplicably happy peasant population does!"

I think the best answer is that the high fantasy genre is heavily inspired by Tolkien.

>>4033160

>>4031055
That's fucking dumb then why don't the wizards just get enchanted guns?

>>4029448
want to collaborate on worldbuilding tools?

>>4032038
similar in the sense that there is no magic, yeah... and i've more-or-less settled on a pangea broken-down into 9 subcontinents so that's similar to islandias island, except on a much larger scale.

i've decided to try and subvert the idea of a time-period setting altogether by having multiple eras exist in the same storyworld simultaneously, separated by geography. Not sure if i'll be able to make that work though, ultimately.

>>4033278
But didn't Tolkien take the plodding pace of the pre-modern world into account? I think that Martin does that really good too. The only vessle that goes fast is boats.

>>4033532
taking a note of this, will amass profit based on your idea

because if it's in the future they call it sci fi instead

>>4033278
I'd go for the early pulps more. Especially Howard and Smith. Anybody remember that article Sprague de Camp did in The SAGA newsletter back in the fifties? He went over the problems with horses as cars and five pound swords and ancient civilizations just sitting there in the jungle, doing nothing?

I think the main thing that Tolkien added to the mix was we stopped having wise and crafty fake Egyptians and magical primitive Africans who know the ways of nature and brutish neanderthal with axes and got dwarves and elves and whatnot. If you read the pulps from the forties up you can watch it happen. I think Tolkien mostly just sanitized fantasy for the younger crowd by turning wise orientals and such into elves.

As a farmer, the thing that bugs me about most fantasy (including tolkien) is that none of them seem to understand how the crops and the cycle of them affected everybody, even the kings and things. The thing that 99% of the people spent their lives doing, and that the one percent were wholly dependant on for their power and resources, is just brushed aside. Fuck plausible magic: show me plausible agriculture.

>>4033727
>Anybody remember that article Sprague de Camp did in The SAGA newsletter back in the fifties?
No, link?

>>4033751
All I can find is a hard copy from sixty five from an APA booklet. I did find Poul Anderson's article from the same zine though. It's here in its entirety on the same subject.

http://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/on-thud-and-blunder/

>>4033844
Thanks, I'll have a read of it.

>>4033739
perhaps we need better worldbuilding tools. stuff like geography, climate, flora, fauna, and a lot of what goes into creating believable cultures probably should already be handled for the author via a piece of software.

then, the author is free to focus on character and plot.. and filling in the more colorful parts.

>>4033850
"Make your farmers real, make them sweat and shirk and spit and know when it's too wet to plant and too dry to house. Make Your cattle stink and swelter in the muck of flies and algae greened slime at the mill-pond and the ford. make the butter sweet, the nights dark and the birds sing believably in the hedges and your hero may wear mail that never rusts despite three times three rolls in a sand-head and a sword that speaks songs of blood and fear beneath a louring sky.
make the miller fat and his daughter fair, but for a bad tooth and a mole here and there, and let us feel his calluses and hear him count his tares and levies with mild spite, and we will allow you any number of elves and even the occasional dragon. Give us a world we can believe, and we'll believe your magic, at least till the end of the tale."

>>4033869
http://pastebin.com/nqFjZwN5

a short aborted essay on magic i posted on a similar thread. read it if you like.

"Even the writers I have cited say little about the producing classes in their worlds, with the notable exception of de Camp. Yet the fact is that it takes a lot of peasants, artisans, and such-like humble people to support one noble or, for that matter, one bandit or roving barbarian. We tend to forget this in our mechanized modern Western civilization, where only a small percentage of the work force is occupied with the necessities of life. Right up till the early part of the twentieth century, though, most of our own population was rural, as most of it still is elsewhere on Earth. In town, the typical worker was not one of the kind we know, putting in forty comparatively easy hours a week, owning a house and car and the other customary amenities. No, he was a dirt-poor hod carrier or ditch digger or something like that, laboring almost till he dropped of exhaustion and glad to get the job. While unions doubtless helped improve his lot, they could not have done so without the increased productivity which advancing technology made possible."

From the Anderson article

Cause thats where Robert E. Howard set Conan, Fritz Leiber set Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, and C.L. Moore set Jirel
Everyone followed suite
And when else could these stories take place anyway?
There are stories set at other points, Swordpoint in a sort of Renaissance era
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in 1814
Its just not the same
There is too much technology, gunpowder, lack of romanticism, etc

>>4033869
yes!

see: what we need are software tools that essentially tell authors what their worlds and locations should consist of, given a limited set of starting parameters... then it's up to the author to breathe life into the dull facts as stated above.

>>4033928
you could suggest a setting where a global ruling elite removes things like firearms and fast, unrestricted travel. severely reduce the population and make it so consumerism never existed to radically deminish the amount of "stuff" in the world that could be repurposed to make arms.

i think if you really wanted to you can shoehorn a world around the concept of modern or near-future "medievalism"

if it would actually work (or would be too much of a stretch) i suppose depends on the author

I'm not that interested in farmers as such, so I wouldn't bother with them directly...but if you're going to have war, you're going to need to think about farmers anyway.

Because odds are you can't afford a standing army. So what you do is, you go recruiting dudes and give them sharp sticks and train them to point them all in the same direction. If you're England, you also have people training with bows.

But the thing is, you can't really afford to put all these people in your army, because your population needs to actually BE IN THEIR FIELDS if you're going to see any food to feed your kingdom with.

So you can only raise a very small percentage of your able-bodied men and put them in your army.

>>4033985
what we need are medieval strategy game scenarios... like war games meet Civ games meet Sim games... that run... and are internally consistent.... and make sense... and then authors can set their stories inside those simulations.

if you're talking about reasonable time frames (3-20 years), an author could model an entire epic campaign before writing the novel, then go back and know exactly what he harvest was like, where the moon was, and if it was raining on the day of the climactic battle, for instance. authors could pull whatever statistical/factual info they needed from the model and then actual do writerly stuff in describing it... without spending half your career researching and keeping track of a believable setting

>>4033978
So Tito's Yugoslavia, basically? Or medieval china? eighteenth century japan?

>>4034013
I just don't think any kind of simulation will really give you that much of a leg up. It's like those plotwheels they used to sell in writers magazines. It's just a fun toy. The question you have to ask is, if you don't already like the milieu and have read and studied it for the sheer joy of it, then why are you writing about it in the first place? Why not just do joss Whedon trick and have regular people doing regular things in cool suits and with pretty backgrounds and not even bother with that much verisimilitude? Not knocking Whedon, here: Shakespeare did it too. It's just a different style. You're not really supposed to think the backgrounds and costumes are anything but plot contrivances to drive the story in those cases. Nobody thinks Julius Caesar is about ancient Rome, or that Hamlet is Danish, or the Tony Stark is an engineer. The setting is just a story vehicle. Only Tolkien and Anderson and a very few others do anything else.

>>4030966
Write it if you're so great.

>>4031314
i think theres a lot of writing to the audience, yes (or to what the editor thinks is the audience) I'm not convinced it's author's choice though. It's getting too be like TV westerns: you have to have certain things or the editor sends it back.

Because the longer you drag out a modern epic the more the reader wonders why nobody's decided to steal a nuke and finish things off that way.

>>4029437

Full Metal alchemist had a somewhat fantasy setting set alongside a 18th-early19th century tech world-wise and it was pretty good.

>>4034034
yeah, only in a modern, "atomic age", or near-future setting...

>>4033675
Videogames and anime already did that

>>4029437
>not reading robin hobbs expansive murrica 19th century fantast where fat people are magical
>20394

>>4034060
>>4034060
>Only Tolkien and Anderson and a very few others do anything else.

All good points. And I suppose what i'm suggesting is simply taking to the bleeding-edge a lot of what those few others have done. And like so many others, the worldbuilding kind of has to exist and 'work' on its own in much the same way as a conlanguage for a fantasy epic often 'works' and is whole and internally consistent as opposed to just writing cool-sounding gibberish and getting on with the story.

maybe i'm just dragging my feet, though, on the real work.. which is the story, as you point out. i just fancy the notion that, if i were successful, I could pick a 24-hour period that i particularly liked from my epic, groundhog day the bastards, and shout "resume program" to have the whole thing run like a giant model train set.

or if the characters I've created have gotten on my nerves I could put a glass dome over the whole place, flood it with water, and start over as a snowglobe salesman.

This is what nearly 20-years of procrastinating with Sim games will do to you, by the way.

>>4033739
This actually sounds like some good idea going on here.

>>4033869
I've often argued that a saturation of 'High fantasy elements' often kills a story for me. Got to have some real food, candy for the special bits.

>>4034104
Already am.

>>4034450
Seems a bit like a 1930s notion. That that I don't believe editors send stuff back, but there's a larger freedom of writing now, and not all of it for the better.

>>4030797
Mistborn could be interesting in the future to this all. It is planned to be a Trilogy or Trilogies. First trilogy was set Medieval. Alloy of Law isn't considered part of one of the trilogies, but is set in an equivalent of maybe 1850? Next Trilogy I'll take a guess is in a modern era, and the final trilogy I would guess in a sci-fi futuristic epic high fantasy setting. Oh wow, what did I just type?