No such thing as a new story
A few years ago, I had the idea for a series of political events which would cause a crisis between neighbouring kingdoms; the kind of trigger incident which is commonplace in fantasy. Mere weeks after my oh-so-bright idea, I discovered that almost exactly the same series of events had happened in the history of the Pagan Kingdom of what is today Myanmar. So if history has always done it before, why bother trying to invent new stuff: why not just ransack the richly stocked shelves of historical happenstance for plot ideas?
That's what quite a few fantasy writers do and have done, so it has a distinguished pedigree. George R. R. Martin; has said that part of the inspiration for A Game of Thrones and the rest of the Song of Ice and Fire series came from the English Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York in the 15th century. Guy Gavriel Kay has his History with a Twist series, including Under Heaven set in China, and A Brightness Long Ago set in Italy; Kay's approach (which I've mentioned in reviews) steers between history and fantasy, a fact that has annoyed some people as being neither decent fantasy nor well-researched history, but there is a charm to his world(s). K. J. Parker does something quite similar (and very funny) with the Siege trilogy, starting with Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, and Joe Abercrombie has merged two revolutions - the Industrial and the French - in his Age of Madness trilogy, starting with A Little Hatred; as that trilogy title suggests, this setting is very much a twisted Grimdark version of the 'Age of Reason' and the Enlightenment. I could expand this list to unfathomable lengths, but these are the ones I've read and enjoyed.
These books are all great in their own ways, and since many fantasy books are so obviously set in analogs of the real world (the current trend seems to favour China and East Asia), why not take your inspiration directly from the real world?
I was - and still am - in the throes of planning something similar. In 2017 I published The Outlaws of Kratzenfels, a (hopefully fun) bit of fluff set in the kind of vaguely central European location of many familiar fairy tales called Elbora. Kratzenfels evolved from an early story I wrote, very much in fairy tale format, with repetitions of threes in some events, called 'The Woodcutter and the War-walker', which was itself inspired by a picture by the Polish artist Jakub Różalski (who invented the boardgame 'Scythe'). Elbora is named after Europe (a bit of switching of sounds from 'Evropa') and I had intended it to be based on the distorted European cartography of the Middle Ages (later I noticed that Joe Abercrombie's maps for 'the Circle of the World' look very similar to the polar-centred projections of the northern hemisphere). I'm still working on Elbora, and indeed it has since generated some spin-off alternative history Europes; how these settings will evolve, as separate or eventually coaslescing I'm not yet sure. One thing is for sure, the real world offers us many fascinating settings and set-ups to explore, and the approach many people have taken of looking at alternative ways to view the world - and perhaps thereby seeing its problems in a fresh light - is unlikely to become history itself.
That's what quite a few fantasy writers do and have done, so it has a distinguished pedigree. George R. R. Martin; has said that part of the inspiration for A Game of Thrones and the rest of the Song of Ice and Fire series came from the English Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York in the 15th century. Guy Gavriel Kay has his History with a Twist series, including Under Heaven set in China, and A Brightness Long Ago set in Italy; Kay's approach (which I've mentioned in reviews) steers between history and fantasy, a fact that has annoyed some people as being neither decent fantasy nor well-researched history, but there is a charm to his world(s). K. J. Parker does something quite similar (and very funny) with the Siege trilogy, starting with Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, and Joe Abercrombie has merged two revolutions - the Industrial and the French - in his Age of Madness trilogy, starting with A Little Hatred; as that trilogy title suggests, this setting is very much a twisted Grimdark version of the 'Age of Reason' and the Enlightenment. I could expand this list to unfathomable lengths, but these are the ones I've read and enjoyed.
These books are all great in their own ways, and since many fantasy books are so obviously set in analogs of the real world (the current trend seems to favour China and East Asia), why not take your inspiration directly from the real world?
I was - and still am - in the throes of planning something similar. In 2017 I published The Outlaws of Kratzenfels, a (hopefully fun) bit of fluff set in the kind of vaguely central European location of many familiar fairy tales called Elbora. Kratzenfels evolved from an early story I wrote, very much in fairy tale format, with repetitions of threes in some events, called 'The Woodcutter and the War-walker', which was itself inspired by a picture by the Polish artist Jakub Różalski (who invented the boardgame 'Scythe'). Elbora is named after Europe (a bit of switching of sounds from 'Evropa') and I had intended it to be based on the distorted European cartography of the Middle Ages (later I noticed that Joe Abercrombie's maps for 'the Circle of the World' look very similar to the polar-centred projections of the northern hemisphere). I'm still working on Elbora, and indeed it has since generated some spin-off alternative history Europes; how these settings will evolve, as separate or eventually coaslescing I'm not yet sure. One thing is for sure, the real world offers us many fascinating settings and set-ups to explore, and the approach many people have taken of looking at alternative ways to view the world - and perhaps thereby seeing its problems in a fresh light - is unlikely to become history itself.
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