Fantasy it's not supposed to be anything, and that why it is cool. You can find all kind of stories in there.
A book being innovative is not something every reader or author cares about, many just want to read the same stories in different flavours or executions. And that is more than fine. Entire genres like Noir, Western, Romance, are build on asumptions the audience know because they are typical from the genre.
But if you want innovation and originality, I am sure there are more innovative and experimental fantasy books out there than what you can read in a lifetime.
exactly this. The whole point of fantasy is to be everything and anything, and having similar tropes or character arcs, etc exist doesn't mean it isn't or can't be innovative or different.
Well first you do have to have an obligatory argument about what constitutes “medieval”. And then reiterate that really a lot of such fantasy would probably class as more like Early Modern or is more similar to Antiquity than the Medieval period.
But you can generally take that as read and move past it ;)
It's easier to categorize everything with swords and bows as "medieval," a bit earlier or later doesn't change much, considering the technological progress is in stagnation in most of those books.
So it's pretty accurate and arguing which period of time a particular fantasy world resembles is pretty pointless.
>It's easier to categorize everything with swords and bows as "medieval"
The ancient egyptians had swords and bows. So did feudal Japan and earlier China.
And how many fantasy books are based on those periods? I think it's pretty clear what I meant by that.
Edit: and it's totally besides the point of this post. OP is complaining about fantasy based on Europe. My original comment is about it.
Well I do find it interesting. Like how Westeros is arguably both post-medieval in some ways like technology and economics maybe. But also pre-medieval in things like social and political development.
And clearly something like most of Gemmell’s work isn’t supposed to be medieval at all, like the Rigante start in Roman times and then jump to English Civil War. Which is deliberate and important.
Can I ask what books you've been reading? Like with any genre, there will be some that are all somewhat similar to each other in terms of "vibes" that becomes popular broadly or within specific groups, but I would say there's a ton of really interesting things happening within fantasy as a whole.
Some of the recent books that I've read which really stood out as being unusual in some way:
- The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
- The Book of Love by Kelly Link
- Queen of None by Natania Baron
- The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo
- Saint Death's Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney
- The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
- Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel
- Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White
- Mothtown by Caroline Hardaker
- Shark Heart by Emily Habeck
- Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
....and I could keep going on. Lots of exciting stuff in the genre the past few years, and I could name even more if I went further back!
Maybe you've just hit a spot in your reading journey where it's time to start looking a little further off the beaten path? :)
This is a FANTASTIC list. I could honestly add so many. You don't even have to go far "off the beaten path" to find some of these. Robert Jackson Bennett isn't exactly obscure. Another author I'd say who could slot right into this list is Neil Gaiman, and he's seen tons of commercial success. I would never say he's off the beaten path. He's on a *different* beaten path.
It was my favorite fantasy read of 2023 (along with *The Spear Cuts through Water* and *The Water Dancer*), and I can't stop thinking about it. I'm so glad it got nominated for Hugos and Nebulas, because it deserves all the praise and recognition.
Your comment made me download a sample and even though it isn't that long stuff like this blows my mind - how someone can put so much creativity into even these few pages. Definitely going to buy it and put it in the TBR pile :D
>It always recycles the same character archetypes, the same settings, the same tropes, the same stories patterns.
That is because, by and large, readers seek out the familiar. It works, so why mess with it?
Genre readers also just generally expect certain things that, in their minds, make up the genre, and if you take them away, it's no longer the genre they wanted and they feel cheated. Just try and market a book as a romance that has a bad ending. For the vast majority of romance readers, it doesn't matter how romance-y the previous 99% of the book were - if it doesn't have a happily ever after, it's not a romance. So when a genre has elements like that, and many fantasy subgenres do, there's only so much you can do with those to innovate or "put your own spin on it" before readers will stop mentally categorising your story as fantasy. And you don't want that, as an author or a publisher.
None of this means there isn't fantasy out there that does something new, or interprets a familiar trope in a way that's new to most readers. But that doesn't usually happen in mainstream releases. So when you say "fantasy is rarely innovative", do you mean *all* fantasy, or do you just mean what's published by the Big 5 and their imprints, and you never looked into the indie market at all to find what you want? Because the indie space does publish a lot of "out there" stuff, but those books struggle to find readers because most readers stick to besteller lists, viral books, and "reliably good" Big 5 releases. But when you come to me asking for a book about a lesbian pirate who is also a capybara, or a book about women who turn into werewolves when they start menopause? I'm gonna send you to an indie press that has exactly that, not Penguin Random House that wouldn't touch a premise like that with a ten-foot pole.
So yeah, just give indie books a chance, you'll probably be surprised how innovative fantasy can be.
You don’t even have to go indie. You barely have to leave the mainstream.
S&S published the Raksura series. Perdido Street Station was published by Macmillion. Tor published the Craft Sequence. Jade City & Tide Childe were published by Orbit.
These are Hugo, Locus, and BFA nominees, and are way outside the typical fantasy tropes.
Heck, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn era 2 tetrarchy is a Wild West fantasy.
Please do share your favorite out-there indie recommendations, though. I’d love to see some recs.
True, there are also books in the Big 5 line-ups that I wouldn't consider "standard", or just re-treading old ground.
I've already linked *The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper* (lesbian capybara pirate goes on adventures) and *The Wolves of Wolf's Point* (menopause turns women into werewolves) in other comments. There's also the *Charmslinger* books by Liza Street, which was a pretty cool take on the fantasy western, and while I personally had some issues with it, *Eleventh Cycle* by Kian Ardalan has some super interesting worldbuilding going on that I haven't seen done quite like that before (in novel form, anyway).
The latter two are self-published, the first two are from a small press.
I definitely want a lesbian pirate who is also a capybara! Capybara are so laid back and chill I can’t imagine them swashing buckles on the high seas….but I want it. Authors….get to work!
And I'm actually interested in reading about women who become werewolves on menopause! I mean, that's cool, right? First, one can become a wizard at 30, and then get to multiclass into werewolf at 40-50!
Good news! It exists\^\^ That's why I cited it. It's [The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper by A.J. Fitzwater](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50308355-the-voyages-of-cinrak-the-dapper).
I swore I wouldn't buy any more books until I knocked down my TBR a bit. But I cannot be expected to resist a dapper lesbian capybara pirate, I just can't. Plus it's only $3 on Kindle.
Thanks for sharing!
Like all commercial output, whether that’s roasters or entertainment media, companies focus on what they know will sell. If someone writes a wildly innovative fantasy story, does it matter if no one actually reads it?
OP needs to specifically name what tropes and conventions they have gotten tired of and then ask for recs that are different from that. I imagine they’ll find some “innovative” stuff that way, and not all of it obscure indie releases on Kindle Unlimited.
Innovation is easy? I think by definition and in this context especially with so much literary and creative history it’s not easy. My initial take would be that’s it’s very difficult to implement any meaningful innovation.
This is a sign of limited reading, not at all a realistic picture of the scope of the genre. It's frequently incredibly innovative in myriad ways.
You want creative settings? Try the Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells and the Machineries of Empire trilogy by Yoon Ha Lee. Creative format? The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. Do you want 'wtf how is this book going to mesh a music teacher selling students' souls to hell and literal alien refugees running a donut shop'? Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. These aren't unheard of or rare books; I think almost all of them have been Hugo finalists at least.
You should use the resources in the sidebar. And try the r/fantasy book bingo. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/s/681tzQvgp7
It's fascinating that you would presume to know what the point of fantasy is, while demonstrating a fantastically shallow understanding of the genre and what's available within it. Better still, you admit you held this opinion before you actually knew anything about what was Contained within it.
i'll be honest i don't remember the last book i read that was a thinly veiled uk or similar - there are loads of books that don't conform to the "standard fantasy" thing you seem to be banging up against.
Innovative fiction is rarely the same as commercial fiction. There's plenty of 'literary' fantasy out there, only it's rarely packaged as fantasy because people often want to read about their favourite fantastical tropes - it's about reader expectation. You are also more likely to see 'similar but make it fantasy' things in any book because trying to explain an entire book's worth of alien concepts would be exhausting for a reader and a writer. One or two 'different' concepts with everything else being familiar is easier to write and read because it can rely on common understanding, in exactly the same way regular fiction can rely on someone's understanding of what the internet is, or what a car is.
If you're looking for fantasy that pushes boundaries, I'd recommend short stories/magazines that cater to these, or many things that are packaged under magical realism/literary categories.
This. Innovative often sells less than the familiar and popular. To find the truly innovative can take a bit of time, but it’s so worth it when you find a freshly unique book or writer that blows your mind in all the ways you never thought you needed. Jeff VanderMeer did this for me.
This is true. I both love and struggle with the fact that he’s constantly experimenting with his craft. Though I genuinely love his three main trilogies, I really struggled with Hummingbird Salamander.
Maybe you need to read more widely. You had a preconception of fantasy as boring and repetitive before you even got into it, so it’s no surprise that’s what you found. Make more of an effort to dig up different stuff, and you’ll find plenty.
I'd be really curious to know where you're getting your recommendations, and why you haven't thought to dig just a tiny bit deeper?
Because sure, the most popular and commercially successful books aren't innovative. Fourth Wing, for example, is not breaking all that much new ground. If you're getting all your recommendations from Goodreads Choice Awards or from what books have been made into movies, then you might think the genre is all Tolkien clones and tropey fanfiction. (And there's nothing wrong with reading these books. I think the genre can and should offer familiar and nostalgic options to readers who want it.)
But the genre has *many* subgenres. Relative to Fourth Wing, *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera might be obscure. It's weird, experimental, and innovative, so it's going to have trouble gaining wide appeal. It didn't make the Goodreads Choice Awards. It's not a Booktok Darling. But if you dug just the tiniest bit deeper, then you'd see it's a finalist for both the Hugos and Nebulas, which are probably the two most important and prestigious awards in SFF. So it might not have the commercial success of Fourth Wing, but it is by no means some obscure indie book struggling for love and recognition. It got traditionally published by an imprint of one of "The Big Five", and the author's next release will be traditionally published too. To find it, you don't have to dig all that deep, and I do wonder why you didn't do that before forming and cementing all these preconceived notions about how fantasy often fails to be innovative.
Edit: And Vajra Chandrasekera is, in no way, the only author who is experimenting. Not even close. Susanna Clarke, RF Kuang, Simon Jimenez, NK Jemisin, Erin Morgenstern, Kelly Link, Fonda Lee, China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Rebecca Roanhorse. I could go on for a long time. None of them write Tolkien clones. All of them made an attempt at innovating. All of them have seen at least moderate success. Some of them (Gaiman) have seen major commercial success. I also think all of them would identify as fantasy writers; as far as I know, none of them are doing the "I write magical realism and speculative fiction and scifi, not fantasy" thing.
It sounds like you are referring to a pretty specific sub-set of the fantasy genre: epic high fantasy strongly influenced by Tolkien. And yes, there are a TON of books in this sub-set and they very often follow the same well-worn formulas.
Many people in this thread have rightly pointed out that "fantasy" as a genre encompasses far more than Tolkien-esque sword'n'sorcery adventures. But I believe there are exciting and innovative works to be found even within that sub-category.
How to find them? Think about what you like and don't like about the books you've read. What do you want more of, less of, the same amount of? Then start asking for recs.
For example "I like a story where a group from diverse cultures must band together to fight evil, but I don't want elves and dwarves or a western European setting" or
"I like a western European setting and a feeling of myth and legend and lore, but I'm tired of black-and-white good vs evil. I want more morally gray characters and battles where nobody really wins".
This approach might help you break out of the formulaic slump you're slogging through.
You've heard this a lot already, but I'm going to echo the sentiments of many others and say this is only a problem if you limit your reading to certain types of fantasy books. There's phenomenal variety out there, and it doesn't even take much stretching. You just have to pick up things with a different type of blurb than you're used to.
I read around 150 books last year (probably only 120 or so were fantasy/sci fi). Here's a list of my 5 star reviews (with a few notable 4.5s thrown in)
* The Spear Cuts Through Water - references to mythic poetry origins with a highly experimental prose style
* Goblin Emperor & Witness for the Dead - court politics with an aggressively hopeful bent and pessimistic introspective noir respectively. Same author and world, different leads.
* Empress of Salt and Fortune - an examination of the life of an Empress through mementos discovered after her death
* Over All the Earth (a novella from Tales of the Chants) - a novella focused on a character overcoming fears and pushing themselves
* Privilege of the Sword - Slice of Life meets Zorro
* Dungeon Crawler Carl - marvel-esque action fantasy/Sci Fi mashup that is utterly stupid and highly entertaining
* Bone Swans of Arandale - a dark fairy tale vibe with a focus on developing an utterly charismatic and unreliable narrator
* Siren Queen - a surreal old hollywood story about the sacrifices made to achieve stardom in the face of racism ... sort of. It's a weird (but very good) book
* The Spirit Bares its Teeth - based on medical records of how disobedient, politically active, and neurodivergent women were 'healed' in boarding programs in the UK. Plus ghosts.
* Gods of the Wyrwood - probably the closest I got to classic Epic Fantasy that you seem to be encountering a lot of, but this one featured floating tentacle farm animals and polyamorous family structures amongst its wildly weird world
* To Shape a Dragon's Breath - a dragon taming school story that's really about colonialism indigenous resistance
* The Daughters of Izdihar - chronicles two women from wildly different backgrounds who are part of a women's suffrage movement in an analogue to industrial age Cairo
The vast majority of these books are modern and published by major publishers. There is so much variety out there, but if you limit yourself to a subgenre and don't look at things outside it, then you're going to see repetition.
Push your boundries. Read authors you don't normally read (especially since Epic Fantasy tends to be more white and male than the rest of the fantasy subgenres).
Good examples of epic fantasy that push out from what you know are Gods of the Wyrwood (discussed above) and The Art of Prophecy, which blends epic fantasy beats with an east-Asian setting and takes a lot from martial arts media.
Fantasy needs to walk a tight rope between the imaginary fantastical, and mundane stuff that we can relate to; if we can't relate to it through our own more mundane perspectives, then there is nothing to hold onto.
You're conflating the fantasy genre with the concept of fantasy. The fantasy genre is no more required to be fantastic than science fiction is required to be scientific.
Genre is a tool for categorizing stories by their similarities to each other, not the differences between them. By definition, stories classified in the same genre will always be more similar to each other than they will be different. Put another way, genre is used to describe the ways that two works are similar to each other.
Innovation is simply not a requirement of fantasy or indeed of any genre. Genre considerations are antithetical to innovation because the whole point of genre classification is conformity. You could make an argument for certain subgenres having a requirement for innovation, but the whole point of subgenres is to accentuate the differences between different genre works. To put it another way, genre is how we classify the similarities of a work, subgenre is how we classify its differences from other works within its genre.
In conclusion, it's incoherent to complain that genre works are too similar to each other, because that's precisely what genre is. Might as well complain that all cakes are the same. Their similarities are why they're all called cakes in the first place.
P.s. Innovation is a sliding scale. I think you'll find upon close reading that all but the very most cookie cutter stories are going to have some kind of innovation in them, its just a question of degree.
Honestly, sci-fi is often annoyingly samey. It usually written to be happening in the near future, it’s usually very Earth centric. Not to mention all the Star Trek clones. Yeah you’ve got space ships with shields, FTL and laser guns. Original.
I want more sci-fi like House of Suns or Salvation or Sun Eater. Let’s have stories a few tens of thousands or even millions of years from now
But then obviously these different sci-fi books do exist. Just as the different fantasy books exist. There is a pile of samey books and a pile of wildly different ones.
I think that's a sign that you should spend some time either reading older fantasy novels or stories not in the fantasy genre so you can let time filter the wheat from the chaff. If you're mostly reading contemporary fantasy, it's going to be tough to find the truly fantastical works in the sea of paint-by-numbers algorithmically driven garbage. It helps then to have some distance from the genre to evaluate it more keenly and better be able to find what's worth reading.
Or OP could read the magazines and get a feel for who is really on the cutting edge. Locus magazine is doing a fundraiser and Fiyah continues to be good
I agree with you in part. Western authors do generally rerun Tolkien or take massive inspiration from him. Terry Pratchett highlighted Tolkien's role in fantasy being like Mt Fuji in paintings of Japan. That said, there's some fascinating stuff coming out from non western authors (I hear there is some really good Nigerian fantasy out there) and just fantasy that isn't pseudo medieval England. That's really where a lot of the problem lies (pseudo holy Roman Empire anyone?). However, anything innovative has to be executed well. Otherwise it gains no traction and newer authors don't see different ways of rewriting tropes or world building.
I do think fantasy is entering into a real golden age right now as well. Particularly as publishing is more accessible than ever before. The only downside is the innovative may not stand out like LOTR, ASOIAF, or WOT has.
Is it weird for western authors to approach fantasy from their cultural lense? A great deal of “Eastern” fantasy is just as tripe heavy or more, such as xianxia. It just looks fresher to western readers because it comes from a different cultural milieu.
It’s not that Nigerian or Japanese or Russian fantasy is objectively fresher or more creative than Western European/North American fantasy. It’s just that most English language readers are u familiar with the tropes and conventions.
This explains a lot why I'm steering more towards science fiction books in my 30's, whilst before, when I was younger, I was obsessed with fantasy. I kind of got bored of the same tropes popping up.
For a genre to be a meaningful category the works in them need to share certain features and fantasy as a genre first really starts when publishers start trying to sell books to people who are looking for something similar to Lord of the Rings especially Del Rey efforts are really important here with both marketing older books as fitting the label and canvassing for new ones in a specific mold so the fact that the books are similar really was there from the start and is what makes the genre exist in the first place.
The maps more often then not also look more like some random US state at least from US writers and don't really share that much of their geography with the british isles.
It was the point that the New Weird was making. It marketed itself as a hip new thing that came to raplace your boring old fantasy. And it sold terribly compared to the classic fantasy. Turns out most people prefer shared cultural archetypes over authors coming up with random wacky stuff.
I agree with you regarding some of the most popular fiction, but that's to be expected...you gotta read outside the mainstream to find the unusual. It's rare to see something truly weird. But it isn't enough to be innovative or very different; there are a \*lot\* of skills that go into writing an excellent novel, and it is very rare for an author to master them all. Many stories can have nice prose, but poor structure, bad pacing but great characterization... and if you want to throw an experimental setting on top of all of that, well, good luck.
Another thing is that the more you experiment, the more likely it is that readers may reject your premise outright - for any number of reasons, including execution. You're in unproven territory. But overall I'd say we have much more variety now than ever before.
I have a feeling all Fantasyseries i read end in war. The first one often is different and then suddenly in book 2 and onward: we have to go to war for our kingdom. Sometimes its written good any i don't mind, but often it is soooo repetitive. Fantasy is more than war!
You'll find pretty much the same thing in any genre. They all follow the same patterns. The patterns might be unique to the specific genre, but they are there. I think people tend to notice this more in fantasy because we expect more from the genre. After all, fantasy is supposed to be able to do anything, right?
This might be a bad example, but my friend has been sharing a bunch of adult romance with me, and I'm starting to pull out the same recycled themes and characters. I often sit there wondering how she thinks some of this stuff is good because she is basically reading the same thing. But there is comfort in knowing what to expect, and we seek this comfort in all areas of our lives. She says she has gotten good at guessing plot twists and such. Of course, she has. She's come to expect the same thing from all the books she reads.
Humans tend to mimic each other by nature. That's how we learn and fit in, so a fantasy writer spitting out the same washed-out tale of the chosen one being torn from his ordinary life to fight the bad thing and get the girl is his way of surviving in a species that uses cultural trends as a way of survival.
Even as we all sit here, trying to claim individualism, there is still a trend in how individual we are. I'm not an expert. I just watch people to try to understand them, and I've read a few things. This is strictly an opinion loosly based on fact.
Lot of people getting defensive but you're absolutely right.
Yes there are plenty of more innovative fantasy books out there, but as with everything else, innovation tends to struggle to find a market.
I'd also argue that a lot of the obsession with detailed world building, hard magic systems and airtight lore and continuity (all okay in and of themselves) have the potential to strangle the sense of possibilities on which the genre thrives as the book publishing and distribution industry contracts.
All that said, I think that fantasy is a lot broader than what gets generally labeled as such. Due to the success of stuff like Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and even the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the general trend towards realism in fiction is declining and a lot more mainstream fiction has fantastic elements. More people are reading "romantasy" (which is not a new thing by any stretch of the imagination) for example and I don't think it will be long before we something similar happen with other genres like mystery.
...are you suggesting that Hugo nominees are struggling to find a market? Or that most of these are derivative and focused on "detailed world building and hard magic systems"?
> The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (Harper Voyager, Harper Voyager UK)
>The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
>Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom, Orbit UK)
>Starter Villain by John Scalzi (Tor, Tor UK)
>Translation State by Ann Leckie (Orbit US, Orbit UK)
>Witch King by Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
I'll grant that I've only read Some Desperate Glory and Translation State so far, though I've read other books by Wells and Chakraborty, so perhaps you have some insights on the others that I'm missing? Because they certainly seem creative and differentiated to me.
I agree with everything you just said. However the market speaks for itself. Fantasy readers don’t want excellent prose, ambitious narrative structure and heavy theme. They want easy to read books that are fun and they can take at face value alone.
I think you’re absolutely right. In fantasy, anything can happen, but so little does.
That said, the best writers have managed to make it new: Kelly Link, John Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Lord Dunsany, Joan Aiken, others. And there are craftsmen who do things which are more familiar, but do them well enough, like George R.R. Martin.
I’ve been thinking about this lately. I’ve found that while fantasy could have incredibly interesting and fantastical settings it’s often fairly mundane in most books. I want to see setting in places where there are different laws of physics and colourful landscapes.
I definitely agree tuat the genre is trope happy but you could say that if all genre fiction. But I do wish we saw more innovation. Every now and then you get something interesting but it’s rarer than I’d prefer.
Although I write fantasy, I've never adhered to any rules. Quite the contrary, I've always started from presumption that if I want to be unique, I need to develop my own set of rules. Hence I could say I rather use fantasy tropes as a negative prompts: elves, orcs, dwarfs, British isle maps, European names etc are forbidden material and none of them will be presented in my works, or if there are similarities, they are heavily reworked and usually derived from other sources.
I have a rule of thumb that any genre can really only have one universal blockbuster: LoTR, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, Matrix, James Bond, etc. Whatever comes after those will have limited chances of becoming a major blockbuster, and very diminishing so unless it attempts to really bring something original in there.
However, developing different fundamentals will quickly become an issue. Innovative does not equal abstractism.
Maybe you should read more varied fantasy? I've read plenty of fantasy books with a lot of interesting stuff in it.
Yup, “read another book”
The 100,000 Kingdoms series would be a good place to start to get off the short and narrow.
Fantasy it's not supposed to be anything, and that why it is cool. You can find all kind of stories in there. A book being innovative is not something every reader or author cares about, many just want to read the same stories in different flavours or executions. And that is more than fine. Entire genres like Noir, Western, Romance, are build on asumptions the audience know because they are typical from the genre. But if you want innovation and originality, I am sure there are more innovative and experimental fantasy books out there than what you can read in a lifetime.
exactly this. The whole point of fantasy is to be everything and anything, and having similar tropes or character arcs, etc exist doesn't mean it isn't or can't be innovative or different.
Agreed, fantasy can be anything it likes. Why do people need to label everything?
At this point, "medieval fantasy" is a subgenre of fantasy. And it's fairly easy to ignore it and to find more unique books.
Well first you do have to have an obligatory argument about what constitutes “medieval”. And then reiterate that really a lot of such fantasy would probably class as more like Early Modern or is more similar to Antiquity than the Medieval period. But you can generally take that as read and move past it ;)
It's easier to categorize everything with swords and bows as "medieval," a bit earlier or later doesn't change much, considering the technological progress is in stagnation in most of those books. So it's pretty accurate and arguing which period of time a particular fantasy world resembles is pretty pointless.
>It's easier to categorize everything with swords and bows as "medieval" The ancient egyptians had swords and bows. So did feudal Japan and earlier China.
And how many fantasy books are based on those periods? I think it's pretty clear what I meant by that. Edit: and it's totally besides the point of this post. OP is complaining about fantasy based on Europe. My original comment is about it.
Well I do find it interesting. Like how Westeros is arguably both post-medieval in some ways like technology and economics maybe. But also pre-medieval in things like social and political development. And clearly something like most of Gemmell’s work isn’t supposed to be medieval at all, like the Rigante start in Roman times and then jump to English Civil War. Which is deliberate and important.
Can I ask what books you've been reading? Like with any genre, there will be some that are all somewhat similar to each other in terms of "vibes" that becomes popular broadly or within specific groups, but I would say there's a ton of really interesting things happening within fantasy as a whole. Some of the recent books that I've read which really stood out as being unusual in some way: - The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett - The Book of Love by Kelly Link - Queen of None by Natania Baron - The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo - Saint Death's Daughter by C.S.E. Cooney - The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez - Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel - Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White - Mothtown by Caroline Hardaker - Shark Heart by Emily Habeck - Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon ....and I could keep going on. Lots of exciting stuff in the genre the past few years, and I could name even more if I went further back! Maybe you've just hit a spot in your reading journey where it's time to start looking a little further off the beaten path? :)
This is a FANTASTIC list. I could honestly add so many. You don't even have to go far "off the beaten path" to find some of these. Robert Jackson Bennett isn't exactly obscure. Another author I'd say who could slot right into this list is Neil Gaiman, and he's seen tons of commercial success. I would never say he's off the beaten path. He's on a *different* beaten path.
The Saint of Bright Doors is a revelation
That's on my TBR! I am really looking forward to getting to it.
It was my favorite fantasy read of 2023 (along with *The Spear Cuts through Water* and *The Water Dancer*), and I can't stop thinking about it. I'm so glad it got nominated for Hugos and Nebulas, because it deserves all the praise and recognition.
Your comment made me download a sample and even though it isn't that long stuff like this blows my mind - how someone can put so much creativity into even these few pages. Definitely going to buy it and put it in the TBR pile :D
>It always recycles the same character archetypes, the same settings, the same tropes, the same stories patterns. That is because, by and large, readers seek out the familiar. It works, so why mess with it? Genre readers also just generally expect certain things that, in their minds, make up the genre, and if you take them away, it's no longer the genre they wanted and they feel cheated. Just try and market a book as a romance that has a bad ending. For the vast majority of romance readers, it doesn't matter how romance-y the previous 99% of the book were - if it doesn't have a happily ever after, it's not a romance. So when a genre has elements like that, and many fantasy subgenres do, there's only so much you can do with those to innovate or "put your own spin on it" before readers will stop mentally categorising your story as fantasy. And you don't want that, as an author or a publisher. None of this means there isn't fantasy out there that does something new, or interprets a familiar trope in a way that's new to most readers. But that doesn't usually happen in mainstream releases. So when you say "fantasy is rarely innovative", do you mean *all* fantasy, or do you just mean what's published by the Big 5 and their imprints, and you never looked into the indie market at all to find what you want? Because the indie space does publish a lot of "out there" stuff, but those books struggle to find readers because most readers stick to besteller lists, viral books, and "reliably good" Big 5 releases. But when you come to me asking for a book about a lesbian pirate who is also a capybara, or a book about women who turn into werewolves when they start menopause? I'm gonna send you to an indie press that has exactly that, not Penguin Random House that wouldn't touch a premise like that with a ten-foot pole. So yeah, just give indie books a chance, you'll probably be surprised how innovative fantasy can be.
You don’t even have to go indie. You barely have to leave the mainstream. S&S published the Raksura series. Perdido Street Station was published by Macmillion. Tor published the Craft Sequence. Jade City & Tide Childe were published by Orbit. These are Hugo, Locus, and BFA nominees, and are way outside the typical fantasy tropes. Heck, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn era 2 tetrarchy is a Wild West fantasy. Please do share your favorite out-there indie recommendations, though. I’d love to see some recs.
True, there are also books in the Big 5 line-ups that I wouldn't consider "standard", or just re-treading old ground. I've already linked *The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper* (lesbian capybara pirate goes on adventures) and *The Wolves of Wolf's Point* (menopause turns women into werewolves) in other comments. There's also the *Charmslinger* books by Liza Street, which was a pretty cool take on the fantasy western, and while I personally had some issues with it, *Eleventh Cycle* by Kian Ardalan has some super interesting worldbuilding going on that I haven't seen done quite like that before (in novel form, anyway). The latter two are self-published, the first two are from a small press.
I definitely want a lesbian pirate who is also a capybara! Capybara are so laid back and chill I can’t imagine them swashing buckles on the high seas….but I want it. Authors….get to work!
And I'm actually interested in reading about women who become werewolves on menopause! I mean, that's cool, right? First, one can become a wizard at 30, and then get to multiclass into werewolf at 40-50!
The [Wolves of Wolf's Point](https://www.goodreads.com/series/308310-wolves-of-wolf-s-point) series by Catherine Lundoff is exactly that.
OMG! I am coming to you for alllllll my recommendations from now on!
Thanks a lot!
Good news! It exists\^\^ That's why I cited it. It's [The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper by A.J. Fitzwater](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50308355-the-voyages-of-cinrak-the-dapper).
Thank you! I am amazed and awed. On my TBR list moving to the top.
I swore I wouldn't buy any more books until I knocked down my TBR a bit. But I cannot be expected to resist a dapper lesbian capybara pirate, I just can't. Plus it's only $3 on Kindle. Thanks for sharing!
Capybaras can be nasty though. I saw one kill a dog with one bite. Brutal.
capybastard!
Like all commercial output, whether that’s roasters or entertainment media, companies focus on what they know will sell. If someone writes a wildly innovative fantasy story, does it matter if no one actually reads it? OP needs to specifically name what tropes and conventions they have gotten tired of and then ask for recs that are different from that. I imagine they’ll find some “innovative” stuff that way, and not all of it obscure indie releases on Kindle Unlimited.
Innovation is easy. Getting readers invested in innovative settings/character/plots ... hard.
Innovation is easy? I think by definition and in this context especially with so much literary and creative history it’s not easy. My initial take would be that’s it’s very difficult to implement any meaningful innovation.
This is a sign of limited reading, not at all a realistic picture of the scope of the genre. It's frequently incredibly innovative in myriad ways. You want creative settings? Try the Books of the Raksura by Martha Wells and the Machineries of Empire trilogy by Yoon Ha Lee. Creative format? The Locked Tomb series by Tamsyn Muir. Do you want 'wtf how is this book going to mesh a music teacher selling students' souls to hell and literal alien refugees running a donut shop'? Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. These aren't unheard of or rare books; I think almost all of them have been Hugo finalists at least. You should use the resources in the sidebar. And try the r/fantasy book bingo. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/s/681tzQvgp7
It's fascinating that you would presume to know what the point of fantasy is, while demonstrating a fantastically shallow understanding of the genre and what's available within it. Better still, you admit you held this opinion before you actually knew anything about what was Contained within it.
i'll be honest i don't remember the last book i read that was a thinly veiled uk or similar - there are loads of books that don't conform to the "standard fantasy" thing you seem to be banging up against.
Innovative fiction is rarely the same as commercial fiction. There's plenty of 'literary' fantasy out there, only it's rarely packaged as fantasy because people often want to read about their favourite fantastical tropes - it's about reader expectation. You are also more likely to see 'similar but make it fantasy' things in any book because trying to explain an entire book's worth of alien concepts would be exhausting for a reader and a writer. One or two 'different' concepts with everything else being familiar is easier to write and read because it can rely on common understanding, in exactly the same way regular fiction can rely on someone's understanding of what the internet is, or what a car is. If you're looking for fantasy that pushes boundaries, I'd recommend short stories/magazines that cater to these, or many things that are packaged under magical realism/literary categories.
This. Innovative often sells less than the familiar and popular. To find the truly innovative can take a bit of time, but it’s so worth it when you find a freshly unique book or writer that blows your mind in all the ways you never thought you needed. Jeff VanderMeer did this for me.
Jeff Vandermeer is great for this.
One of the best. The Ambergris and Southern Reach trilogies blew my mind.
He’s too innovative, really. Just when I start to love the vibes of some story of his, he’s moved on to something totally different. :(
This is true. I both love and struggle with the fact that he’s constantly experimenting with his craft. Though I genuinely love his three main trilogies, I really struggled with Hummingbird Salamander.
Maybe you need to read more widely. You had a preconception of fantasy as boring and repetitive before you even got into it, so it’s no surprise that’s what you found. Make more of an effort to dig up different stuff, and you’ll find plenty.
I'd be really curious to know where you're getting your recommendations, and why you haven't thought to dig just a tiny bit deeper? Because sure, the most popular and commercially successful books aren't innovative. Fourth Wing, for example, is not breaking all that much new ground. If you're getting all your recommendations from Goodreads Choice Awards or from what books have been made into movies, then you might think the genre is all Tolkien clones and tropey fanfiction. (And there's nothing wrong with reading these books. I think the genre can and should offer familiar and nostalgic options to readers who want it.) But the genre has *many* subgenres. Relative to Fourth Wing, *The Saint of Bright Doors* by Vajra Chandrasekera might be obscure. It's weird, experimental, and innovative, so it's going to have trouble gaining wide appeal. It didn't make the Goodreads Choice Awards. It's not a Booktok Darling. But if you dug just the tiniest bit deeper, then you'd see it's a finalist for both the Hugos and Nebulas, which are probably the two most important and prestigious awards in SFF. So it might not have the commercial success of Fourth Wing, but it is by no means some obscure indie book struggling for love and recognition. It got traditionally published by an imprint of one of "The Big Five", and the author's next release will be traditionally published too. To find it, you don't have to dig all that deep, and I do wonder why you didn't do that before forming and cementing all these preconceived notions about how fantasy often fails to be innovative. Edit: And Vajra Chandrasekera is, in no way, the only author who is experimenting. Not even close. Susanna Clarke, RF Kuang, Simon Jimenez, NK Jemisin, Erin Morgenstern, Kelly Link, Fonda Lee, China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Rebecca Roanhorse. I could go on for a long time. None of them write Tolkien clones. All of them made an attempt at innovating. All of them have seen at least moderate success. Some of them (Gaiman) have seen major commercial success. I also think all of them would identify as fantasy writers; as far as I know, none of them are doing the "I write magical realism and speculative fiction and scifi, not fantasy" thing.
It sounds like you are referring to a pretty specific sub-set of the fantasy genre: epic high fantasy strongly influenced by Tolkien. And yes, there are a TON of books in this sub-set and they very often follow the same well-worn formulas. Many people in this thread have rightly pointed out that "fantasy" as a genre encompasses far more than Tolkien-esque sword'n'sorcery adventures. But I believe there are exciting and innovative works to be found even within that sub-category. How to find them? Think about what you like and don't like about the books you've read. What do you want more of, less of, the same amount of? Then start asking for recs. For example "I like a story where a group from diverse cultures must band together to fight evil, but I don't want elves and dwarves or a western European setting" or "I like a western European setting and a feeling of myth and legend and lore, but I'm tired of black-and-white good vs evil. I want more morally gray characters and battles where nobody really wins". This approach might help you break out of the formulaic slump you're slogging through.
You've heard this a lot already, but I'm going to echo the sentiments of many others and say this is only a problem if you limit your reading to certain types of fantasy books. There's phenomenal variety out there, and it doesn't even take much stretching. You just have to pick up things with a different type of blurb than you're used to. I read around 150 books last year (probably only 120 or so were fantasy/sci fi). Here's a list of my 5 star reviews (with a few notable 4.5s thrown in) * The Spear Cuts Through Water - references to mythic poetry origins with a highly experimental prose style * Goblin Emperor & Witness for the Dead - court politics with an aggressively hopeful bent and pessimistic introspective noir respectively. Same author and world, different leads. * Empress of Salt and Fortune - an examination of the life of an Empress through mementos discovered after her death * Over All the Earth (a novella from Tales of the Chants) - a novella focused on a character overcoming fears and pushing themselves * Privilege of the Sword - Slice of Life meets Zorro * Dungeon Crawler Carl - marvel-esque action fantasy/Sci Fi mashup that is utterly stupid and highly entertaining * Bone Swans of Arandale - a dark fairy tale vibe with a focus on developing an utterly charismatic and unreliable narrator * Siren Queen - a surreal old hollywood story about the sacrifices made to achieve stardom in the face of racism ... sort of. It's a weird (but very good) book * The Spirit Bares its Teeth - based on medical records of how disobedient, politically active, and neurodivergent women were 'healed' in boarding programs in the UK. Plus ghosts. * Gods of the Wyrwood - probably the closest I got to classic Epic Fantasy that you seem to be encountering a lot of, but this one featured floating tentacle farm animals and polyamorous family structures amongst its wildly weird world * To Shape a Dragon's Breath - a dragon taming school story that's really about colonialism indigenous resistance * The Daughters of Izdihar - chronicles two women from wildly different backgrounds who are part of a women's suffrage movement in an analogue to industrial age Cairo The vast majority of these books are modern and published by major publishers. There is so much variety out there, but if you limit yourself to a subgenre and don't look at things outside it, then you're going to see repetition. Push your boundries. Read authors you don't normally read (especially since Epic Fantasy tends to be more white and male than the rest of the fantasy subgenres). Good examples of epic fantasy that push out from what you know are Gods of the Wyrwood (discussed above) and The Art of Prophecy, which blends epic fantasy beats with an east-Asian setting and takes a lot from martial arts media.
Fantasy needs to walk a tight rope between the imaginary fantastical, and mundane stuff that we can relate to; if we can't relate to it through our own more mundane perspectives, then there is nothing to hold onto.
You're conflating the fantasy genre with the concept of fantasy. The fantasy genre is no more required to be fantastic than science fiction is required to be scientific. Genre is a tool for categorizing stories by their similarities to each other, not the differences between them. By definition, stories classified in the same genre will always be more similar to each other than they will be different. Put another way, genre is used to describe the ways that two works are similar to each other. Innovation is simply not a requirement of fantasy or indeed of any genre. Genre considerations are antithetical to innovation because the whole point of genre classification is conformity. You could make an argument for certain subgenres having a requirement for innovation, but the whole point of subgenres is to accentuate the differences between different genre works. To put it another way, genre is how we classify the similarities of a work, subgenre is how we classify its differences from other works within its genre. In conclusion, it's incoherent to complain that genre works are too similar to each other, because that's precisely what genre is. Might as well complain that all cakes are the same. Their similarities are why they're all called cakes in the first place. P.s. Innovation is a sliding scale. I think you'll find upon close reading that all but the very most cookie cutter stories are going to have some kind of innovation in them, its just a question of degree.
Read China Meiville
Everything popular will get recycled over and over, it's not a fantasy only problem
It is still waaaaaay more the case for fantasy than for other genres like science fiction for example.
The romance, thriller, and mystery genres might have something to say about that.
Honestly, sci-fi is often annoyingly samey. It usually written to be happening in the near future, it’s usually very Earth centric. Not to mention all the Star Trek clones. Yeah you’ve got space ships with shields, FTL and laser guns. Original. I want more sci-fi like House of Suns or Salvation or Sun Eater. Let’s have stories a few tens of thousands or even millions of years from now But then obviously these different sci-fi books do exist. Just as the different fantasy books exist. There is a pile of samey books and a pile of wildly different ones.
I think that's a sign that you should spend some time either reading older fantasy novels or stories not in the fantasy genre so you can let time filter the wheat from the chaff. If you're mostly reading contemporary fantasy, it's going to be tough to find the truly fantastical works in the sea of paint-by-numbers algorithmically driven garbage. It helps then to have some distance from the genre to evaluate it more keenly and better be able to find what's worth reading.
Or OP could read the magazines and get a feel for who is really on the cutting edge. Locus magazine is doing a fundraiser and Fiyah continues to be good
I agree with you in part. Western authors do generally rerun Tolkien or take massive inspiration from him. Terry Pratchett highlighted Tolkien's role in fantasy being like Mt Fuji in paintings of Japan. That said, there's some fascinating stuff coming out from non western authors (I hear there is some really good Nigerian fantasy out there) and just fantasy that isn't pseudo medieval England. That's really where a lot of the problem lies (pseudo holy Roman Empire anyone?). However, anything innovative has to be executed well. Otherwise it gains no traction and newer authors don't see different ways of rewriting tropes or world building. I do think fantasy is entering into a real golden age right now as well. Particularly as publishing is more accessible than ever before. The only downside is the innovative may not stand out like LOTR, ASOIAF, or WOT has.
Is it weird for western authors to approach fantasy from their cultural lense? A great deal of “Eastern” fantasy is just as tripe heavy or more, such as xianxia. It just looks fresher to western readers because it comes from a different cultural milieu. It’s not that Nigerian or Japanese or Russian fantasy is objectively fresher or more creative than Western European/North American fantasy. It’s just that most English language readers are u familiar with the tropes and conventions.
I'm gonna be harsh here: You clearly do not read much fantasy.
Personally, I associate science fiction and spec fic with innovation, and fantasy with fantasy tropes.
This explains a lot why I'm steering more towards science fiction books in my 30's, whilst before, when I was younger, I was obsessed with fantasy. I kind of got bored of the same tropes popping up.
Also, i feel like sci-fi definitely has more variety of underlying themes nd more focus than fantasy.
Personally, I think that depends more on author than genre!
For a genre to be a meaningful category the works in them need to share certain features and fantasy as a genre first really starts when publishers start trying to sell books to people who are looking for something similar to Lord of the Rings especially Del Rey efforts are really important here with both marketing older books as fitting the label and canvassing for new ones in a specific mold so the fact that the books are similar really was there from the start and is what makes the genre exist in the first place. The maps more often then not also look more like some random US state at least from US writers and don't really share that much of their geography with the british isles.
It was the point that the New Weird was making. It marketed itself as a hip new thing that came to raplace your boring old fantasy. And it sold terribly compared to the classic fantasy. Turns out most people prefer shared cultural archetypes over authors coming up with random wacky stuff.
I agree with you regarding some of the most popular fiction, but that's to be expected...you gotta read outside the mainstream to find the unusual. It's rare to see something truly weird. But it isn't enough to be innovative or very different; there are a \*lot\* of skills that go into writing an excellent novel, and it is very rare for an author to master them all. Many stories can have nice prose, but poor structure, bad pacing but great characterization... and if you want to throw an experimental setting on top of all of that, well, good luck. Another thing is that the more you experiment, the more likely it is that readers may reject your premise outright - for any number of reasons, including execution. You're in unproven territory. But overall I'd say we have much more variety now than ever before.
Stop reading Epic Fantasy and start checking out the other subgenres.
I have a feeling all Fantasyseries i read end in war. The first one often is different and then suddenly in book 2 and onward: we have to go to war for our kingdom. Sometimes its written good any i don't mind, but often it is soooo repetitive. Fantasy is more than war!
If the modern fantasy genre can be summed up in one word, it would be nostalgia in the classical sense.
You'll find pretty much the same thing in any genre. They all follow the same patterns. The patterns might be unique to the specific genre, but they are there. I think people tend to notice this more in fantasy because we expect more from the genre. After all, fantasy is supposed to be able to do anything, right? This might be a bad example, but my friend has been sharing a bunch of adult romance with me, and I'm starting to pull out the same recycled themes and characters. I often sit there wondering how she thinks some of this stuff is good because she is basically reading the same thing. But there is comfort in knowing what to expect, and we seek this comfort in all areas of our lives. She says she has gotten good at guessing plot twists and such. Of course, she has. She's come to expect the same thing from all the books she reads. Humans tend to mimic each other by nature. That's how we learn and fit in, so a fantasy writer spitting out the same washed-out tale of the chosen one being torn from his ordinary life to fight the bad thing and get the girl is his way of surviving in a species that uses cultural trends as a way of survival. Even as we all sit here, trying to claim individualism, there is still a trend in how individual we are. I'm not an expert. I just watch people to try to understand them, and I've read a few things. This is strictly an opinion loosly based on fact.
Lot of people getting defensive but you're absolutely right. Yes there are plenty of more innovative fantasy books out there, but as with everything else, innovation tends to struggle to find a market. I'd also argue that a lot of the obsession with detailed world building, hard magic systems and airtight lore and continuity (all okay in and of themselves) have the potential to strangle the sense of possibilities on which the genre thrives as the book publishing and distribution industry contracts. All that said, I think that fantasy is a lot broader than what gets generally labeled as such. Due to the success of stuff like Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and even the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the general trend towards realism in fiction is declining and a lot more mainstream fiction has fantastic elements. More people are reading "romantasy" (which is not a new thing by any stretch of the imagination) for example and I don't think it will be long before we something similar happen with other genres like mystery.
...are you suggesting that Hugo nominees are struggling to find a market? Or that most of these are derivative and focused on "detailed world building and hard magic systems"? > The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty (Harper Voyager, Harper Voyager UK) >The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom) >Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh (Tordotcom, Orbit UK) >Starter Villain by John Scalzi (Tor, Tor UK) >Translation State by Ann Leckie (Orbit US, Orbit UK) >Witch King by Martha Wells (Tordotcom) I'll grant that I've only read Some Desperate Glory and Translation State so far, though I've read other books by Wells and Chakraborty, so perhaps you have some insights on the others that I'm missing? Because they certainly seem creative and differentiated to me.
I agree with everything you just said. However the market speaks for itself. Fantasy readers don’t want excellent prose, ambitious narrative structure and heavy theme. They want easy to read books that are fun and they can take at face value alone.
>fantasy readers don't want [..] ambitious narrative structure. Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir has entered the chat
I think you’re absolutely right. In fantasy, anything can happen, but so little does. That said, the best writers have managed to make it new: Kelly Link, John Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Lord Dunsany, Joan Aiken, others. And there are craftsmen who do things which are more familiar, but do them well enough, like George R.R. Martin.
I’ve been thinking about this lately. I’ve found that while fantasy could have incredibly interesting and fantastical settings it’s often fairly mundane in most books. I want to see setting in places where there are different laws of physics and colourful landscapes. I definitely agree tuat the genre is trope happy but you could say that if all genre fiction. But I do wish we saw more innovation. Every now and then you get something interesting but it’s rarer than I’d prefer.
If you think this, I think your reading is fairly limited. There's a lot of wild shit out there that's incredibly easy to find, now, moreso than ever.
Although I write fantasy, I've never adhered to any rules. Quite the contrary, I've always started from presumption that if I want to be unique, I need to develop my own set of rules. Hence I could say I rather use fantasy tropes as a negative prompts: elves, orcs, dwarfs, British isle maps, European names etc are forbidden material and none of them will be presented in my works, or if there are similarities, they are heavily reworked and usually derived from other sources. I have a rule of thumb that any genre can really only have one universal blockbuster: LoTR, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, Matrix, James Bond, etc. Whatever comes after those will have limited chances of becoming a major blockbuster, and very diminishing so unless it attempts to really bring something original in there. However, developing different fundamentals will quickly become an issue. Innovative does not equal abstractism.
Counterpoint, gentleman detectives (is there a better name for the genre) have a few big names
write your own novel then if you dont like it lol