So I’m currently reading The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin and it reminds me in some way of Mistborn in terms of the ways both novels represent a current development in terms of fantasy settings (TFS does have the added presence of a hot bisexual pirate character who gets into a three-way relationship with the main characters, not quite something BS would write about). Classic fantasy has stuck to limited types of setting, basically either feudal or renaissance alt-Europe. These settings heavily limit the features of the settings that are available to the author — all governments are monarchies, main characters must start as farmboys or street urchins, and guns are strictly banned. For all of this early fantasy, this wasn’t too much of a problem, since that playground provided plenty of themes to explore, especially those around the Campbellian hero. By the time everyone had copied Tolkien one too many times over in the 80s, though, the basic forms of these settings were pretty tired. There was some pushing of these boundaries in the big fantasy series of the 90s: WoT is more early modern than medieval, and technologies such as guns and motors are developed in their early stages during the series; ASoIaF hews closely to lords-and-castles, however, though it does critique that setting more than other books have. But despite these small pushes, fantasy has remained closely associated with the pre-modern and pre-industrial revolution, especially the big popular books.
Meanwhile, science fiction has basically never had setting restrictions. A science fiction book can be set on earth with robots, set far away with aliens, or even be in the past with time travel, and no one bats an eye. This has let science fiction explore a much broader set of themes than fantasy. As a result fantasy has been often left as a backwater, or as pseudo-fascist, since often the conclusion of the story is that the restoration of an absolute benign monarchy is best for everyone. The euro-centricity of the typical fantasy setting is also clear. And all this for not much more reason than tradition: there’s no reason stories about magic in invented worlds should only exist within copies of medieval Europe.
Luckily, there seems to be some progress being made on these fronts. The old settings have gotten just too tired, and the political atmosphere is more interested in non-monarchical Eurocentric settings. Mistborn and The Fifth Season are two examples of this in very successful novels. Both are set in invented worlds that are clearly industrial. In Mistborn, there are big cities and canning and genetic engineering. The bad guy has limited the range of technology available in order to better control the population, and things like the electric grid and gas engines are clearly existent. The sequels, which are set after a time jump, are set in a world that’s clearly closer to the 1920s and have magical aircraft. Sanderson, in his usual style, goes in-depth into how his magic system interacts with the technology and creates or expands it. But the important thing is that he’s not scared that having technology disqualifies him from writing fantasy; instead, it enriches it. Similarly, in terms of forms of government, some of the Mistborn books deal with establishing constitutional modes of government and the difficulties with deliberative parliaments. There are lords, but they’re clearly not feudal. And Sanderson’s overall inter-series world concept, the Cosmere, deals with gods traveling between planets in one galaxy (maybe it’s far far away?), furthering the different from other fantasy novels that might as well take place on a flat earth.
The same is the case in the Fifth Season, where the novel takes place in a world that has exhausted its supply of coal and is harnessing geothermal and hydro energy sources for energy generation. The constant disasters central to Jemisin’s story mean that not all tech is able to last — there are no fast transport methods, for example — but in some cases their technology seems even more advanced than ours. And the eugenics programs operated are clearly highly developed in a way that thankfully was never sustained in our world. The government of her world is also administratively developed, with regional networks of cities overseen by appointed governors and bureaucrats. Even more so than Sanderson, Jemisin blurs the boundary between contemporary fantasy and soft scifi. A geologically active planet inhabited with humans who have evolved special sensors that detect earthquakes — it could as well be somewhere a space adventurer could land. There is clearly magic going on, so it does stick to being fantasy, but clearly not a fantasy that’s interesting in building boundaries.
Fantasy was pretty stagnant for a long time, so it’s good to see popular novels redefining what fantasy can be. Freeing itself from the bounds of swords and kings lets fantasy be more creative and concern itself with more than just
