The New Old West
For years fantasy writers, and to some extent SF writers, have been looking for new worlds to write about, and wondering what the next big thing is going to be. I don’t mean just “are werewolves the new vampires” or what we can do to make zombies more interesting. Those are, if I can put it this way, single-trope problems.
More complicated is the general feeling that we’ve pretty much exhausted Celtic mythology as the magical/supernatural basis for our stories, and the pseudo-middle-ages as the setting of choice. Not to say that many wonderful stories aren’t still being told using those tropes – and being welcomed enthusiastically by mainstream audiences (even my Spanish cousins are reading/watching Juego de Tronos) but it’s getting more and more difficult to come up with something that feels fresh and innovative.
Of course we’ve already seen successful forays into non-white, non-western mythologies and cultures, but those of us who are white, and western, tend to tread carefully when we borrow from other cultures. No one wants to be guilty of any kind of appropriation.
On the other hand, we’ve also seen successful use of areas of western culture that don’t involve cousins of the Green Man. Dave Duncan’s Alchemist series successfully mines the European Renaissance, for example, while the success of Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, set in the Napoleonic era, just proves how hungry we are to see dragons in a new light. And let’s not forget the Victorian Steampunk phenomenon, which has fired the imaginations of Fantasy and SF writers alike.
