Joel Shepherd writes at length about creating the land of Lenayin in his newest novel Sasha (my review). It is interesting to see how he wanted to play with the tropes of medieval fantasy, especially the political system and its effect on culture.
…unlike so many peoples in so many fantasy novels, Lenays couldn’t give a pile of horse manure about nobility, rank, status, or any of the sort. Lenays achieve status amongst their peers by being upstanding individuals…
I was interested as I wrote Sasha that there weren’t many fantasy novels I could think of featuring a people who embraced what we political science types would call liberalism, roughly meaning the preeminence of the individual in society…
I can’t think of many fantasy novels where the people live beneath the rule of a king, but are ambivalent toward him and his authority. Because fantasy novels tend to be in love with the power of kings, and in love with the feudal system that sustains it…
Though power itself can be glamorous, much of the romance surrounding that power was in reality bullshit, and much of the manner in which kings actually ruled was cruel, arbitrary and unenlightened, to put it mildly. A good king could certainly be better than a bad king, but the system itself doesn’t allow much of what we would consider today ‘liberal open mindedness’ — you’re either loyal, or you’re dead, and that applies to those living beneath good kings and bad kings alike. George RR Martin is one fantasy author who grasps this extremely well in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’. But a lot of fantasy, sadly I think, tends to swallow the propaganda whole, because the propaganda is pretty. Perhaps this just goes to illustrate that there is a statue of limitations on the offense caused by nasty political systems. Fantasy writers glorifying Nazism would get into trouble. Feudalism, not so much….
Related posts:
