Today I was out participating in what is part of the Aboriginal and Maori people’s hunter-gatherer tradition. Such things were basically a part of any subsistence level culture. I’m not a survivalist or remotely expert at these things, but I can tell you two things: 1)Most people have not the vaguest idea of how hard subsistence is to do. 2)It is messy, bloody, smelly and brutal (not inefficiently so, or unnecessarily cruel – there is just no time for that). But if you did not do it, you died. The average urban dweller faced with these things would die (or adapt really fast). The traditions are dying – it’s hard work, and moderately dangerous. In 50 years time it will be a mention in a history book, most likely.
I actually could write about it – just like I could fill you in on the hunting today. But it would as well received by most people without the background as detailed book on Inuit whale-hunting. Yes, that would be interesting to a few of us, especially those who grasp who thin the margin between surviving and dying really has been for 99% of humanity’s existence. But not for most of the book-buying public. That, trust me, is not why they’re interested in fantasy — which, by and large — if it was to be realistic, would have to be centered on these sort of things. But just as readers complain about the ‘the lack of ‘reality’ reality isn’t what they ‘re looking for. Almost no one wants details on medieval tanning of hides, or medieval ‘toilets’ and toilet breaks in their medieval-set high fantasy, in full robust technicolor. What they actually want is not to be thrown out of your book by details which are shall we say acceptable to their world view. Yes, they want the details of halberd, or a pistol or a sailing ship right. Usually, the people who want these details right, are well-informed and possibly expert on those on those, and quite happy to have Gell-Mann amnesia about the rest.
Trust me: no matter what some arbitrary individual on the internet says: very few fantasy readers care about potty breaks or the bleak reality of a real medieval setting.
Mad Genius Club 
40 responses to “Modern sensibilities and fantasy”
If there’s room in fantasy for torture porn and horrible people being horrible to each other, there’s room for the classic “Man vs environment” plot.
Finding the market is a different (but very important!) question. That said, I’m old enough to remember westerns and survival stories dominating the spinner racks.
I read a blurb for some “end of technology” book that sounded like the author thought that “no technology” was a good thing.
I think some people need to experience such an event, but it likely wouldn’t sell as a story. 😦
“No technology” or “no HIGHER than Medieval/Bronze/Stone Age technology”? The people who make that sort of argument usually seem to think that ‘technology’ somehow began with the steam engine or the like. I really love the ones who think they can get rid of all that evil-bad technology but somehow they can keep their free Net porn and upper-middle-class lifestyle intact.
I suspect they don’t think about what “no technology” means.
And yes, they imagine some sort of paradise along with their “favorite stuff” (that wouldn’t really exist sans technology).
I suspect many people who love high fantasy would be horrified just by the smells of the average royal court, and the lack of (modern) hygiene. A walled city in summer when the river ran low? Uuuuugh, at least until noses went numb.
Sketchy food supplies was another reason to move the court around. There was a reason the Holy Roman Emperors changed location every so often – eating out an area, plus having to be where the fighting was or trouble seemed to be bubbling up.
The other thing we take for granted today is the lack of obvious signs of injury and deformities on people. We try to put people back together as close to the pre-injury appearance. They couldn’t do that back in the 400s-1940s very well. (Even now. I remember fighting off a flinch when I realized that a man in his 80s was missing not only one eye but the orbit as well. His face just sagged in a sort of dish-shape from eyebrow to upper jaw. Given the other scars, I suspect combat wound in WWII or Korea, but I didn’t ask.)
For sure! Everyone looks perfect, with perfect teeth. Films are even worse. Disabilities and scars — if they show up at all — are remarkably photogenic as opposed to wince-inducing.
In a setting that has instant or near-instant healing magic (or whatever) that can explain some of that. And if only some people have access to it for whatever reason, it can also be a quick way for a character to figure out where someone comes from even if they’re trying to hide it.
I think something could also be said about works that have wild animals that look perfectly groomed and well-kept, without visible scars, sores, or the like. Mother Nature isn’t a beautician, as some old hunters once told me.
I hadn’t heard that about Mother Nature but those hunters are correct!
Michael Crichton’s estate published a pirate novel he had been working on and it was full of smelly, disgusting details about life in the pirate towns of 1700s West Indies. I didn’t finish it for two reasons: it was obviously rushed and unfinished, and the smelly, dirty details were more than I really wanted to know. I leave those out of my own stories despite the fact that they are less realistic for lacking them.
I wish I could edit my post to correct Mr. Crichton’s name.
Done. And yes, self-edit would be nice. WP not changing everything every two-three months would also be nice.
Thank you!
Comment editing isn’t all that hard of a thing to build into a site.
Or it would be IF they didn’t constantly take a jackhammer to the foundation and re-pour it in a different shape.
THEN it just becomes one more frickin’ thing to fix every blasted time.
He did something with his Great Train Robbery book – alot of really disturbing details about the Victorian era. MC Beeton got away with a fair amount of it in her Regency novels too.
I’ve heard some claim that the Great Train Robbery is highly fictional, even the parts that don’t sound fictional.
I don’t know enough Victorian history to judge.
Same.
People tend to assume what they are familiar with is the law of the universe. This is why reading primary source is so important.
Then you know to put in the requisite magic.
I don’t think people want reality so much as escapist realism. Reality sucks and never loses. We’ve been so extremely lucky in our lifetimes to be able to hold it at arm’s length. But if the power grid were ever to go down for a week straight A LOT of people would run smack into its harsh and unflinching details.
Story time:
One of my coworkers ran the tub full of water her freshman year in college when the power went out one night out of habit. Her roommate asked her what she was doing. Coworker grew up on a farm and knew that in rural areas if the power goes out you might not be getting it back for days, or weeks, and it was important to have some extra fresh water around just in case.
We did lose power for a week years ago when a derecho came through. Most people decamped after a day or two, looking for hotels or friends. And it was the lack of air conditioning that most people talked about. Most people were on water towers, rather than directly on the well, dependent on a pump, so the water problem didn’t hit them immediately.
Absolutely. Several of the low-star reviews I got were for including “too much bad” in a book with…. terrorists attacks and counter-terrorist operations. It said so, right in the blurb.
But the reader wanted an escape from reality, and mine was too close to the reality to provide what they wanted.
Honest retellings of war and civil unrest are not for the faint of heart. Shake Hands With the Devil is the first book that made me cry as an adult.
They must have been really upset when you told them that the slit trench stank.
The scene where the girl discovered that she couldn’t “go tinkle” without an armed man on overwatch? You left out the fainting couch and smelling salts.
I’m sure there’s a market for something closer to reality. Finding that small market is hard.
I like a bit more realism. I also like a consideration of infrastructure, like sewage systems, but then that interests me.
Fantasies tend to do handwavium about food gathering and sewage. OTOH if I ever build a magic world I will definitely have magic feather beds and magic hot and cold running water. And magic multi vitamin ice cream.
Part of why my fantasy world is taking a while to build is trying to make it fairy tale pleasant without being pure wish fulfillment.
This! I’ve got various things to justify “better than medieval conditions”, I just need to work out “and this is how they do it without breaking reality much”.
Jolie, most if not all of the fantasy worlds I’ve seen forget that magic that consistently produces stable results is going to fill the niche we usually label “technology”, and the degree is usually based on how common the ability to work with it is. Alma’s Merchants universe, Misty Lackey’s Valdemar and Garrett’s Darcyverse are examples of this, IMHO.
You’re lucky if they remember to put in the hand-wavium.
I do remember one particular fantasy romance, think like the Princess Bride, that I enjoyed then and now, that had the royal castle where most of the action took place right next to a massive slum for the commoners. The problem was that we never ever anything except those two places in the story, not even in illustrations. It was done in graphic novel format. Wouldn’t at least some wealthy nobles and merchants and such be living near the Imperial Palace, with homes to match?
The story also has the Empress, a young woman barely out of her teens, openly carrying on with commoner lovers — which supposedly has the nobility infuriated, though all we see is one or two complaints — and planning to change the three-tier caste system to something more like modern egalitarian societies. And everyone around her who isn’t a villain or jerk is shown as agreeing with this 100%.
Again, I get why it had to be shown that way. But just once I’d like to see a story set in such a society where the viewpoint character wants to maintain the social hierarchy without them being depicted as a total monster. Have them be a decent sort who sees it the way, say, medieval European was supposed to work, with duties and responsibilities going from high to low as well as vice-versa. Sorry for the rant, that whole ‘modern American social and sexual attitudes in a society where they don’t belong’ bit just drives me nuts.
Exactly. Noblesse Oblige can be so useful for a noble treating commoners with some respect as being useful and therefore worth ensuring they eat.
If your peasants don’t eat, they’re not strong enough to work. That’s quite rational yet unacceptable to some modern minds.
Yes. I recall reading somewhere years ago that the actual lower classes are usually the ones most resistant to change in their societies. Simply because they know how difficult it was to get what little they have now, and are usually convinced that if society changes suddenly and drastically, they’ll still be on the bottom. Only without the few rights and protections they do have.
Correct. For example, when Russian nobles wanted to try things like the seed drill and a different kind of crop rotation, or even new crops including potatoes in Russia, the peasants balked. If anything went wrong, they’d starve. Better known low-yield practices than to have a high-yield experiment fail and doom everyone.
I heard that one guy who wanted to introduce potatoes finally planted them in a garden with armed guards… with careful instructions to the guards not to shoot anyone stealing the potatoes.
Obviously, if they were worth guarding, they were worth trying to grow yourself….
And to accept bribes.
Yep!
I have read that the ones most opposed to child labor laws were poor families.
My father was born in 1928. He had four older brothers and a younger sister, and of them all only his sister made it all the way through grade school and into college. Dad and the rest? Needed to work to keep food on the table. From what he told me, it wasn’t at all odd either.
One English Victorian man recounted the grave debate about whether he should be pulled from school. He was working as a monitor there, but he could earn more in another job, but he was getting more of an education. . .
They finally decided to risk it and leave him in.
Redefining 16 year olds as “children” was a huge mistake.
In current WIP my guy is visiting the last tavern in Valhalla. It’s the one a mile or so before the border with Niflheim, on the road to Hvergelmir, the sacred spring that waters the roots of Yggdrasil. The tavern is there because of the pilgrims who come to take the waters of the holy spring.
Our hero hits it off with the lady playing lute on the porch of the place. Long story short, despite the chill in the air they spend the night outside on the porch, because it smells -bad- inside.