Just as historical romance is dominated by the Regency period, an awful lot of fantasy, particularly epic fantasy, defaults to a generic western medieval setting: swords, castles and kings, forests, horses…not too much rampant plague or other real medieval drawbacks, though…it’s understandable, because the western world had knights and broadswords, sword fights are fun, and guns are too easy.
There is also the concern that, actually, readers of some genre fiction styles want certain familiar settings, and messing with that violates their expectations and leads them to reject the book. A new setting can also mean a lot more research and scene-setting to get it across to the reader, whereas new writers in old settings can rely on the set-up done by the countless writers before them.
However, consciously choosing your setting is a way of making your book stand out from the genre crowd and giving it originality. One of the joys of the Locke Lamora series is its well-defined setting: it’s more Renaissance than Medieval and it’s a rich backdrop to the story. Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Bird is set in ancient China, and again, is a real stand-out from other fantasy stories because of it.
Once you wrench your mind from the standard setting, there’s many other periods of history – and cultures – to choose from to give your fantasy/romance/other planet book distinctive flavour. How do you narrow it down? There might be a particular person or historical event you want to use as a starting or plot point, or there might just be a place and period that attracts you.
There might also be an aspect of the plot that will dictate a setting. For example, one of the few fantasy elements in the book I am currently working on is the Mosaic Virus, which mutates women into creatures called Mosaics. ‘Virus’ has only been used in its modern sense of an infectious agent since 1728 (the first time it was written down with that meaning). However, I can’t go too much past this year, because I also want my main character to be using a rapier, as opposed to a sword, and as opposed to the shortsword, which replaced the rapier in around 1715. In 1730, a rapier may be unfashionable, but not impossibly so.
Using these two pieces of logic based on etymology and weaponry, I know that my setting is southern European (I know this because of certain cultural plot points I’m not going to bore you with), with at least a few early eighteenth-century technologies and attributes. I can now do research around things like food, fashion and clothing, hobbies and pursuits, technologies, and societal aspects, which will give my story specific background – in a ‘he loaded his musket’ rather ‘he loaded his rifle’ (rifling wasn’t used yet) kind of way, rather than a two-page description of what everyone’s wearing kind of way (oh god I hate long descriptions of things not relevant to the plot).
This particular method is not always perfect – I was quite annoyed when I discovered my lads need to be wearing breeches rather than trousers, for example, and very surprised to find that the nicely old-fashioned word ‘incendiary’ is far more modern than ‘bomb’ (in the sense of mortar shell) or even ‘hand-grenade’, which of course would sound horribly out of place to any but an expert reader. On the other hand, I don’t have to be entirely accurate – it is a fantasy world, after all, and does not march lock-step in line with our own history. For example, I wasn’t thrilled with everyone getting to have guns, so I made the muskets stupidly inaccurate and ammunition hard to get, just to pull that technological advantage down a bit (and I’m not entirely historically off here).
Such conscious focus on small details can give your setting context and spice; weaving the setting into your story adds to its flavour and attraction and makes it sing out to the novelty-seeking reader (and potential publishers – maybe – or maybe they just want you to copy the last thing that made it big). Think beyond the standard to the time and place that your story truly belongs.
You’ve touched on a point that is very dear to my heart at the moment. I’ve written a few short stories with “Africanised” settings which did NOT go down well with Joe Public off the very large online writers’ group that I send work to (I’m sure you know which one I mean).
Elephants tend to throw people off … yet this is the reality that I know and I still feel strongly that I should write what I know.
Of course there is that SF steampunk western that’s bubbling in a pot in the distance …
“Elephants tend to throw people off” – for a moment I thought that was a proverb (like “only ride one wild horse at a time”…)
It is problematic, balancing a novel setting with people’s attraction to the familiar. If my advice was geared towards writing for mass-market publication, I’d have to say forget using anything other but stock-standard setting, given the way critiquers tend to react to anything out of the ordinary (I wrote a short story which featured a man who wanted to get married and – gasp! – his girlfriend who didn’t, and the number of readers who simply could not accept that such a relationship is possible was astonishing).
However, I truly believe that writing from the heart is what gives a book depth and resonance – if your heart’s in Africa or the wild west, then go for it – you’ll find your audience.