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Despite the 20+ answers in this thread I think most of us would agree that life for 99% of fantasy world inhabitants would be awful. Strip away the royal courts, the fellowships, the magic schools etc and most of the time you're left with a feudalistic world full of peasants that have to work 10 hours a day to not starve and will most likely die of infection the next time a bandit cuts them during a highway robbery. Either that or when the local lord has the daughter of a neighbouring count executed the peasants get to don heraldry and hack at each other in fields in a militia. Or when an Orc eats them.
Pre-industrial societies were/are full of hardship. If nature didn't kill you through disease or exhaustion your fellow man would because he's your lord and he doesn't like the look of you or he's a different lord who doesn't like the look of your lord. I'm getting pretty bored of this to be honest and would love to find a novel/series that's primary focus is a fantasy world experiencing industrial revolution, political revolution or both. Things like steampunk or arcanepunk are close but generally the respective mechanisation and magical revolutions are artefacts of the setting and the stories don't focus on this.
I've just finished the first merchant princess omnibus by Charles Stross that is tantalisingly close (it features a family capable of jumping between alternate universes, one of which is ours and the other two are pre-industrial alternate versions of history), hoping the rest of the series will expand.
Even if you don't know of any I've got a related question: why is so much fantasy routed in either a static feudal or urban setting? Given that a lot of science fiction and fantasy comes out of the US (a country that fought to get away from monarch and establish a radical-for-the-time republic) and the UK (a country that spawned the industrial revolutions) it's a strange trend that I can't fathom.
Pre-industrial societies were/are full of hardship. If nature didn't kill you through disease or exhaustion your fellow man would because he's your lord and he doesn't like the look of you or he's a different lord who doesn't like the look of your lord. I'm getting pretty bored of this to be honest and would love to find a novel/series that's primary focus is a fantasy world experiencing industrial revolution, political revolution or both. Things like steampunk or arcanepunk are close but generally the respective mechanisation and magical revolutions are artefacts of the setting and the stories don't focus on this.
I've just finished the first merchant princess omnibus by Charles Stross that is tantalisingly close (it features a family capable of jumping between alternate universes, one of which is ours and the other two are pre-industrial alternate versions of history), hoping the rest of the series will expand.
Even if you don't know of any I've got a related question: why is so much fantasy routed in either a static feudal or urban setting? Given that a lot of science fiction and fantasy comes out of the US (a country that fought to get away from monarch and establish a radical-for-the-time republic) and the UK (a country that spawned the industrial revolutions) it's a strange trend that I can't fathom.
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