Multicultural Fantasy

Blame it on the anthropologist in me. I've gotten tired of fantasy that recycles the same bland, watered-down quasi-Celtic-Norse-medieval settings, and am on an active search for books that draw on different cultures and time periods for their inspiration. This list is a work in progress, and I welcome suggestions for additional books (or corrections for the ones listed here). More detail on what I'm looking for may be found at the bottom of this page.

NOTE: This list is based on subject matter, not quality. I haven't read everything here; the presence of a book on this list is not a recommendation, and the absence of a book is not a condemnation.




My criteria for building this list are admittedly fuzzy. I want books that draw substantially on a particular culture for their subject matter or setting; what I mean by "substantial" is highly subjective. I'm personally interested mostly in fantasy, but there's some SF in here, and I will certainly add more if anybody can point me in the right direction.

This list consists of novels and the very occasional single-author short story collection. My reason for not listing short stories individually is partly that my task would quickly become overwhelming; there's also the consideration that short stories are often much harder for a reader to track down than novels are.

The categories I'm leaving out are Celtic fantasy, Norse fantasy, and fantasy based on England prior to the Tudor period. Thanks to our good friend J. R. R. Tolkien, these are the three settings most commonly seen in the genre, but in a simplified, flavorless form brought on by too many writers copying other writers copying other writers copying Tolkien. I may someday go looking for fantasy with those settings where the author appears to have done some actual research, but that'll have to be a separate list, since I'll want to read everything I put on it and make judgement calls on how solid I think it is.

As for the categories I do have, there's a certain blurriness to them, too. I've lumped the entirety of North America together, for example, and the Aegean region (which includes Greece, Crete, and because I feel like it, Atlantis -- but not Troy, which got big enough to have its own category). I split England by time because there's a whole subset of Elizabethan fantasy, and likewise ended up splitting Rome from Italy. Spain's got the secondary header of Moorish because it's pretty tough to separate those two; same for Crusades, Near East, and Middle East (but Sumer's off on its own). Like Sumer, the Carribean gets its own category, even though it's obviously heavily linked to African material. If you think I've put something in the wrong category, feel free to let me know, but on the whole, I think this is enough to steer readers in appropriate directions.