WeepingElf wrote: ↑07 Feb 2019 22:58
I have the impression that I am sailing into blue water with my two current fiction projects.
I have
never seen a setting in which Elves are just humans, and Atlantis was an ancient civilization (of the said Elves) in the British Isles. So I think the Elvenpath uses a setting which is previously
unused, not merely
underused.
Obviously there are no settings in which elves are humans since, by definition, they would then not be elves. There are countless stories, however, in which myths of elves (fairies, sprites, goblins, etc) are said to have been
inspired by lost human cultures. In particular, in the British context, there's a whole genre in which "elves" (etc) are equated to the aes sidhe, who are only the tuatha dé by another name, and the tuatha dé are just humans (albeit with magic powers). Alternatively, there are lots of traditions of 'little people' and 'the people of the woods' and so forth.
Similarly, about the only fixed and essential thing that defines "Atlantis" is that it has sunk beneath the waves; so there are probably no stories in which Atlantis simply somewhere in the actual UK, because then it wouldn't be Atlantis (it also of course wouldn't match the geography specified by Plato, or by later versions of the myth). However, there are needless to say a great many stories in which an ancient civilisation was located in the british isles but subsequently sank beneath the waves - the entire mythologies of Lyonesse*, Cantre'r Gwaelod, Ys, and others too, and all that they've inspired. More generally, and recently, there are lots of stories about great ancient civilisations in britain, often as "explanations" for the Arthurian mythology.
*A land of old upheaven from the abyss / by fire, to sink into the abyss again / where fragments of forgotten people dwelt... as Tennyson puts it.
There is also a severe shortage of stories in which the human race manages to overcome the current ecological, economic, political and cultural crisis and achieves a bright and prosperous future with realistic means, i.e. without alien interventions, miracle technologies or other futurological "wild cards", and without tumbling into a dark age before the turnaround is achieved.
I guess mostly because this is unrealistic - if you're writing a sci-fi, it seems almost inevitable that some sort of technological or other futurological developments will have occured.
There may also be an issue of tone here. It's strange to see the current world as suffering a "crisis", and the sort of depressive mindset that's likely to see it that way is inherently probably unlikely to see this "crisis" as something that can simply be "overcome" without any major changes (miracle technologies, interventions, futurological wild cards, etc). Indeed, if we're set to achieve a bright and prosperous future without any major changes in course, it's particularly difficult to sustain the idea of us facing a crisis - usually we use that word when we're NOT expecting a bright and prosperous future to develop if we keep heading in the same direction!
![[:D]](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin2.png ":D"){kind=icon}
). I guess I am one of the few who use "typical mixed fantasy" for the conworld.
