Fantasy/fiction in modern setting

[Saariston]

Looking at most of fantasy, it seems to be set well in the past, with little work set in modern day or modern life, seemingly very few are willing to pick up on the challenge as let's be real, don quixote would be quite boring with a cellphone, and maybe a little bit too "relatable" for many wanting to read, even with mythological or fantasy elements, there are movies but it is not the same I would argue, as the whimsy of having medieval hierachies, bloodlines, round table dramas, horrid creatures and mythology is just a little too interesting to pass up, a novel in such setting trying to imitate anything with those elements would pretty much end up failing as we live a little too close to the times of what we're reading to like to imagine, myself I remember in gymnasium reading a fantasy novel set in a first person view, I remember thinking it was to excruciating boring that I failed the test.

 

[Insolent Lad]

The greater part of Stephen King's output is fantasy (albeit frequently 'horror fantasy') in a modern setting. Not that I'm a King fan but he does seem popular. Gaiman's 'American Gods' is very much fantasy set in the contemporary world.

 

[Prince of Spires]

Disagree.

The best selling book series of all time, Harry Potter, is a Fantasy tale in a modern setting.

Urban Fantasy as a genre is a thing. There are plenty of works set in the modern day. Here on the forum we have A.E. Lowan and her team, writing the Books of Binding, which is Urban Fantasy. There's the Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee, which is one of the best received and highly recommended recent fantasy tales which is Urban Fantasy. Brandon Sanderson has several modern day like settings. And there are plenty of others.

 

[Saariston]

I may have overlooked this as a genre, though books like harry potter have their own fantasy hierarchy and feels like it could almost be put in any timeline after the industrial revolution and work quite well. I cannot comment on the rest since I was unaware of these, though what I meant was 21st century

 

[CupofJoe]

In the UK you can also add:
Aberystwyth Noir by Malcolm Pryce. 7 books set in a current but alt-time line of Wales where Druids act like the Mafia.
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. 9 books in a London with spirts and magic and Met Police wizard.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Again set in London. It started as a TV series and then was developed by Gaiman into a Novel and many other things.

 

[pmmg]

Well...also in fairness, most of those fantasies were written in the past as well. King Arthur and Perseus do not have cell phones because there were no cell phones around when they were written.

Fantasy often looks back to days of mythology when fairies and elves were still believed to be real and hidden in the world. And, fantasy writers, building on what brought them, were mostly likely shaped by all these earlier works, so, it makes sense to me that a good portion of fantasy would adopt those types of time periods, those are the stories that got us interested in the first place.

Fantasy in the modern world still feels like a breakout direction to me, which will become more and more prevalent as time moves on. I suspect the current mindset of the public has moved from 'that's what they used to believe then' to 'Yeah, I know its not real, but I am going to go with it.'. All the heavy lifting of introducing it has been done already by others.

 

[Queshire]

Honestly I think cell phones get overlooked too much in fiction. Imagine what you can do with a character talking to someone else over the phone when something happens to the person on the other side of the line. Will the hero manage to get there in time? OoOo~ tension.

 

[Mad Swede]

I'm not sure where to begin, or how to put this. But...

First, using an example like Don Quixote doesn't work. That book was contemporary fiction when it was written. And yes, the story itself would work equally as well if it were updated to a modern setting with cellphones and the internet. The themes developed in the two books are (still) applicable to modern life.

Second, the question of setting is in many ways secondary to the story itself, especially in more complex novels. The setting is a means to an end, a way of anchoring the character and story arcs in order to allow an author to develop their theme(s). Choosing a setting can allow you to to discuss issues and develop themes without hitting the reader over the head. It also depends on where your focus is. If your primary focus is on people and how they act then you can use almost any setting, because you have a character focus. If you're focussing on how technology affects people then you might need a contemporary setting. It's also a question of your life experiences as an author, in that one piece of advice is to write what you know. It's sometimes forgotten that J K Rowling was a teacher, so her setting (a school, albeit a magical school) is no surprise.

And finally, it is also a question of what the readers want. If they want escapism they might well prefer a setting which isn't modern.

 

[casval]

My mind first went to The City & The City, by China Miéville, which is a police procedural set in neighboring fictional cities in Eastern Europe. I say 'neighboring', perhaps the correct word is 'interlocking' - there are few fantasy elements, save for the fact that the cities themselves are fantastically cross-hatched with each other and may require you to get a work visa to visit your own kitchen.

I do think there's a curious bias to see technology as inherently science fiction. There are many modern stories that feature a character trapped inside a video game, for instance, which are usually labeled 'science fiction' even if the game they are trapped in is a fantasy RPG. On the surface, this is no less fantastical than old novels about characters being trapped inside of books. But because video games run on computers, it is labelled as science fiction by the publisher.

 

[skip.knox]

There's a whole sub-genre for this, called urban fantasy.