Kill the King!

[Derin]

Lol I didn't say I was going to trade in what I knew in the process

How much do you know about surgery? If you needed it, could you direct somebody to do it for you without anaesthetic? Do you know how to grow and purify penicillin? Are you willing to eat partly rotting meat, bread with sand in it and vegetables contaminated by human faeces, all of which haven't undergone any sterilisation or preservation process but salting, pickling or cooking? Do you prefer to risk your life on unsterilised water, or spend a large portion of your life cutting firewood (assuming you're in a land where that is allowed)?

Medieval style worlds would suck to live in.

Also, Pratchett is a god. He's the Douglas Adams of fantasy, with a much longer list of works.

 

[Donny Bruso]

Medieval style worlds would suck to live in.

That is your opinion. Mine is different. Why don't we politely agree to disagree and move on.

 

[Amanita]

Strangely enough I'm getting more interested in medieval settings the more I learn about them. School stuff was full of relatively boring wars and quarrels between kings and the Pope but now we're covering all the stuff the ordinary people did, and I keep getting new ideas while listening. And for tomorrow we had to read a medieval Arab's travel accounts, they could almost be passed of as part of a fantasy story. And the whole idea of the "House of Wisdom" and their astronomical, mathematical and alchemical research are highly interesting too.
Maybe, at the end of term, I'm actually going to try and write medieval fantasy.
Having a fantasy world based on the real Middle Ages would be a relatively uncommon setting as well though. Most of the time, it's just "generic fantasy land" copied again and again.
Among other things there's no change there, nothing brought in from other parts of the world, no old texts being translated from language to language...

Despite of this, I'd really like to see more stories featuring different setting and even daring to combine fantasy with modern technology which I'm trying to do at the moment.
I really like contemporary fantasy as well, as long as it's really about some magical issues and not pure horror or about vampires, werevoles etc. To my great regret, I couldn't find many books like that. I've only read the ones by Marion Zimmer-Bradley which are among her least known works as well.

And, to add something to this argument: I definitely wouldn't want to live during the Middle Ages. Especially as a woman, this definitly isn't an appealing thought.