Fantasy world settings do not have to be on planet Earth. Non-Earth settings have the advantage that you don’t have to explain why we don’t have dragons or elves on Earth in our own time— they can be exclusive to the off-world setting. Yet if your fantasy planet happens to have been settled by Earthmen, you can have cultural influences from any desired Earth culture.
One fantasy world that is not on Earth is the one in the Game of Thrones series by George R. R. Martin. Since that fantasy setting is a world where winter can last for years, it’s clearly not on our Earth. But further explanations for the setting are not given, perhaps because none of the characters know it. Or maybe they do know more but they are too busy committing incest or killing their fathers in the privy to think about it.
Another fantasy world on another planet is Darkover, created by the late writer and child abuser Marion Zimmer Bradley. One of the books in the series clearly tells the story of how Darkover was settled by humans on a crashed colonization spaceship and cut off from interplanetary human society for a long period of time. The planet was supposed to be a metal-poor world, but they did have enough to produce swords for all.
In the Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey, her world, Velgarth, is also another planet, but the inhabitants of Valdemar and neighboring countries seem to be human enough. The major difference is that magic and ‘mind-magic’ are real, and there are strange creatures like kyries and gryphons. There is nothing about Velgarth that is explicitly extra-terrestrial— it could just as well be understood as Earth in a prehistorical period, as in the Conan the Barbarian setting.
The question for writers of fantasy is this: should your world be on another planet or on Earth of the past or future? Much depends on what elements are in the story you want to tell. In Game of Thrones, the long winters are a threat hanging over the characters which might be hard to survive. Those winters require a different planet. While the stories in Mercedes Lackey’s series could just as well take place on a world that clearly is the Earth of the past.
A story idea I am working on now has conflict between two different groups of Earth colonists— the Northmen, who are Christians and mostly of Germanic and Celtic stock, and a later settlement of Southern European origin who have been given a cultural framework based on ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt. Beyond their world are the Starmen— mysterious people who send down selected livestock and young humans who are a genetic improvement on what the two colonist groups started out with, and also some replacement parts for certain machines, such as the ansible (interplanetary radio) which keeps the Northmen’s bishops and patriarch in contact with the pontiff on Earth.
The reason I want this to be another planet is the mystery of the Starmen who are sending down things and people to the planet for unknown reasons. The Northmen are interested in discovering more, while the southern grouping, the Cornelians, think they are the wisest people because of their mastery of Greek philosophy and so there is nothing they can learn, either from the Northmen or the Starmen.
One thing to keep in mind in plotting your own fantasy world is that if all your characters are from that world, no one can contrast certain things with the way they are on Earth. For example, we know that Game of Thrones is set on a different world, but we don’t know if that planet is larger or smaller than Earth, or if the gravity is different or if the day is longer or shorter. The characters don’t know that so we don’t know it.
The essence of fantasy fiction, though, is to have human-relatable characters. If your characters are really just glowing balls of light, like the Organians on Star Trek, it may be hard to tell stories that humans can relate to. In Mercedes Lackey’s books, there may be characters who are kyrie or gryphons, but most of the characters are human like us. Which is why her books work so well for humans.
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