How will fantasy remember our era?

[Ranwulf]

This question's been interesting me a bit. Feel free to point me in the right direction if threads have already been created in a similar vein. The search feature isn't all that helpful if it ignores three-letter words

It seems like most eras of the past, perhaps excluding the last sixty or seventy years, have become established in fantasy fiction. The industrial age is immensely popular. The colonial age isn't quite as popular, but there's no shortage of it either. The Renaissance is also somewhat lower profile. The middle ages are just plain ubiquitous in fantasy fiction. Before that there's less and less. But pretty much every era has enough fantasy fiction that you could spend your life reading it.

So in a century, two centuries, whenever, our era is bound to carve out a slice of the fantasy fiction mass. How do you think we will be remembered?

I'm not necessarily saying I think that these portrayals are accurate, but some things I think we might see in the fantasy world of our today:

+ The blossoming and newness of worldwide communications, the low-techness of which may have an appeal similar to that of the Steampunk theme. The dawn of computers.

+ Extreme geographical disparity in human development (unless that just gets more extreme in the future)

+ Perhaps there will be some romanticization of terrorism (hey, we can be pretty insensitive regarding things that happened X hundred years ago)

+ Our era's China has a lot of potential to be fantisized, I think, as a huge and diverse country in which liberal values and technology clash with an authoritarian government.

+ Mass extinctions and callousness towards nature

+ The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. In some ways it seems like a modern day alien invasion, with one force far more advanced the other, and with different values. A love story involving a US Army Battlemage and and some Afghani ninja-type woman would be awesome!

To me, it's hard to look at today and think about it in this way. I'm sure no one in the middle ages expected people to get such a kick from reading about them in a fantasy setting, but here we are doing it!

 

[Quokka]

Obviously it all depends on how things develop in the future but if we start with a general assumption that things get better socially as well as technically then:

The disparity in wealth and resources,
The emphasis placed on country and area divisions,
What is allowed and accepted practices by mass media
There's still vast areas of the world (and even parts within cities etc) controlled by smaller groups rather than the ruling government
It's still very possible to get lost, be undetected or change identities in our world, may or may not change in the future.
And the fact that we may be getting towards being the last generation before at least personally exploring and colonising our own solar system.

Might all provide interesting starting points for speculative fiction if you're looking back on it like people do today to earlier periods.

 

[Toby Frost]

Fascinating question. I suppose a lot of the answer depends on the sort of society that arises in the future. Consider for instance The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad, which is about a fantasy novel by a fascist, and is in part a satire of fantasy.

My own suspicion is that our era will be seen as a sort of late-period Rome, grossly indulgent to the point of immorality, and deluded by either excessive capitalism, religion or both. Of course, that's assuming that we don't fall apart entirely, in which case we will be looking at now with some nostalgia, as we roast wild cat around the camp fire. But I reckon that no matter what there will be a very long story about a boy naive to the world and yet destined to be king, advised by an elderly wizard, set in something a lot like the medieval times. Sometimes there will be extra peripheral characters, sometimes some jokes, and sometimes more death than usual, but it'll still be there...

EDIT: that last bit was a joke