Varieties of modern fantasy

 Fantasy has become a well developed genre, with lots of sub-genres, from romantic ("romantasy") to grim-and-dark to "cozy" to humorous.  Today I want to talk about several recent excellent fantasy books as examples of the variety the field has embraced.

Okay, at the simplest, fantasy is a story with magic, usually (not always) set in an imagined past, often vaguely medieval.  JRR Tolkien essentially invented the modern genre with The Lord of the Rings, and in the 1950s critics didn't know what to make of it, although they liked it a lot.  "Super science fiction."  "Fairy tales for grownups."

Tolkien-style fantasy has dominated for 75 years. It has a fairly well developed world in which the story takes place, generally with wizards, magical creatures like hobbits or elves or dragons, often a map.  The material culture is pre-modern, swords instead of guns, horses instead of cars, hand-made instead of factory-made goods, wood fires instead of electric and gas.  George RR Martin has this kind of setting for his on-going series beginning with A Game of Thrones.  My main fantasy series, "The Royal Wizard of Yurt," falls more or less into this category (though I highly doubt anyone would compare Yurt to Martin's Westeros.)

One can vary this with fairy-tale fantasy, sort of the same but vaguer on setting, often including such New World items as chocolate and potatoes in a semi-European setting (even Tolkien included potatoes and tobacco), generally more lighthearted (certainly more so than Martin), and frequently involving princesses.  Some authors retell classic tales like "Beauty and the Beast" or "Snow White" this way.

Alternately one can have a medieval setting that is pretty close to the real Middle Ages, although with magic. My husband and I did this with our Count Scar.

  

 

One can also set fantasy in something like the modern world.  The book The Everlasting, by Alix Harrow, starts off in something sort of like modern England but then ranges back over the centuries to the Bronze Age or before, with efforts to remake history in pursuit of justice.  It's been getting a lot of attention for its unexpected plot twists and strong characters.

This book just came out last year, as did Snake Eater by T. Kingfisher.  This one is set in something close to the American Southwest, and it is very evocative of the creatures and myths of the desert and the native Americans.  Its magic isn't time-travel but the idea of desert gods attached to native creatures (a roadrunner is crucial, definitely not the cartoon version).  Again, excellent characters.

A third recent book I've very much enjoyed (though it's nothing like my own fantasy) is The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. This one is a few years older. It's set in something like modern Britain, except that a lot of children are born as magical creatures, and there's a highly questionable bureaucracy that is supposed to supervise them. Humor, very realistic children, and a touch of gay romance, lots to enjoy.

You will notice that fantasy is very rarely a quest to overcome the Dark Lord these days. Ever since Diana Wynne Jones published Dark Lord of Derkholme, a hilarious adventure where people from our world pay to take quests through the "portal" to a fantastic land and "slay the dark lord," we haven't seen it much.  But there are lots and lots of alternate plot lines. Fantasy, when done right, raises real human concerns in a setting like and unlike ours. And I haven't even talked about sex-with-magical-creatures.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026  

Cows

We take cattle for granted.  Beef accounts for a quarter of the meat eaten in the world.  Our milk and dairy products are primarily from cows (half-and-half for our coffee, much of our cheese, butter, sour cream, and ice cream).  Most of our leather comes from cows.  We wouldn't know what do without them, even though most of us have few personal interactions with them.

Did medieval people have cows? Of course. But they were raised and treated differently than cows today, and there were no cows in the Americas before Christopher Columbus brought some on his second voyage (1493).

Cows are descended from the aurochs, a wild bovine that finished going extinct in the seventeenth century but had been very rare for centuries before then.  The aurochs might be considered Eurasia's answer to the bison. It could reach six feet tall at the shoulder and had wicked horns.  But the aurochs was domesticated into the cow around 10,000 years ago, probably roughly simultaneously in the Middle East (specifically what is now Turkey) and in South Asia (specifically what is now Pakistan). It became smaller, more mild-tempered, and stupider.

The generic term "cows" can either mean cattle of either sex (used this way in the term "cowboy") or else female cattle in particular.  The feminine is the term used for the species as a whole. (Fun fact:  The same is true of geese.)

Cattle change a landscape.  They trample through the mud and eat all the grass.  In the medieval Mediterranean region they were relatively uncommon, because sheep and goats did better in a dry landscape and could eat plants cows wouldn't touch.  The Romans had mocked the Germanic peoples for preferring cows to goats when they showed up along the margins of the Roman Empire.  But then they mocked the Germans for liking butter and for not speaking Latin.

 Medieval cows were smaller than our cows today, which really can be enormous, as you'll know if you've had any personal interactions. Medieval cows were usually brown, not the black-and-white we often assume.  Dairy cows did not produce milk year-round (or almost year-round) as they do now, which meant farmers were not slaves to their cows, who now require twice-daily milking.

Today most beef cattle are free-range for much of their lives, wandering around eating grass without much human supervisions, then rounded up, taken to livestock yards for fattening up (mostly on grain and corn), and slaughtered.  Dairy cattle are kept in good sized herds, from twenty cows up to a couple of hundred.  Medieval cows were mostly kept one-at-a-time, in close contact with their humans, as I have discussed earlier.

Medieval cattle were also very useful as draft animals. Oxen were used to pull carts and plows much more than horses, which are more flighty and more expensive to keep. (An ox is a male castrated as a calf, so it grows up with a bull's muscles but not a bull's aggression.)  The ox transformed life in the Americas, giving the natives an animal that could be used to pull heavy loads, which they had never had before (for small loads, North American natives had used dogs, South Americans the llama—you can see this has serious limits).

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval social history and how it still affects us today, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.