LamanaAli
New Member
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2026
- Messages
- 1
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’m genuinely curious where people land.
I love this genre. I grew up on it. However, a significant portion of sci-fi/fantasy continues to heavily rely on the same Western medieval template, including castles, knights, feudal politics, and familiar mythologies. And while those stories can still be excellent, it does feel like we’ve been circling the same well for a long time.
What we lose in that repetition isn’t just aesthetic variety; it’s entire ways of thinking.
Different cultures bring different ideas about power, family, faith, honor, fate, and even what it means to be a hero. That translates into entirely new character psychologies, moral dilemmas, humor, relationships, and conflicts. The way a character raised in a desert trading culture sees the world is fundamentally different from one raised in a feudal European court. Their instincts, their fears, and their sense of duty, it all changes. And that’s where things start to feel fresh again.
When books step outside that default, people notice.
Stories like The City of Brass or The Stardust Thief didn’t just succeed because they were well-written; they offered readers a different texture of the world. Different mythologies, different rhythms, different emotional landscapes. They feel familiar enough to enter, but new enough to stay interesting.
That kind of storytelling reminds me why I fell in love with the genre in the first place.
It’s also part of why I ended up writing my own book, The Celestial Ashes. I spent years looking for a Moorish/Islamic-inspired epic at the same scale as the big names in the genre and just couldn’t find it. So I built one. And more than just a different coat of paint on a familiar structure, it's an entire world shaped by a different history, philosophy, and emotional core.
And zooming out, this isn’t just about one region or one type of story.
Whether it’s Asian-inspired worlds, African epics, Middle Eastern settings, or Native American mythologies, there’s a massive amount of narrative territory that still feels underexplored in mainstream sci-fi/fantasy. Mainly, because it hasn’t been centered as often.
I think there’s a real hunger for that now, as a natural evolution of the genre.
So I’m curious.
Are readers actively looking for more non-Western–coded worlds?
Or do most people still prefer the familiarity of the traditional settings?
I love this genre. I grew up on it. However, a significant portion of sci-fi/fantasy continues to heavily rely on the same Western medieval template, including castles, knights, feudal politics, and familiar mythologies. And while those stories can still be excellent, it does feel like we’ve been circling the same well for a long time.
What we lose in that repetition isn’t just aesthetic variety; it’s entire ways of thinking.
Different cultures bring different ideas about power, family, faith, honor, fate, and even what it means to be a hero. That translates into entirely new character psychologies, moral dilemmas, humor, relationships, and conflicts. The way a character raised in a desert trading culture sees the world is fundamentally different from one raised in a feudal European court. Their instincts, their fears, and their sense of duty, it all changes. And that’s where things start to feel fresh again.
When books step outside that default, people notice.
Stories like The City of Brass or The Stardust Thief didn’t just succeed because they were well-written; they offered readers a different texture of the world. Different mythologies, different rhythms, different emotional landscapes. They feel familiar enough to enter, but new enough to stay interesting.
That kind of storytelling reminds me why I fell in love with the genre in the first place.
It’s also part of why I ended up writing my own book, The Celestial Ashes. I spent years looking for a Moorish/Islamic-inspired epic at the same scale as the big names in the genre and just couldn’t find it. So I built one. And more than just a different coat of paint on a familiar structure, it's an entire world shaped by a different history, philosophy, and emotional core.
And zooming out, this isn’t just about one region or one type of story.
Whether it’s Asian-inspired worlds, African epics, Middle Eastern settings, or Native American mythologies, there’s a massive amount of narrative territory that still feels underexplored in mainstream sci-fi/fantasy. Mainly, because it hasn’t been centered as often.
I think there’s a real hunger for that now, as a natural evolution of the genre.
So I’m curious.
Are readers actively looking for more non-Western–coded worlds?
Or do most people still prefer the familiarity of the traditional settings?
