When Folk Tales Collide

Western fantasy fiction is heavily influenced by Greco-Roman and Norse mythologies. From pantheons of fickle deities to mischievous fae folk, from great dragons to tunnel crawling wyrms. Over the decades, since fantasy’s emergence as a genre, more and more European folklore has made its way into fantasy fiction. Orcs, goblins, elves, dwarfs, etc., are well represented from Tolkien to Rowling.

In more recent times, the fantasy bestiary has benefited from globalisation and immigration. Our great dragons now live alongside Eastern wingless dragons on the pages of fiction. Jinn or djinn have started to feature in New York Times Bestsellers alongside vampires and angels. Hugo Award winners are no longer just Middle-class, white males. What does that mean for fantasy as a whole and us as writers?

I’m a writer of South Asian descent, a practising Muslim and a perpetual student of higher education. I started writing in the mid-90s as a teen. The first short story I submitted was titled Hunter or the Hunted, inspired by the British folk figure of Hearn the Hunter. The second was a swashbuckling Arabian Nights styled romance called Kiss of the Rose. Clearly, my writing was as liminally stuck as my British Muslim identity was. However, for the next decade or so, none of my writing featured Asian or Muslim characters. Sultan only came along in my 4th or 5th draft of The Changeling King. Is this because my mind had become colonised by my British identity? Or was I subconsciously writing for a mainly white audience?

The truth is that the generation X children of migrants have always been stuck between their national and ethnic identities, both in Europe and in North America. Ours was the struggle of finding and negotiating our place between the two whilst the Millennials took to the duality literally like natives. As a result, our fiction will look very different in terms of characters, treatments, and themes.

So, what can you expect from my new writing? The sensibilities of a gen-xer who grew up reading Gemmell, Fiest and Eddings, but also the deeper spirituality and awareness of a person who has come to terms with his place in the world and gotten his inner dragons to stop fighting … at least until I need a cool battle between airborne lizards.