Lev Grossman is topical in two ways. In his The Magicians and The Magician King he has a city between the worlds, obviously inspired by Lewis' Wood, but except for taking it physically as a place in a couple instances that doesn't seem to change so much the nature of the stories. (The characters do speculate about who built the city, and how, and why, but the plots don't really explore this yet.) He also, in The Magician King, writes a Reynard, so if you collect them there's one to add to your set, but his is really not one of the better ones.
Bear's Faerie in the Promethean Age books (Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth) is the closest I've seen a Fairyland done with not-all-white characters. (Not without problems -- see RaceFail! -- but done, at all.)
There at least Bear's fairyland is explicitly tied to the mythology of the British Isles. I think that tie is usually present for American writers, implicitly or explicitly, and that is part of why their fairylands are often accessed via forests, and why the fairylands you see accessed via deserts are tied to First Nations mythology. (Or could be Arabic mythology, or Mongolian, to pick two other desert civilizations.)
Honestly I think being well-read in genre is overrated for writers of that genre -- not critically so, but some -- and I think you underestimate how much you've read, to say nothing of how much you've picked up by cultural osmosis. By which I mean, I wouldn't let it stop you if it's something you want to try. :-)
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regna
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Date: 2013-07-13 05:59 pm (UTC)Bear's Faerie in the Promethean Age books (Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth) is the closest I've seen a Fairyland done with not-all-white characters. (Not without problems -- see RaceFail! -- but done, at all.)
There at least Bear's fairyland is explicitly tied to the mythology of the British Isles. I think that tie is usually present for American writers, implicitly or explicitly, and that is part of why their fairylands are often accessed via forests, and why the fairylands you see accessed via deserts are tied to First Nations mythology. (Or could be Arabic mythology, or Mongolian, to pick two other desert civilizations.)
Honestly I think being well-read in genre is overrated for writers of that genre -- not critically so, but some -- and I think you underestimate how much you've read, to say nothing of how much you've picked up by cultural osmosis. By which I mean, I wouldn't let it stop you if it's something you want to try. :-)