Why is fantasy allergic to guns?

The Victorian fantasy of the pre-industrial age, and how to move on from it.

In Brian McClellan’s Power Mage trilogy, one of the few names of any note in the ‘flintlock fantasy’ sub-genre, the traditional magic users are literally allergic to gunpowder. This was presumably intended as a metaphor for how new technologies usurp magic, a trope in the genre, and plays off the ‘fairies being allergic to iron’ folk-legend but relatedly, in my opinion, is a great manifestation of this truth: fantasy is allergic to guns. Across the genre you will rarely see them and instead often see authors go to great lengths not to use them even when it would make sense. I think there’s an interesting reason for this which says something about fantasy as a genre going right back to its origins.

‘A Victorian fantasy of the pre-industrial world’ is how I have sometimes described what it feels like reading some early fantasy, from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. That is not necessarily a bad thing, just a thing. Early fantasy was a part of a greater romanticist movement that decried modernity, industrialism, and urbanism in favour of an idyllic understanding of the past. We can see this most notably in the two greats of the early genre: Lewis and Tolkien.

In Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, his characters are able to escape the confusion of the modern world and the horrors of the blitz for a historically inspired one in which the villains are externalised and easy to defeat, creating lasting harmony. Those who refuse to do so, such as Susan, who makes the mistake of being a modern woman, are denied a happy resolution at the end of the series.

But this theme is most notable in Tolkien, in which the Shire is represented as a version of the ‘Merry England’ trope, an agrarian utopia, encroached upon by war, dictatorship, and industrialism. Even when Saruman is killed and the Shire freed at the end of the novel, in the true thematic climax of the book, the Shire is forever altered, forever changed by both Saruman’s industrialisation of the Shire and the blood on both sides required to free it. In the end, Frodo doesn’t even recognise the land he sought to save, putting his life on the line and being forever altered to save a home he can never really return to. As a metaphor for the experience of many soldiers, it is poignant as only a story written by a soldier could be. It is additionally notable, though, that the conflict is not just good vs bad or freedom vs imperialism but is also explicitly rural agrarianism vs industry. And, of course, that the evil empire is defeated, but the industrialism the evil empire and its puppets leave behind is not. Magic continues to leave the world and what follows is the age of men, ending in our own industrial age.

What does all of this have to do with guns? We’re getting there. But first, simply, the ‘Victorian fantasy of the pre-industrialised world’ these novels sketch out is just that: a fantasy. Not just in the immediately apparent sense of these being non-existent worlds where animals talk, wizards totter around, and elephants are really big and called oliphaunts, but also in the more integral sense that the historical world these stories are based on never truly existed. Yes, industrialism had and continues to have bad effects on us as a species. It led to huge inequality. People die or are mutilated working in mines and factories daily. It was hell to live through and is hell for many to this day. But that doesn’t make what came before necessarily better. The world pre-industrialisation had huge inequality, dangerous working conditions, and if anything greater levels of poverty and deprivation. ‘Merry England’ is a barefaced lie.

It is also a lie that we can draw a clear distinction between agrarianism and industrialism. The late medieval and early modern era in Europe saw the slow edging towards industrialisation - through trade, innovation, and imperialism - before everything exploded around the turn of the 19th century. An example of this and the one this piece will focus on is gunpowder. Invented in China a little under two thousand year ago, the first gunpowder weapons in Europe were cannons, used from the 14th century onwards. By that time, China already had handheld firearms, but Europe invented their own and, by the 18th century, they had become the universal infantry weapon in European armies. So during many archetypical medieval conflicts, such as the Hundred Years War, gunpowder was already in use. Any fantasy based on this time period, and following the technology of the time, would have to admit that technologies associated with industrialism were already in use centuries before industrialisation took off in Europe.

Tolkien, a student of history himself, seemed to realise this and did not set his world during the equivalent of that time period. One way you can tell this is through the kinds of armour the characters are described as using: almost always mail rather than plate armour. Mail, interlocking rings of metal, worn over a woollen gambeson, was by far the most common armour of earlier periods but, from around the 14th century, began to be replaced by metal plates, culminating in what we call a suit of plate - the stereotypical ‘knights’ armour’. This was invented, in part, because mail was insufficient against guns. Gus and armour then continued in somewhat of an arms race until armour was almost entirely dropped in the 17th/18th centuries. Lewis, more of a religious scholar than a historian, does describe characters in this later form of armour. The film adaptations of LOTR go so far as to put the entire Gondorian army in it. The question is raised: why would plate armour be invented without the guns that made it necessary?

Well, because it feels more medieval-y, right? In most of the artistic depictions of Arthurian (and non-Arthurian, I use King Arthur because his legends are some of the earliest romanticist stories) knights from Victorian romanticist artists, they wear plate armour. It feels old-timey and like the proper garb for a knight to have. But it is a lie. Plate armour was not so much the heyday of the knight as coincidental with their downfall. Knights are a high medieval concept and by the late medieval era began to decline, in part because once you can give a load of peasants a gun and train them in its use in a few days, why do you need a warrior aristocracy who train their whole lives? So Lewis took the medieval feel of plate armour and scrubbed it of the modernity of guns to better fit his message and ideas.

Modern fantasy is quite different from its mid-century predecessors, not just in style and plot archetypes but in its settings too. We are increasingly getting fantasy based on non-European cultures and non-medieval time-periods. The default still seems to be Europe, but Europe at a different time-period. Specifically I put it to you that the new ‘Standard Fantasy Setting’ is Renaissance Europe, where it used to be high medieval Europe.

Jordan’s Wheel of Time is one of the most famous examples of this though, perhaps influenced by him, Sanderson is the biggest writer to set almost all his work in this new Standard Fantasy Setting today. The Renaissance inspired default setting differs from the old default setting in a number of ways. It is more urbanised - modern fantasy is more likely to be set in cities than old fantasy and its worldbuilding reflects that. The fashion is more modern, in fact often feels more baroque even than renaissance (read, for example, the clothing descriptions provided by Jordan, Sanderson, and Lynch, to name a few). There are greater levels of scholarship, technology, travel, and other things we would associate with the transition into the Renaissance age. Many of these writers have said explicitly that their work is principally inspired by the Renaissance.

But, hang on. The Renaissance began in the 15th century. So… where are the guns?

Well, some writers provide in-world explanations. In The Wheel of Time, gunpowder is a closely guarded secret by a particular guild and its military application is uncovered over the course of the series, until cannons of a sort are in fact in use by its end. In Sanderson’s most widely read series, Mistborn, various technologies (including canning) are held back by the Lord Ruler for fear that they might challenge his rule-through-magic and, once he is defeated, begin to flourish. Eventually, guns do emerge in the sequel series (I believe - I have yet to read it personally. I’m getting to it, stop pestering me). That sequel series, though, has a more 19th century setting as I understand it, and so goes somewhat beyond the scope of my argument, given Victorian inspired steampunk, gearpunk, etc. has a long history of using guns.

But these are in-world justifications. Why do writers make the decision to not include firearms in their fantasy novels, while preserving most of the rest of the time-period their setting is based on? Why are guns singled out?

You might say that guns are just too powerful and would ruin the story. Would they not make magic obsolete? Well, no, no they would not. Especially not the guns of that age - slow, single shot things that can just about hit a barn door reliably from a distance of 10 meters so long as there isn’t a breeze (I exaggerate, to be clear, but you get the idea). We can have a discussion of how an M4 might render throwing fireballs obsolete, but not a brown bess or its precursors. Brian McClellan actually does a great job of showing this: how guns of the 18th/19th century mean very little against being able to throw a wall of magic out of your fingers.

In fact, one of the ways we know this is that many fantasy writers really really really want guns in their work but seemly don’t feel they can. One half of the YouTube channel OSP has a video about how writers often fall back on the technology of their age. In her case, she was talking about communications technology. But the same is true of guns. Writers want to be able to use them for cool gun things like standoffs or they just assume that the police/guards should have a gun-like weapon. So often they end up creating a pseudo-gun, most often out of crossbows.

Crossbows, it should be said, are not guns. You cannot keep them loaded, ready to fire off at any second, or you will ruin the weapon. Handgun sized ones don’t work. When you want these things, you want guns. And yet so often in fantasy crossbows are depicted like this - basically just as if they were actually guns. Wheel of Time even does this - Jordan has a whole army of guys just equipt with crossbows at one point (I forget their name but they’re loyal to Rand and appear in Crown of Swords to the best of my recollection) which just doesn’t work. When guns were first adopted as a standard weapon across all infantry soldiers, it was largely because the bayonet had been invented so the musket could be a ranged and melee weapon. Crossbows cannot be. I wish those guys luck if they get charged by cavalry. Hopefully some of you brought pikes. I have already mentioned Lynch and I am reminded of the stand-off in Red Seas under Red Skies using crossbows. The idea no doubt taken from Westerns where the stand-off creates a really cool scene. But Westerns use guns, where that works, not handgun sized crossbows.

Sometimes, not wanting to use guns even becomes a deep problem for a series. Here I am thinking about Kuang’s Poppy War Trilogy. An interesting trilogy largely inspired by mid-century China where, I am sure you will agree, guns existed. The real Northern Expedition, the real Long March, the real Chinese Civil War and Second Sino-Japanese War all were fought with, you know, guns. Throughout the series, the books show campaigns inspired by these real events, with strategies and tactics equally inspired by them. But, without guns, they make increasingly little sense. Worse, the series later introduces guns, but only in the hands of the European inspired culture. As I’ve previously outlined here, real gunpower and guns were invented in China. By the time Europeans were using firearms widely, so were the Chinese. When China was invaded in the Opium Wars, there was a gap in military technology but not a chasm. Yet, The Poppy War depicts a European inspired culture with guns and zeppelins (a 19th century invention) against a Chinese inspired culture with the level of technology China had maybe a thousand years ago. Then the series asks if that chasm makes the Chinese inspired people innately inferior. Obviously Kuang does not want us to answer in the affirmative to that question, but the whole question looks ridiculous when you remember the real history. If Kuang had felt that she could write a fantasy story in which guns were the main weapon used by the culture that was the focus of the story, that problem could have been avoided. But she didn’t. So, why?

Well, fantasy no longer holds romanticist notions of the past as its primary thematic message. Quite the opposite, actually - popular fantasy such as Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire depict a medieval inspired world that is if anything overly brutal, not idyllic. The modern idea is that the medieval world was worse than it really was, not better. We have decidedly removed our romanticist-coloured spectacles. So why can we still not depict guns?

Largely, I think it comes down to this: guns feel too modern. I have explained to you why they aren’t, in fact being no more modern than the plate armour that is everywhere in fantasy, but nonetheless that is how they feel. And there is a sense, I think, that unless that is the focus of your story, as it is in the flintlock fantasy sub-genre, literally named after the guns, it feels un-fantasy-like to include them.

Yet, by not including them, we encourage a poor understanding of history and lead readers to believe that guns are more modern than they in fact are. And, by assuming that guns have no place in fantasy, we make it hard for writers to include them even when it makes a lot of sense to do so.

This is particularly important to me, not just as a pedant for historicity, but because of the idea it creates. While most modern fantasy does not write from an explicitly romanticist point of view, creating these worlds entirely devoid from anything that feels modern helps reinforce in readers’ minds the basic fallacy that there is such a thing as the entirely pre-modern, pre-industrial world and that everything changed out of nowhere around the turn of the 19th century. That isn’t just wrong, nor does it just obscure the role of technologies invented outside of Europe earlier than that in leading to European industrialisation (such as gunpowder from China, but also the Indian cotton gin, or how introducing Chinese agricultural technologies freed up more of the European labour force to move to the cities in work in factories), but it also helps reinforce that basic romanticist fantasy of an idyllic pre-modern world. A fantasy that I am particularly concerned about for how it is utilised today by political reactionaries who want to return to that world that never really existed, devoid not just of industry but of rights, equality, and diversity (though romanticism does have many progressive voices in its history, like Rousseau and Orwell). Reinforcing that such a world never existed, even through the inclusion of something so innocuous as firearms technology in a late medieval setting (though I’m sure I have another essay in me about what the fantasy genre owes history more broadly), undermines that argument.

What I am ultimately trying to say with all this is I think it is fine to include guns in fantasy and that it is a weird, though interesting, legacy of fantasy’s origins that they are not more used. So, if you are a writer who wants to carefully cut guns out of your Renaissance inspired world or would like to include pseudo-guns but not actual guns, just ask yourself why. If the answer is that it doesn’t feel fantasy enough or old-timey enough, maybe think about why that is, why that’s silly, and then include them anyway.

And so ends my put-more-firearms-in-your-fantasy screed.

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Thank you for reading. I prefer actually writing to writing-about-writing, but occasionally I have thoughts to share. If you want to read some fantasy that’s more than happy to have people shoot each other, subscribe and check out my short fiction.