As much as I love them, I’m getting tired of elves just being “tall humans with pointy ears that live in the forest and use bows” and dwarves being “short humans with beards that are great craftsmen who live in the mountains”.
Whatever race they are, I wanna see societies that aren’t just your typical Tolkein or DnD setup.
by BostianALX
3 Comments
*Perdido Street Station* by China Miéville is a steampunk-y fantasy with tons of fantasy races. And not the classic high fantasy elves and dwarves, but ones the author came up with – cactus people and bug women, species that aren’t humanoid at all. The author does a really good job of fleshing out some of the different cultures and jumbling them all together into one massive city.
Jim Butcher’s *Codex Alera* is great at this. Notably features an entire continent of wolf men, among others. One of the major races is admittedly pretty close to humans, but they have a prettty unique culture
Malazan Book of the Fallen. There are other races, but the author differentiates them well enough, and his background in archaeology lends some depth to the different races/factions.
It’s not light reading, the first book in particular is dense with characters, factions and concepts and everyone seems more powerful than the previous antagonist.
The Broken Earth Trilogy. No elves. The non-human factions are truly alien.