My personal motto is “Imagine Otherwise,” and this is the perspective that shapes all my writing, but especially my creative work. How might the world look different if we didn’t start with the corrosive and simplistic binary of “savagism vs. civilization”? What would fantasy fiction look like with women, Indigenous people, queer folks, and other frequently stereotyped or marginalized communities at the centre rather than the margins? Do our imagined secondary worlds have to look to Europe and its patriarchal and colonial legacies for inspiration, or can we look to the deep roots of this land and the cultures, perspectives, lineages, genders, and histories embedded here? This is what inspires me, and what I hope in my own work helps to make room for others to expand the possibilities of wonder and imagination in more diverse, more expansive, and more complex ways.

Many scholars in the history of ideas have discussed the binary of “civilization” vs. “savagery,” two concepts quite firmly entrenched in much of mainstream epic fantasy and contemporary political rhetoric. (See, for example, Roy Harvey Pearce’s seminal study, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, as well as Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.’s The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present, Richard Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire-Building, Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, and Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.)

In this binary, the cultural differences between communities—social, political, economic, military—are often measured by assertions of the more powerful group’s supposedly more “civilized” status in comparison with the more marginalized group’s supposedly more “savage” state. The binary is so commonplace that it’s become normalized, but it’s still an imaginary construction—there’s nothing objectively natural or inevitable about these ideas. “Civilization” and “savagery” are ideologically driven shortcuts to help define relationships of power; they don’t accurately represent the complexities of human societies of either our age or those that came before.

Much mainstream sword-and-sorcery fantasy chronicles the bloody adventures of pseudo-European, proto-Aryan psychotics with super-powers who cut a murderous swath through various tribal “savages” in their quest to bring “civilization” to the howling wilderness, or who simply faciltate the supposedly inevitable disappearance of a once-great culture now long past its prime.* There are generally two types of these primal peoples in the literature. The first are the Noble Savages, the elves/faeries/Fair Folk, beautiful and mysterious creatures whose own once-powerful civilizations have faded/are fading before the inevitable rise of Men. They’re almost always elegant children of Nature, connected to the wilderness but melancholy over their ultimate doom. These Noble Savages live only to die, but in a peaceful, resigned way, understanding that they must disappear so that humans can rule in supreme (if mundane) solitude. They generally help the human heroes along with some good advice, a temporarily safe haven, and a mystical weapon or two, then vanish into the sunset of a disappearing world of enchantment.

The second and more numerous savages in mainstream fantasy are the Ignoble Savages. These bestial antagonists are often represented as swarthy marauders, brutal and ignorant, with a taste for “man-flesh” and a visceral hatred for the values of the (generally white and male) heroes who are very often enthusiastic colonizers and empire-builders. Generally driven by the will of a tyrannical overlord, the primary goal of these nameless, faceless hordes is to bring a veil of darkness over the light of the heroes’ world. The Ignoble Savages, too, exist only to die, but their destruction is messy and celebrated. They’re the mindless obstacles that must be slaughtered for the quest–and for civilization itself–to triumph.

But this isn’t the only way of understanding or representing cultural conflict, interaction, and exchange; it’s not the only way of considering how our differences divide and sometimes connect us. Might is not always right; often there are deeper and better ways of knowing, and truer insights than excess violence and high volume.  There are other ways to envision the world and our relationships, and there are many scholars, writers, artists, and visionaries who continue to offer new stories and possibilities, or old stories in new or different ways. We can all imagine otherwise….**

• *While J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy works are sometimes critiqued as the exemplar of this racialist/racist binary, especially in the aftermath of Peter Jackson’s films and their visual representations of racial difference, a careful assessment of his entire Middle-earth corpus reveals a far more complicated picture of cultural conflict than is demonstrated by many of his successors. The influence of writers like Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs has been far more corrosive to the genre in comparison with Tolkien’s more sophisticated and complex representations of difference. This isn’t to say that his work isn’t sometimes quite problematic, but it doesn’t reflect the noxious racist brutality of Howard and his ilk.
• **I recently explored some of these themes in a personal essay, “Hack the Orcs, Loot the Tomb, and Take the Land: Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity, and Otherwise Futures of Dungeons & Dragons,” which appeared in Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons, edited by Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter, and Jose Zagal (MIT Press, 2024). It’s a reflection on my own complicated history with the tabletop role-playing game and its deep savagism vs. civilization foundations, and of finding meaning in the game while straining against its internalized bigotries.