Rare Air - A New Breath for Fantasy

There is a paradox at the heart of fantasy literature, one that reveals itself the moment you ask what the genre actually is.

The usual answer involves dragons and dark lords, quests and chosen ones, landscapes that bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval Europe. But this is a trick of marketing, a sleight of hand performed so deftly over the past century that we've come to mistake the package for the thing itself.

Fantasy, understood correctly, is not a subgenre at all.

Every story is shaped by the perspective of its teller — by their culture, their lived experience, their understanding of the world and the worlds beyond it. This subjectivity is inherently fantastical. It is imaginative, speculative, irreducibly human. Before there were genres, before there were categories and classifications, there was simply the act of imagining. And from that act—that primal human impulse—all storytelling emerged.

The Default

Fantasy did not emerge from fiction.

Yet at some point, through a process both gradual and oddly systematic, fantasy contracted. It became a box—narrow, meticulously defined, constructed almost entirely around a single tradition. A tradition drawn from European mythology, medieval history, and the literary inheritance of a small constellation of Western authors.

To say "fantasy" now is to summon, for most readers, a specific visual vocabulary: castles and swords, magic systems and monarchies, narratives that unfold in settings suspiciously reminiscent of pre-industrial England. This is not because fantasy is inherently European, or because the European mythic imagination holds some monopoly on the fantastic.

It is because the genre, as it has been packaged, marketed, and popularized across generations, has been filtered through a European lens so consistently that the filter has come to seem like the form itself.

Fantasy is vast. It has always been vast. Over time, it has branched and evolved into a rich ecosystem of subgenres, each with its own conventions, tones, and concerns:

Epic. Dark. Science. Historical. Romantic. Superhero. And many more.

Each of these represents a different way of engaging with the imaginative, the mythical, and the supernatural. Each carries its own weight, its own history, and its own relationship to the cultures that birthed it.

And yet, when people speak of fantasy — when they reference the genre in conversation, in criticism, in popular culture—the word "fantasy" almost invariably collapses into a single variant.

To understand why fantasy has become so narrowly defined, we must understand the conditions that shaped it.

The literary tradition that dominates global publishing, film, and media is, by and large, a Western one. The myths, legends, and folkloric traditions that became the raw material for modern fantasy — dragons, elves, dark forests, ancient prophecies — are drawn overwhelmingly from European sources: Norse mythology, Celtic legend, Greek and Roman traditions, and the medieval European imagination.

This is not a judgment. These are rich, profound traditions with centuries of storytelling behind them. But they are not the only traditions. They are not even the oldest.

Across the globe — in Africa, in Asia, in the Caribbean, in the Americas, in the Pacific Islands — there exist mythological and folkloric traditions of extraordinary depth and complexity. Stories of creation, transformation, spirits, and supernatural forces that are just as vivid, just as profound, and just as fertile as anything in the European canon. And yet these traditions have been, for the most part, absent from the mainstream fantasy conversation. Not because they lack power or richness, but because the structures of publishing, storytelling, and cultural consumption have historically centred one tradition above all others.

Globalisation has begun to shift the ground. As the world becomes more connected — as stories, ideas, and cultures flow more freely across borders than ever before — the assumption that European mythology is the default reference point for fantasy is no longer sustainable. It is no longer even logical. The audience for fantasy is global. The sources for fantasy should be too.

The Webbed Bridge

The shift did not arrive through argument alone. It arrived through infrastructure.

The internet collapsed distances that publishing had always used as an excuse. A writer in Ibadan could build a readership in London without a literary agent's blessing. A reader in Atlanta could discover a novel from Accra without a major distributor's involvement. The gatekeepers did not disappear — but their gates became, for the first time, negotiable.

Online communities dedicated to speculative fiction began seeking what mainstream shelves were not providing. Award bodies broadened their criteria. Anthologies dedicated to African speculative fiction — among them Omenana magazine and the Africanfuturism collection — created visible gathering points. Places where a movement could see itself taking shape.

It was not one door opening. It was many, and they opened simultaneously.

The Rare

Africa was already a continent of storytellers.

Griots carried entire civilizations in their mouths. They remembered genealogies stretching back centuries, recited epics that lasted days, and populated the imagination with gods, spirits, and heroes whose adventures explained the thunder, the harvest, the mystery of what waits after death. Storytelling was not entertainment in the casual sense. It was architecture. It held communities together. It was how a people understood themselves.

This is the deep root from which African fantasy grows.

The genre's modern rise did not happen overnight. It emerged gradually — through writers who felt the weight of those ancient stories pressing against the walls of contemporary literature, demanding new containers. In the early 2000s, authors began experimenting. Reaching into Yoruba cosmology. Into Igbo spiritual tradition. Into the warrior histories of the Zulu and the court intrigues of the Malian empire. Translating what they found into novels, into short fiction, into worlds that readers could walk through.

The results were unlike anything the genre had seen before. The magic felt different. Older. More intimate. Rooted in the earth rather than floating above it.

Nnedi Ofofor was among the earliest voices to crystallize what this literature could be. Her work demonstrated that African mythology was not merely a decorative alternative — it was an entirely distinct philosophical universe. One with its own internal logic, its own understanding of power, gender, nature, and the sacred. When Who Fears Death arrived, it did not ease readers gently into its world. It plunged them in. Awards followed. Conversations opened. A door, once barely ajar, swung wide.

Then came a wave. Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone landed on bestseller lists and ignited a generation of younger readers who had grown up hungry for exactly this kind of story without quite knowing how to name the hunger. Marlon James constructed a vast, mythologically dense epic in Black Leopard, Red Wolf that critics scrambled to describe, reaching instinctively for comparisons before realizing the book demanded its own vocabulary. Each success made the next one more possible. Publishers began to listen. Literary scouts started paying attention to voices emerging from Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Harare.

The source material alone could explain it. Africa is not one mythology but hundreds. The trickster figures, the ancestor spirits, the creation myths, the stories of gods who loved unwisely and heroes who bargained poorly — all of it had been waiting, largely untranslated into genre fiction, for writers willing to make the crossing.

The Future

The African diaspora played its own essential role. Writers whose families had carried the cultures of the continent across oceans brought with them hybrid imaginations — fluent in multiple worlds simultaneously, capable of moving between ancestral memory and contemporary reality with a particular earned grace. Afrofuturism created a cultural climate in which African fantasy could flourish. The global success of Black Panther made the argument plainly: African aesthetics and mythologies did not need to be translated or diluted to achieve mass resonance. They needed only to be trusted.

The space keeps growing. Literary festivals dedicated to African speculative fiction have emerged across the continent. Small presses and journals are publishing short fiction that experiments fearlessly with form and tradition. A new generation of writers — younger, more globally connected, more confident in the value of their inheritance — is producing work that builds on the pioneers while pushing further still.

What Africa's storytelling tradition always understood, and what it descendants are only now fully reckoning with, is that the imagination is not a luxury. It is the most serious business there is. It is how a people dream themselves forward. African fantasy is not a trend. It is a tradition finally finding its full modern voice — and the world, it turns out, has been waiting to listen.

It is not the only genre that needs this kind of expansion. But it is one where the need is acute, the potential is enormous, and the stories waiting to be told are inexhaustible.


DMG — Stories from the edges of the world. for the pros.