Is it a bad a idea to write a fantasy novel with a setting in which non of the sentient races are human, human-like or even mammalian?
>Is it a bad a idea to write a fantasy novel
yes
The only thing you're gonna change from writing a book featuring humans is descriptions. Whatever you write is gonna end up having basically human sentiments and thoughts in a different body.
Readers will relate to men.
That's why the hero is John Carter and not Tharrs Tharkass.
If you want to learn how to write an alien psychology, read Vance. He writes a lot of aliens or races of men with very different thinking patterns, and those stories are often very droll.
>>7395200
Asimov did a good attempt at none-human thought in 'the gods themselves', perhaps you could take a look at that OP.
>>7395191
If you can do it without overwhelming the reader with description.
>>7395352
This. I like a race of sea-faring merchants based on those wrestling rhino beetles.
I don't give a fuck how hard their horns are or how their bodies informed their ship design.
regards, /tg/
>>7395370
Furthermore, anything is better than more fucking elves,
YOU CAN DO IT
>>7395191
Only if you're not up to the task. It's difficult for something to write as something it isn't; you're likely to just fall back on human ways of thinking to simply get a point across. Otherwise, you risk trying too hard to NOT be human, risking mediocrity and incomprehension on the part of the reader. Either way, it's a creative failure.
The way I see it, the best thing you can do is start writing human (in increments, not a novel at a time), then drift away from that, steadily working all the human-like thought out of your system and getting an understanding of how an inhuman, non-mammalian sentient creature would think. I have one character that's basically an inhuman sentient (though it came from a human), so I have some understanding of how to write them. Granted, it rarely speaks, and almost never in any human language, but still, it's a start.
NO
MOre
FAntasy
>>7395191
so a fantasy book about chairs or something?
>>7397338
YES.
>>7397329
Join NOMOFA today! Rid the world of it's most unproductive preoccupation!
>>7397347
I' sure memeing and shitposting on 4chins is more productive than creating a world and writing, whatever that is.
Jesus fuck I keep coming back and then I remember why I left /lit/
Brian Aldiss pointed out that the reader needs a character they can sympathise with. "nobody wants a passport to a planet full of talking slugs".
>>7397553
Holy shit. Sci-fi morons in a single post.
