I noticed early on in my reading career that most fantasy I was coming across was Anglo-Celtic with sword swinging and sorcery under northern hemisphere oak trees. The Oriental fantasy that I read included the Bridge of Birds and the Plum Rain Scrolls, both set respectively in ancient Chinese and Japanese worlds that never were. The strongest female character I read was of the mother in the Plum Rain Scrolls whom was a fox fairy whom spent most of the narrative frozen in stone needing to be rescued.

Vixen

But when it came to my writing I wanted Australia to be portrayed in my work. My first (unpublished) fantasy novel was set under gum trees in a post-nuclear world with the protagonist being a woman of Asian descent. I missed strong Asian women in fantasy work, and I remembered when reading an (unknown) fantasy book feeling surprised when the main character was black- how white washed my fantasy world had become! By the time I wrote Vixen it was clear in my mind that I wanted to subvert the mythology of the fox fairy being a monster and a bitch- strong women could exist and challenge the dominant paradigm.

Since then I have read Larissa Lai’s When Fox is a Thousand, a brilliant playful work around the fox fairy and cheered! The success of Lian Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor trilogy shows that the demand for Oriental based fantasy is still strong. The challenge is to come up with work that does not fall into the easy escapist route of Oriental fantasy, but worlds and racial depictions that do us justice. Fantasy fiction can be a projection of what we want to be rather than just a poor reflection of the dominant paradigm. We need to rise to the challenge!