I’m embarrassed to say that I have encountered this, this particular type of story on multiple occasions… So I got curious, is there a name to this trope?
Assuming it’s a surprise, this is Earth All Along. Genre Shift is similar, but that’s more about tone than plot
Specifically the After the End variant
You maniacs, you blew it all up!
Flintsonian/Jetson
I knew a tvtropes link was going to be here as soon as I saw the question lol, here goes my next three hours I guess
How was your trip?
Oh you’re still going? Nice. Enjoy your stay!
The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is my personal favourite of Bruce Campbell’s work. Starts off as any ordinary western, before getting very, very weird.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105932/
Come to think of it, Firefly might count, after watching Serenity at the end of the series.
Good shit.
I have no idea the answer to your question, but I now know like 99% of people on lemmy have shitty reading comprehension.
Seriously. There’s a dozen links to TvTropes and almost none of them match OP’s description, but they’re all upvoted to high heaven. Not to mention the unrelated replies talking about their favorite stories which don’t actually match the trope either.
Browsing responses here, you aren’t wrong.
People on here seem to not know what a trope is. Holy hell.
Not 100% sure, but these come to mind.
- Science Fantasy
- Dying Earth
- Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy
These sound right to me, especially Dying Earth - a podcast I listen to covered Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun trilogy and they described it as such. Wikipedia calls it Science Fantasy. Great books by the way
Yeah, Adventure Time
You mean like Adventure Time?
They are pretty obvious about it being a post nuclear war reality.
Star Wars is fantasy, not sci-fi. (Technically it’s a space opera, it not at all about science or how that science might impact society.)
Just because there’s technology, or it’s post apocalyptic doesn’t make it not fantasy.
Shanara chronicles, too.
I really like the term “Science Fantasy”. It acknowledges the parallels with Science Fiction but respects how they differ as well.
Shanara chronicles, too.
Yep, they visit ruins in one series that is pretty clearly the ruins of Tacoma or some place like it.
Terry Brooks happens to live in that area. Coincidence? :)
You mean like “dwarves and elves are GMO humans” and “magic is actually tech gadgets” ?
For a pure magic example
The Mistborn era 1 (books 1-3) are fantasty magic.
Mistborn era 2 (books 4-7) occur hundreds of years later in that worlds “industrial/steam” age. Still, with magic.
So, for example, some allomancers can push or pull on metals. In Era 1 that’s used for combat but also for rapid movement. An allomancer can fall from a wall, throw a coin and “push” off of it causing them to bounce forward and upwards. As they’re starting to reach the azimuth they “pull” the coin, catch it and repeat.
They also in combat throw and then “push” coins or metal fragments like shrapnel.
In Era 2. A sheriff (who’s an allomancer) leaps across a gully, aims and shoots a bullet into a wooden crate and then “pushes” on it to cross it.
Another time during a shootout one “pushes” gunfire away so it deflects around him. Not guaranteed to get all of the bullets but useful in situations like that.
There are other uses and other allomantic abilities but the entire shift of the format was just done phenomenally.
Can’t recommend the Mistborn series enough
Yeah, Sanderson earned the cred on the original trilogy. It’s a fantasy series, but the magicians are basically Jedi. Great stuff!
And the powers, as in all the cosmere series, has limits which balances it out.
No endless pushes, flying, etc. every world has some resources or constraint so you’re not left with a “Superman” kind of scenario.
Death Gate’s cycle says hello!
To clarify, are you asking if there’s a specific genre to Planet of the Apes where there’s a big reveal that this is actually just earth after some society ending disaster? (And similar stuff but that’s the first that came to mind).
NK Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy comes to mind, fantastic series it that’s your thing
Aladdin (1992). The Genie is the last survivor of the AI wars and has mental damage. The Cave of Wonders is another remnant. “Magic” is low level AI responding to human intent. Iago is an uplift. Agrabah is literally a generic Middle Eastern country because it was assembled from the fragmented records of what remained of the Middle East.
Do you think the genie got it from twitter war brainrot or just did too much of the sensory content back in his skibidi days?
Star Trek comes to mind unless you disallow scifi (as high fantasy usually would iirc, though notably “space operas” really do seem to blur the line).
LOTR could be argued as such - there was an earlier age of beings from which only remnants survived, and then we also watch live as a second epochal transition takes place, where the likes of elves disappear. I mean, either way it’s not “our reality” type of age - but then again you couldn’t ask for that from “high fantasy” by definition :-).
And it’s a very common trope in video games - e.g. Chrono Trigger that is arguably the best RPG of all time (shitty graphics, even for its time, but hands-down the best story I’ve ever seen, made btw by the creators of Final Fantasy who were given the freedom to do whatever they wanted for it). Edit: another one like that is Lufia - not a ground-breaking game but highly regarded for doing what it did so very well, at its time mind you.
And I’ve seen some others where like basically Earth is implied to have been destroyed (or at least it is unclear whether it survived a world-ending event), but the singular human remaining lives on, in space, but in something like a series of interconnected “worlds”, some having higher levels of technology than Earth ever managed to reach while others are set in earlier timeframes. And dealing with noncorporeal beings from like higher dimensions, and entities like a god inside the machine - so definitely once again mixing up heavy elements of “high fantasy” (with the likes of swords and magic) and sci-fi.
If you can dream it, someone has likely written it. Books are freaking awesome! 😎 So too are other mediums, when profits are not the exclusive focus.
I loved Chrono Trigger! The very first example of this that I ran into as a kid was Crystalis. You are told at the beginning that it’s Earth after an end of the world event, but it’s a sword and sorcery overhead action RPG (think original Legend of Zelda with slightly more RPG, slightly more action, and slightly more varied combat) and ends with you shooting advanced technology with your magic sword.
Yes I played Crystalis! Not like, whenever it was when it first came out, but I like to study the evolution of gaming so I went back and played a bunch like Dragon Warrior/Quest, even the Japanese versions of Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, etc.
I definitely enjoyed Chrono Trigger more:-). But I was glad to have played Crystalis too, especially with it having been so unique (or at least like rare I guess).
And while I never played it, isn’t Baldur’s Gate also post-apocalyptic, with a high fantasy theme? There are indeed so many that use that trope.:-)
Post Apocalyptic Fantasy and Post Apocalyptical High Fantasy are two phrases I keep seeing.
Where have you seen this? I’ve been looking for some stories like it
The Wheel of Time does this.
Yeah, though clues are few and far between; the
spoiler
museum in Tanchico with the Mercedes hood ornament
is the biggest clue. From Jordan’s other writings, the
spoiler
First age was our time, then humans created an AI powerful enough to genetically engineer humans to be able to do magic,
and that led to the Age of Legends.
Yup. I think there are a few more, on a re read rn and Great Hunt they go to a parallel world where there appear to be Jet contrails and large swatches of burned ground where absolutely nothing will grow - nuclear fallout?
I hadn’t heard of the AI bit before but it sort of makes sense. sAIdin and sAIdar? No?
I’ve got to check these recs out
OG Planet of the Apes, Horizon Zero Dawn is too in a way
I’ve never actually seen, just the references. Guess it’s worth a go
OG Planet of the Apes took place on Soror, a planet in the Betelgeuse system.
The YA book series The Tripods, is medieval dystopian.
The Broken Empire trilogy. Also Red War trilogy, which is spin-off (though uses these themes a bit less)
Yor: Hunter From the Future
The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein, though sadly she never finished it.
Shanara chronicles are set after humanity fucked everything up, demons came and fucked more shit and got sealed away and are now coming back.
It’s otherwise your sword and horse fantasy, though.
