robinturner | I am so going to write that book

After sniping at fantasy writers so much, I have decided it is high time that I started to write the fantasy novle I've been kicking around my head for the last couple of years. Well, I say "fantasy", but it's actually one of those hybrid novels that look like fantasy at first sight but have a scientific (or pseudoscientific) underpinning, like some of Sheri S. Tepper's or Gene Wolfe's books. The backdrop is pretty vague and, I might add, unoriginal: there's a world which resembles to a large extent your typical medieval-level-technology fantasy world, but there are all these magical objects and weapons which make the reader think "Ah, a lost civilisation." Following Clarke's dictum that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, the characters see these as really magical, but they could be just very sophisticated machines with a machine-mind interface. Or they could really be magical—I'm leaving it open. A possible scenario is a planet that was settled by members of an advanced civilisation who descended into barbarism after some convenient unexplained catastrophe and worked their way back up to a roughly medieval level—again, I want to leave those details up to the reader.

Another unoriginal idea is having three sexes: the population is 50% male, 40% female and 10% hermaphrodite, and our hero comes from the third sex. No genitals and, more importantly, not much in the way of sexual hormones, so non-standard emotions. Actually, I say it's unoriginal, but although I've come across a fair number of SF novels with non-standard sexes, I've yet to find one where the main character comes from one of these.

Some other ideas.

It's in the Southern hemisphere, just for the hell of it. As Sara Douglas points out, even Australian fantasy authors make the North cold and the South hot, so I wanted to be different. (Gene Wolfe is a worthy exception—some have speculated that Nessus is a future Buenos Aires.)
The main characters are brown-skinned; the evil invaders are pale and, just to annoy the Celt wannabees, red-heads. Again, not an original idea; I pinched it from Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books, where the Archipelagans are described as copper-coloured and the Kargs look pretty much like Vikings.
Polyandry is sometimes practiced because of the surplus of men. Land is held by women and worked by men; neuters tend to hold professional, military or governmental positions.
Because of the three sexes, the number three pervades the whole culture: they have three deities (except for the neighbouring monotheists), the land is ruled by a triumvirate and so on.
The existence of magical weapons means that warfare is conducted according to chivalrous conventions, like not vaporising city walls—at least until the Evil Celts turn up.
There are nomadic barbarians riding creatures not entirely unlike wargs, just because barbarians riding wargs are cool.
The hero is not going to be some gawky teenager; he/she will be middle aged, partly because I'm middle aged and partly because I want to screw up Campbell's Hero's Journey as much as I can.

Now all I need is the time to write the damned thing.