The interesting part is that as he was a linguist, he created artificial languages for his settings, and with Tolkien, who Barks is often compared to, it’s challenging to discover whether he started setting-first, or created the setting as a vehicle for his constructed languages. Barker was essentially every single teen dungeon master, myself included, with dozens and dozens of marbled composition books with all kinds of detailed notes on their settings. Barker, a professor of Indian and Middle Eastern studies who was a white Midwesterner who converted to Islam and changed his name to Mohammed Abdul Rashid (before weebs and Japanophilia, the culture nerds tended to obsess over most was the Middle East, India, and Persia, just ask Harold Lamb, John Milius, or even Lovecraft, who gave himself the “Arab name” of Abdul Azhared and wrote “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath”). Artists tend to make it look vaguely like precolonial South America, as their overly busy ornamentation seems to be visual shorthand in the western mind for “culture that is truly alien and wildly divergent.” It led to impossibly stratified, priest-ruled cultures where social standing had to be factored into everything, more like precolonial India. That’s the world of the Empire of the Petal Throne, an earth colony that reverted to barbarism when it was sucked out of the planet’s orbit 40,000 years ago and into a dimension with vastly different physical laws. Talislanta, Skyrealms of Jorune, heck, even Synnibarr, the Uwe Boll of this subgenre) follow the blueprint of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books, in that it usually is a setting of impossible antiquity that at one point was starfaring but reverted to barbarism, so a feudal society is surrounded by alien artifacts and superscience they barely understand, with ruins of 20,000 years and so on. Nearly all “weird and different” tabletop settings (e.g. As for the setting itself, it’s often fascinating to me how divergent thinkers tend to diverge alike.
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