Fantasy Gun Control / Literature

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• Averted in various "fantasy-of-manners" series, which include firearms as a natural part of their post-Renaissance motif.
• Averted in the Polish fantasy novel Achaja where the invention and spread of rifles leads outright to an End of an Age. Such a revolution in the art of war creates a world where a mere peasant familiar with the basics of shooting can put the Master Swordsman down with no sweat.
• Eventually averted in Matt Stover's The Acts of Caine.
• In the first two books of Arcia Chronicles, guns and gunpowder raise no eyebrows (even though they are still too expensive for everyone but the nobles), but after the Time Skip, The Church finds a magic to remotely detonate all gunpowder in the vicinity, putting this trope into full effect.
• Averted in Artamon's Tears by Sarah Ash, where guns are used quite liberally by the people of Tielen, which allows them to conquer the rest of the world, which does have Fantasy Gun Control.
• Justified in Aurora (2015) because the ship's printers refuse to print guns on account of the fact it's a colonisation ship, so guns are neither needed nor safe. Of course a rebellion eventually foments and, with there being plenty of engineers aboard, the printers settings are overridden. This was anticipated by the now-sentient Ship, who made the printers design guns that would explode when used as a form of deterrence and punishment for their users, re-establishing this trope.
• In the Black Blade series, the gun control is literal — guns are acknowledged to exist, but are strictly outlawed in Cloudburst Falls. This is because they disturb the tourists — a Family enforcer in a suit with a gun looks intimidating, while that same enforcer in a Renfaire outfit carrying a sword is part of the scenery. The mob families all respect and obey this law (Most of their income is directly or indirectly connected to the town's tourist trade, after all), though this doesn't cut down on violent crime in the slightest.
• In Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword, the local magic, called kelar, can cause firearms to jam or explode en masse, which was a big part of how the desert nomads known as the Damarians held the modern Homelanders at bay. Also seen in the story, when a group of Homeland soldiers leave their guns behind when marching out to fight with the Damarians against a mutual enemy.
• Averted in The Book of the New Sun, which, granted, is Science Fantasy rather than fantasy. Handguns coexist with both swords and futuristic energy weapons.
• Played surprisingly straight in The Broken Earth Trilogy. The society of the Stillness is post-apocalyptic many times over, and is explicitly stated to have technologies including asphalt, electric lighting, and antibiotics. The third book reveals the sci-fi tech levels of the lost civilization of Syl Anagist. Despite this, shipboard cannons are described as a relatively new invention.
• Broken Ring: Zigzagged. Vraxor's country has cannons, but not firearms for some unexplained reason.
• In the alternate Earth of The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, mundane firearms (called "mechanicals", to distinguish them from wands) do exist, but in a far more primitive state. It's explained that wild elemental spirits are evidently attracted to explosives, and would cause the weapon to blow up if a gun used powder of greater than medieval-era purity.
• The Chathrand Voyages is a high-seas fantasy epic that quite thoroughly averts this one; all naval ships seen in the books (including the eponymous Chathrand) carry a full complement of cannon as their primary weapons regardless of national origin. Personal firearms exist but are still largely unknown; Sandor Ott, consummate Magnificent Bastard that he is, has managed to get his hands on a pistol, however, and makes plain his belief that they'll be in common use in a century or so.
• Played With in The Children of Man. Firearms are a recent invention in this world, and Merchant House Evensong has a monopoly on their manufacture. This makes securing Evensong's loyalties a major priority for both sides in the upcoming war.
• Zigzagged in Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber series. Gunpowder and other explosives don't work in Amber: the laws of physics are different there, and there aren't any local equivalents, leaving the natives to rely on bladed weapons and bows. And then subverted in The Guns of Avalon, when Corwin discovers a substance in a nearby Shadow world that can combust in Amber — and immediately brings mass quantities of the powder to Earth and has it made into ammunition, arming a strike force with modern automatic rifles. As it happens, the stuff doesn't combust on Earth (or on its native plane, where it's used as a gem polishing compound), so he gets some skepticism from the munitioners he commissions to make his ammo. In later books, it's noted that while blades are still the standard weapon, Amber maintains a tightly controlled cache of firearms and special ammunition for emergencies.
• The Cinder Spires: Downplayed. Guns exist but are an expensive weapon with a very marginal niche. The natural laws of the setting cause iron to rust within a few days of being exposed to the atmosphere, meaning that all iron needs to be coated in copper to not disintegrate. However, the gunpowder analogue is incredibly corrosive to copper, meaning that a gun barrel needs to be replaced after about fifty shots, so anyone who wants to get good with a gun needs to drop serious cash on spare parts. This, in turn, means that swords and ethereal gauntlets (essentially magic-shooting Ray Guns) are the preferred weapons of most people. However, guns are the preferred weapons against etherealists, who can manipulate the energies fired by gauntlets with their minds.
• In the Coldfire Trilogy, guns exist but generally are not used, as the psychological impact of the fae (which alters the real world based on the subconscious thoughts and fears of people — sort of, see its page for a better explanation) mean they have a nasty habit of not working properly, they're rarely used in combat.
• In John Ringo's Council Wars series, Mother, the AI that runs Earth, actively suppresses energy releases over a certain low threshold (except in very specified circumstances). Before the war breaks out this was just a matter of public safety, and no one really cared because their Clarke's Third Law tech rendered such limits irrelevant. Following the outbreak of war, and the resulting loss of the supertech to most of the population, it means that not only can they not use firearms, they can't use most forms of internal combustion engines or power production either.
• Cradle Series: Due to the fact that everyone practices the sacred arts, guns are pretty much completely unknown. It's mentioned offhand that there are a few small, weak sects that use cannons, but most people don't bother because Striker techniques are stronger and easier. However, "launchers" are the simplest type of soulsmith construct, where a Striker technique is forged into an object that can then be activated. Again, there are normally better options, but it's useful if you need a Striker technique that you wouldn't be able to produce on your own. And then Fisher Gesha begins experimenting with ways to make more complex launchers, where multiple techniques harmonize with each other and increase in power. They are extremely powerful, but also expensive and difficult to make.
• In Diana Wynne Jones's Dalemark Quartet, guns exist, but they're rare and expensive because few craftsmen have the skill to make them (the state of the art is roughly equivalent to our 18th century). South Dalemark armour is specifically designed with "exaggerated curves" to deflect bullets.
• Damsels of Distress: The world that the stories take place in take influence from westerns and mob stories. Guns are commonplace with the titular Damsels being in possession of a load of firearms. Most of the pistols are revolvers and there are lever-action and bolt-action rifles. There is also a heavy machine gun, which is one of the more recent developments in weapons technology.
• In Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels, magic makes ranged weapons (and weapons of mass destruction) possible, but everyone (in the aftermath of several very destructive wars) has agreed not to use it like that, because it makes war just too damned lethal.
• In The Darksword Trilogy, Magic is Life, while Technology is Death. E.g., a mage shapes a wooden chair from living wood, while technology kills the tree to make the chair. The Magocracy strictly enforces this rule, so the few rebel technologists hide in remote areas, their technology mostly stuck in the Dark Ages.
• The Dark Tower:
  • The series proves a good fantasy world can work with guns. Just replace Knight in Shining Armor in military aristocracy with The Gunslinger and keep a straight face. Then again, The Dark Tower isn't your run-of-the-mill fantasy.
  • It's actually more or less stated that the gunslingers are direct descendants of not just your standard fantasy knight equivalents, but All-World's equivalent of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The metal in Roland's guns is supposedly from Arthur Eld's melted-down sword. That makes it easy to "keep a straight face."
  • Also All-World, Roland world, was once a futuristic world not that different from ours, but there was some type of apocalyptic war that went down and now it's "After the End" besides other guns do show up from the time it's just not many are left anymore, and of those not many work (though some new ones do come in from other levels of tower from time to time.) Guns are rare simply because no one knows how to make or fix anything complex. The world has moved on.
• Averted in Death of the Necromancer by Martha Wells. Guns exist side-by-side with knights, swordplay, and magic (including that of the eponymous necromancer). The prequel, "The Element of Fire," has a quasi-Elizabethan setting, and the protagonist uses a wheel-lock gun in the first chapter.
• Delvers LLC: Something about the nature of the world makes gunpowder extremely unpredictable; it's easy enough to make, but prone to exploding at random. The protagonists experiment a bit and realize that it's contact with air that does it (they theorize that the invisible magical spirits in the air are the root cause, but they can't be sure), and make bombs by sealing gunpowder in airtight containers and having a fire mage use a basic fire spell to detonate them from a distance. Henry also creates a non-gunpowder cannon using his metal manipulation magic.
• Discworld averts and re-establishes this. The book Interesting Times showed that the Agatean Empire has early cannons, but they're unreliable novelties due to a lack of quality control, and the empire is isolationist and far away from where most of the series takes place. Then in Men at Arms it turns out that the Disc's greatest inventor came up with a revolver rifle, which briefly terrorizes Ankh-Morpork when it's stolen by an unhinged assassin. Something about the "gonne"'s singular nature and sheer killing power turned it into an Evil Weapon capable of possessing its wielders, and it actively enforces this trope by killing an artisan that was trying to duplicate it. When the thing is finally defeated, it is buried forever with a fallen guardsman so he can have a peerless weapon in the afterlife.
• Downplayed in The Divine Cities. Guns exist, but since the dominant tech culture is a nation lacking saltpeter, the weapons in City of Stairs are mostly advanced crossbows. Guns are fully present in the next book, thanks to Saypur starting to support the Continent's industry.
• Dragaera:
  • Played with in one of the books. It is revealed in Orca that, long ago, soldiers used weapons along the lines of magical flintlocks — they look like sticks, are one-shot, and are just as likely to amputate the fingers of the user as kill the enemy. Later, at the time of the Khaavren series, "flashstones" are used, which are sort of like a combination grenade/gun; they only allow two shots at best, and blow anyone hit by them to pieces. Thanks to advances in Magitek, though, by the time of the Taltos series, there is no need for anything like this, as you can simply draw on the Orb's power to attack an enemy.
  • In a book set later in the series' timeline it's mentioned that flashstones were discontinued after a sorcerer developed a counterspell that could remote detonate an opponent's stone (usually with fatal consequences for the opponent). This counterspell was area effect, and in its first public casting was applied to the entire opposing side at once. Ouch.
  • The absence of guns is probably more a case of Brust's personal fondness for swashbuckling over shoot-em-ups. Note that it's not just firearms that are excluded; even archery is apparently not much practiced in the Dragaeran Empire, as Vlad doesn't even recognize that the bows ("javelin-throwers") wielded against his unit in Dragon are weapons until they're explained to him. The fact nobody can believe Vlad could bag wild game without sorcery suggests that arrows aren't used in hunting either.
• Dragonlance:
  • Zigzagged. Guns do exist and can be made quite easily. The problem is, these guns have been invented by the minoi, or "tinker gnomes", whose racial hat is Bungling Inventor. As a consequence, even beyond the fact that they are a peaceful people who have little inherent use for weapons in the first place, their guns tend to be ridiculously overcomplicated, heavy, inaccurate, and prone to exploding. Furthermore, they can't sell these weapons to any other race (since "Gnomish invention" is interchangeable with "dangerous and unreliable piece of junk"), and no other race is inclined to develop them since science in general has become regarded as the province of fools, imbeciles, and lunatics, thanks to the minoi.
  • In one Dragonlance short story (Jeff Grubb's "Boom"), an unusually bright gnome actually discovers atomic fission weaponry. The leaders of the gnome immediately take his notes, lock them away, and exile him. He then turns to the dragonarmies of Takhisis; the wing commander refuses to countenance the idea of such a weapon (partly because it is far too impractical to use, mostly because the weapon is far too horrifically destructive) and sends him into slavery, covering up the weapon's existence forever.
• Dragonvarld: Although hand-held firearms still don't exist, cannons do in the books' universe. Edward gets them to fight dragons, perfecting highly maneuverable cannons that can shoot them from the air on his castle. It turns out humans developing cannons is what convinced some dragons they were now a dire threat, so they had to take control over human society secretly.
• Many magical beings, including most wizards, in The Dresden Files detest firearms, but also fear them. Harry Dresden is not like most wizards; even so, he prefers revolvers and shotguns over semiautomatics because his magic is less likely to screw with them.
• Subverted heavily in Everworld. 5 modern teenagers find themselves in an Alternate Universe full of ancient gods and medieval technology. There are several references throughout the books to situations where artillery or handguns would be very useful.At one point, they trade a modern chemistry textbook to the Coo-Hatch in exchange for attaching their metal that can cut through anything to one of the main characters swiss army knife. The Coo-Hatch use the technology to build a primitive cannon, which is used at the battle of Mount Olympus. And of course, later in the series, Senna uses her powers to bring in a small, heavily-armed group of followers from our universe, and they conquer several cities and kill a minor god, thus threatening all of Everworld.
• Averted in another, related, Stephen King novel, The Eyes of The Dragon. The mediaeval-style kingdom of Delain has gunpowder and cannon, though they are high-tech enough to be rare, but King Roland killed the eponymous dragon with a bow and arrow, which was a key point in the climax of the book.
• The Familiar of Zero:
  • Guns make an appearance on occasion being essentially an equalizer between nobles who use magic and plebs who cannot though only a few well-trained musketeers are ever seen using them.
  • There's a Vietnam-era rocket launcher and a WWII-era Zero fighter aircraft appear in the first season. Being from Earth the natives don't know how they work. Colbert learns how to make gasoline for the plane and the fact that the Zero fighter still has ammunition in the second season suggests that SOMEONE learned to make bullets. A Howitzer appears in Season 3.
  • Gunpowder weaponry are more prominent in the light novels, which isn't a surprise since they are based in magical 16th century Europe.
  • During his time in the army Guiche was tasked with using magic to keep matchlocks dry in humid condition, and flying airships are armed with heavy cannons.
  • The elves have even more advanced armaments.
• Yuriy Ivanovich's Father of Emperors:
  • Gunpowder works in the Magical Land the protagonists find themselves in, and they find historical evidence of firearms invented and then forgotten.
  • Centuries ago, a level 20 mage had approached a cannon-armed castle in the guise of a fleeting peasant and had cast the "solid air" spell inside the cannon barrels right before the besiegers entered cannon range. Attempts to fire the cannons caused critical failures, the castle was conquered and razed.
  • The protagonists lose a ship to the same tactic. Later they sink the hostile mages' vessel by ordering one allied mage to protect one cannon from being tampered with during the battle.
  • Another human from Earth made a career as a backwater Sanier kingdom's chancellor and introduced, among other things, artillery and riflemen companies to the army. The Sanier kingdom proceeds to curb-stomp the neighbors' armies and to cut bloody swaths into knight armies until the protagonists intervene.
  • An army detachment from Sanier is attacked by a "stone anaconda" guardian golem. As the golem ravages the infantry, the artillery opens fire on it regardless of "friendly fire".
  • Level 44 mages can cast a gunpowder detonation spell at about 50 meters, level 71 mages at about 5 kilometers of range. A mage at a level above 71 breaks the siege of the Vaderlon city and curb-stomps the above-mentioned Sanierian artillery and riflemen, complete with exploding ammo carts and infantry reduced to bloody bits.
• The Fires of Caldarus by David C. Simon has both cannons and flintlocks alongside magic, plus dragons.
• Averted in A Fox's Tale: The Warden's Daughter, set in a Fantasy Counterpart Culture very similar to the Holy Roman Empire. Muskets exist right alongside magic and have the same effectiveness as actual ones.
• Gate: The basic premise is modern army versus fantasy armies, and just how screwed the latter are in the face of rapid-firing guns. The only time the army even considers giving guns to the locals is when they work together to take out a dragon with anti-tank missiles; the difference in tech is so alien to the locals they see them only in a Freudian light.
• Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road features an adventure through multiple parallel universes having different laws of physics that prevent firearms from working, forcing the protagonists to rely on swords, bows, and sufficiently advanced mathematics (aka Magic).
• Averted in T.C Rypel's Gonji novels, the books are set in Europe near the Renaissance period so guns of all sizes are fairly commonplace. So much so that the samurai Gonji who Does Not Like Guns and initially stuck with his bow, eventually got a brace of pistols since he couldn't dismiss their firepower. In this series, guns pack a punch but most supernatural creatures can shrug off gunshot wounds or are even Immune to Bullets.
• A science fiction version of this in the early Gor series books. The author (John Norman) wanted the characters using primitive weapons only, so he had the alien Priest-Kings prohibit the inhabitants of the planet Gor from possessing firearms. Anyone who violated the rule suffered the "Flame Death" (inflicted Spontaneous Combustion). In a later book, their enemies, the Kurii, "got around this" by giving their human collaborators powerful air rifles. In real history, such weapons were used by Austrian troops in the Napoleonic Wars, and Lewis & Clark took one on their expedition across North America. The major advantage in the Kurii's case was that the air rifles had greater range and accuracy than the common bows and crossbows the Priest Kings permitted, but unlike gunpowder weapons were nearly silent. Which actually was the main reason the Austrians and Lewis & Clark used them — the early 19th Century version of a suppressed weapon.
• Arguably inverted in The Great God's War. Belleger has spent centuries devoting all its scientific efforts to first inventing and then perfecting firearms, which means that by the time of the story the kingdom's elite troops carry newly invented clip-loaded rifles but the kingdom is otherwise stuck in Medieval Stasis.
• In Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series, the heroes, who are all modern-day college students, introduce gunpowder technology to the fantasy world they've been teleported to. This prompts the natives to develop a Magitek version involving superheated steam and a spell that prevents it from expanding until the proper conditions are introduced by the pull of a trigger.
• Harry Potter:
  • Guns exist in the Muggle world; for example, the Muggle news claims escaped criminal Sirius is carrying one (he really has a wand, of course). While the Ministry of Magic has a department to study Muggle artifacts, no wizard (or even squib) is ever seen using or even carrying a gun. This may have something to do with it being set in 1990s Britain, where guns are far from commonplace even amongst Muggles (Britain has much stricter gun-control laws than, for instance, the United States). In the first book, Vernon threatens Rubeus with a rifle, something that would be unremarkable to an American reader but shocking to a British reader.
  • And, indeed, wizards don't even appear to know what guns are, in spite of the many wars that one must assume they noticed. The Daily Prophet has to explain them as "a kind of metal wand that muggles use to kill each other." Kingsley Shacklebolt also makes a comment to Arthur Weasley, incorrectly referring to them as "firelegs" instead of "firearms," implying that they're completely off the ordinary wizards' radar.
  • The Death Eaters despise Muggles, it therefore follows they'd not consider Muggle technology remotely worth using. The "good guy" wizards, though they do kill, aren't seen using Avada Kedavra; combined with the lack of interest in Muggle technology among most wizards in general it figures they wouldn't be interested in firearms.
  • Word of God is that the magical higher-ups do understand guns and other Muggle weapons, the Masquerade is in place because of it. They must, at least, have enough awareness of guns to name Ron's favorite Quidditch team (the Chudley Cannons) after them. Even though "A Muggle with a shotgun will usually beat a wizard with a wand" wasn't actually said by Rowling, it's still probably true. The supplementary material makes it clear that if it ever came to open war the magical world wouldn't stand a chance, partly because it came very very close in the past.
• Hero Of Thera: The laws of physics are slightly different on Thera, resulting in a world where gunpowder and most other forms of high technology (such as electricity) don't function, even when brought from other worlds where they do. When Hektor tries to ask about using different types of powder, the locals snap that everyone who has "read those stupid Amber books" has tried to mix up a new type of gunpowder and conquer the world. They never get it to work. Since the whole world is the setting of a multiversal game, Hektor assumes that the Game Master would strike down any attempts that get too close.
• How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: Downplayed. There aren't guns in this world, not because they don't know how to make them, but because due to how magic works, bullets are simply not as useful as enchanted arrows or spears: the amount of enchantment you can put on an object is directly related to its size and weight, and weaponry enchantment is nigh-required to break through defensive enchantment, so bullets, despite being fast, are too light to cause damage against foes. On the other hand, large-bore cannons are common siege weapons (though the shot can be intercepted by sufficiently skilled archers), wyvern knights use gunpowder barrel-bombs for ground attack, and cannons are even more useful at sea where the overwhelming presence of water suppresses other elemental magics.
• Played with in The Jackal of Nar by John Marco. The Lucel-Lor people have a druid-like religion which goes a long way in limiting their technological advancement to the equivalent of Dark Ages Europe but their magic is even more limited. Only the high priest has magic powers and he had them since birth so he can't spread it around, so they are at a huge disadvantage. Meanwhile the empire facing them is at Clock Punk mixed with Steampunk level of technology. They have kerosene-powered flame cannons that invert Video Game Flamethrowers Suck and have so much range and firepower that they can take out stone castles and have recently invented high-explosive rockets (think World War 2 Germany's V2 rocket). But somehow all their infantry are stuck at using swords, polearms and partial plate armor. Similarly another kingdom who's people are related to those of Lucel-Lor have galleys armed with cannons and are at stage similar to the Golden Age of Piracy but they still don't have guns for the individual warrior.
• Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute: Upon entering the mutable reality of the Dreamlands, Johannes is annoyed to find his Hand Cannon transformed into a sword. He bitterly speculates that by the time the collective unconscious of the place advances to incorporating archaic flintlocks, the waking world will have invented Death Rays and germ bombs.
• Journey to Chaos: This is a case of Playing with a Trope. In the magic world of Tariatla, gun use is absent despite it being an otherwise modern 21st-century world. Basilard states this is because guns are Awesome, yet Impractical. It's a lot of noise to no effect and in the time it takes to build one, he could train a dozen people to use Hand Blasts, which would be more effective but less costly (soldier wages = ammo expenses). The one place in the entire world where guns are as lethal as they are in real life is Ceiha, which lacks mana and is therefore lacking most fantasy tropes.
• There's an aversion in the first of the Kai Lung series of stories, where a bandit is shown armed with a handgun as a way of calling attention to the stories being about an extremely fictionalized Ancient China.
• Eventually averted in Jacqueline Carey's D'Angeline novels; in Naamah's Kiss, an alchemist invents the first gunpowder weapons. This is later enforced through wiping the memory of everyone who knew how they worked to stop them being used again.
• Last Dragon has the soldiers of Proliux using arquebuses in their conquest of the north.
• Averted in The Last Unicorn where guns are mentioned though not used. The book itself is a bit of an Anachronism Stew because John Henry is mentioned as well.
• Played with in The Long Earth. Guns don't exist outside the datum Earth during the first ten years or so after Step Day, not because there's anything special about gunpowder, but because iron can't step. It's possible to build guns locally, but the other Earths don't have the capacity for industrialization yet. Averted by the start of The Long War some fifteen years after Step Day. By that point, datum Earth and some of the more built up stepwise worlds have begun manufacturing firearms out non-ferrous materials like brass and ceramic.
• In the Liavek books, guns exist, but it's possible to use magic to keep them from working within an enclosed space.
• Averted in the Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett. Though the world is very much a 'magic is the science' environment, guns are known and commonly used. Clearly seen in ''The Eyes Have It''.
• Literal Fantasy Gun Control is in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen by H. Beam Piper. The priests of Styphon control the knowledge and production of "fireseed" (aka, gunpowder) to their political and economic advantage: supply fireseed to one side in a war and not the other, and the war is effectively over, so they have exercise something between extreme influence and out-right control of the entire world. Unfortunately for them, Calvin Morrison accidentally hitch-hikes from our world to theirs due to a ParaTime accident, and has full knowledge of the formula and method of production of a more powerful form than Styphon's House.
• Obliquely mentioned in The Lord of the Rings. Saruman's army uses blasting powder to breach the wall at Helm's Deep. Later, there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it mention of Sauron's forces blasting breaches in the Rammas Echor. In The Hobbit, Orcs and Goblins are said to delight in explosions and other such mechanisms. Going back several thousand years, Tolkien's early drafts of the tale of the Fall of Gondolin feature Morgoth's forces using what amount to APCs, but he removed these in later writings.
• Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen:
  • The series does not have guns, but it does have dynamite-like munitions whose outer shells are made of clay. These are quite nasty: In Reaper's Gale, a few Malazan soldiers armed with munitions manage to fight off and seriously injure Silchas Ruin, a badass Ascendant in his dragon form. They do that by using custom crossbows the bolts of which have the munitions attached instead of arrowheads.
  • These munitions are still tightly controlled since only the Morath warrior clans are able to manufacture them on a large scale and are picky on who they trade them to. When a Malazan army recruits an alchemist to make their own versions, the final products are very effective but are essentially biological and chemical weapons rather than pure explosives.
  • The Morath also keep the most powerful versions for their own use. While the standard munitions are extremely lethal, when an army's sappers get their hands on some stolen advanced munitions, they end up blowing an opposing army to smithereens in the opening action of a battle with a single salvo. It's no wonder that the Morath keep such tight control over these weapons.
• Averted in The Marvelous Land of Oz, as there is exactly one gun, though it is never loaded nor shot. The gun belongs to the Royal Army of Oz. The other armies have no guns.
• In Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire, all the societies shown are very technologically advanced, but projectile weapons are extremely rare. When you live in a spacefaring culture, and you spend a lot of time protected from the deadly vacuum only by a comparatively fragile metal shell, an uncontrolled high-speed projectile is a whole lot more dangerous than anyone you might feel the need to shoot at.
• Mistborn takes different approaches in its first two eras.
  • Enforced during Mistborn: The Original Trilogy. The Lord Ruler keeps the Final Empire in Medieval Stasis so he can get a second crack at the Well of Ascension after a thousand years have passed. He knows that he has the power to suppress a medieval populace and actively stamps out technology that could threaten his dominance. Gunpowder is mentioned explicitly as a technology that has been invented and quashed multiple times. The reasoning is that it takes a significant amount of time to train a corps of archers, and the more of them there are, the more likely that they'll be discovered. In contrast, an army of conscripts armed with bayoneted muskets can be made proficient in a very short time. With this trope enforced, ranged combat can only be carried out by archers and allomancers, and the Lord Ruler controls both.
  • Wax and Wayne goes the other direction, with Wax being a Wild West style gunfighter. He even gets a special revolver that can only be properly used by an allomancer.
• L.E. Modesitt Jr.:
  • In the Saga of Recluce, guns do work and some people know how to make them, but they're considered impractical because chaos mages can cause gunpowder to ignite from a distance, killing the would-be gunslinger. This is subverted both early on and late in the timeline. In Fall of Angels, the "angels" from another universe possess slug-throwers, rifles, and lasers, but those run out of ammo, energy, or break. In the later books, Hamor perfects a manufacturing process that allows bullets and cannon shell to be virtually immune to chaos magic. Other modern weapons make their appearance: anti-personnel mines, rocket guns, and even laser beams on a Kill Sat when sunlight focused by a lens (and Order) carried on a hot air balloon destroys Fairhaven
  • The Corean Chronicles, on the other hand, did feature firearms. The prequel trilogy stated that the Cursors tried to ban all rifles used by their subjects other than one standardized caliber — which didn't have the stopping power needed to hurt a Cursor unless the shooter was very lucky. This was to prevent the lower classes from developing large caliber rifles, and any kind of cannon so that they couldn't make a serious effort at rebelling. This effort fell apart shortly before their empire did (for totally unrelated reasons).
• The Monarchies of God pentalogy avoids this one, with primitive guns and swords coexisting seamlessly. The guns are only able to be fired twice a minute (three times if the soldier is particularly well trained) and have a limited range, so arrows of various sorts are still useful, and traditional cavalry and infantry are the bulk of forces.
• Mother of Learning: Subverted in multiple ways. First off, the recent Splinter Wars were in part caused by the proliferation of cheap firearms allowing untrained troops to at least be a problem for trained magic-users. This is part of the reason that magic-users are disdainful of firearms, considering them a brutish peasant weapon. But since on an individual level guns aren't really that dangerous compared to magic, there aren't many laws regarding them. When Zorian needs to defend himself in a hurry, he tries to buy a magical weapon or combat spell, but doesn't have the proper licenses. The owner of the combat shop just casually sells him a gun as an alternative, no license or registration required.
• In Robert Lynn Asprin's Myth Adventures series has dimension-hopping, high technology, and plenty of warfare, but no guns. The stereotypical mobsters carry crossbows in their violin cases, and others use magical wands. There are references to firearms, but for "demons" it's not a best option: in a random dimension, one clearly has better chances to get either crude bolts or Ley Line than ammo for the specific gun.
• The Night Land: Despite being set thousands of years in the future, humans don't use firearms, only the Diskos — a circular, spinning sawblade on a stick. The basic explanation is that knowledge of the workings of still-extant ranged weapons was lost ages ago; besides, the humans' philosophy is that if a monster is too far to be struck with a melee weapon, then it's better to avoid it rather than provoke it into attacking. The narrator also suggests that, perhaps, the laws of chemistry don't work the same way in the future. Overall, using ranged weapons is considered a waste of the limited "Earth-Current" energy on which most future human technology runs.
• Averted in the Non Compos Mentis series of novels by Yuriy Ivanovich:
  • Flor is an explosive compound placed similarly to plastic explosives and triggered by any incendiary spell.
  • Dragons use solid fuel pills to enhance their fire-breathing ability by chewing the pills and mixing the resulting powder with their naturally flammable saliva into an equivalent of napalm. The pills themselves make for a sufficiently powerful explosive, used e.g. to take out a warehouse by exploding the fuel pill crates.
  • Among surviving ancient Precursor artifacts the most numerous would be the "litanra". Similar to a crossbow in appearance, every litanra uses a clip housing small energy balls for ammo, and features single-shot and burst fire modes. Another artifact recharges empty clips within minutes, apparently using ambient background magic. Litanra charges explode on hit and pass magic shields. Without a litanra, charges can be simply ejected from the clip, flung around with telekinesis spells and triggered by incendiary spells.
  • Litanra charges are especially nasty due to both the unexplained principle of burst shots being exponentially more powerful than single shots and the invention of a spell to reflect litanra shots while discharging them as hurrican supercells.
  • The Precursors have installed upscaled stationary litanras on a strategic location to allow long-range bombardment of almost the entire continent.
• Garth Nix's Old Kingdom trilogy features a dichotomy between the magical Old Kingdom and the modern (early 20th century) world, Ancelstierre, separated by a wall. The closer one gets to the wall, the more modern technology falls apart — machine-made paper crumbles and firearms stop working. However, the border guards use guns to blow away zombie baddies who try to cross into the modern world from the Old Kingdom. Provided the wind doesn't blow from the north. Apparently whatever anti-technology aura the Old Kingdom possesses is blown around by the wind. The guards also carry magic swords as backup (unofficially), and some are even mages. Not just guns are controlled: anything using post-industrial revolution tech falls apart. This includes machine-made paper, and the flammable chemicals in gunpowder become inert. The inverse is also true, magic doesn't work much past the wall.
• Averted in One for the Morning Glory (where the early handguns are humorously referred to as "omnibuses").
• Older Than Steam thanks to Paradise Lost. After being badly beaten on the first day of the War in Heaven, the demons use unstable elements to create cannons and gunpowder to even the odds against the angels. Thus, the creation of guns precedes the creation of the Earth.
• In The Pillars of Reality, while a lot of the population doesn't have much more than medieval technology, the Guild of Mechanics has rifles and pistols. The various governments of the world can pay exorbitant fees for a small number of guns, but the Guild ruthlessly suppresses anyone's attempts to make their own.
• Thoroughly averted in The Powder Mage Trilogy. The action takes place in a time frame roughly equivalent to 18th century Europe which means that firearms are commonplace and wars are waged with cannons, artillery, and muskets. Not only that but the Powder Mages themselves require actual gunpowder to work their sorcery, which mostly revolves around Improbable Aiming Skills, as well as telekinetically manipulating and redirecting the force of exploding gunpowder.
• Downplayed in the Queen's Thief series. While the countries in the series are Fantasy Counterpart Culture versions of Ancient Greece and Persia, the setting has some late Medieval elements, including flintlock weapons. Eugenides notes in The Thief that they're primitive and considerably less accurate than crossbows. They are also heavily controlled by mundane law: Attolia has some handguns on hand for use by the Royal Guard, but no one has an assigned handgun. When the situation calls for a gun, the soldiers report to the armory and collect the weapon, then turn it in when they go off duty.
• Averted in The Relic Guild series by Edward Cox. Humans have mundane guns and have even crafted some themselves. Unfortunately for humanity, the vast majority of guns come from the Aelfir and they have the ability to enchant their firearms as well. Worse yet, humans only number 1,000,000 people and they are stuck in a Land of One City, while the Aelfir exist in the billions and have civilizations in many different dimensions.I
• Raymond Feist's The Riftwar Cycle enforces this trope strictly. The various trilogies span close to two centuries of Midkemia's history, yet at no point does gunpowder ever make an appearance. While magic does exist, it's rare enough that it doesn't figure into military tactics at all, making the absence of firearms even more apparent. Extends to naval forces as well, which seem to rely on archers and shipboard ballistae to conform to Napoleonic era tactics rather than the real-life pre-gunpowder tactics of grappling and boarding ships.
• In The Rising of the Shield Hero guns exist, but due to Role-Playing Game mechanics acting like laws of physics the damage a gun does is determined by the stats of the gun's wielder rather than the velocity and mass of the bullets. This means that guns are no better in a fight than bows and arrows, and there's only one country where anyone bothers to use guns.
• Averted and Lampshaded in Rune Breaker, Ere. Two characters use rifles and an ancient wizard complains bitterly about guns and grenades in the hands of non-wizards.
• In The Saga of the Bordenlands, by Argentina's Liliana Bodoc, the sideresios from the Ancient Lands (the equivalent of Europe in this fantasy world) have a technology equivalent to that of the 16th century, therefore they have arquebuses and cannons, which gives them a great strategic advantage over the Fertile Lands armies, less technologically advanced. In fact, when one of the heroes sacrifices himself and manages to blow up the powder store of the sideresios, rendering their firearms useless, they cower and decide to flee leaving the Fertile Lands.
• Brandon Sanderson:
  • Played with in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy. In the third book we find out that gunpowder does exist, but the Lord Ruler suppressed knowledge of it since it could allow for the creation of large rebellious armies that needed little-to-no training.
  • It is then averted in Wax and Wayne, which is a fantasy equivalent of the Wild West a few hundred years later. Aluminum guns and bullets that can't be affected by magic, specialty guns with entirely internal triggers and safeties that can only work for certain types of mistings, new combat counters for mistings that have arisen in the gun age, and even specialty anti-misting bullets that exploit those anti-gun counters.
  • Averted in "Sixth of the Dusk". The protagonist is from a culture roughly equivalent to Polynesia post-European contact: a stone age culture that's starting to assimilate technology from somewhere in the 1800s. He himself doesn't use guns, but they do. They're enough to kill the theoretically unkillable Nightmaws and drive off the Shadows Beneath from a ship.
  • Played with in "Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell". Guns and gunpowder exist, but since kindling fire is one of the three Berserk Buttons for the thousands of undead Shades wandering the forests, people don't use gunpowder unless they have no other choice. Silence sets up a trap with a keg of gunpowder to exploit a loophole; the Shades will attack the one who kindled the flame first, so she makes it so that her targets accidentally step on a firestarter and blow themselves up. The Shades kill everyone who survived the blast.
  • Averted in the Alcatraz Series. The Free Kingdoms don’t typically use guns, due to finding them “primitive.” Alcatraz explains this as being because swords have been subject to as much improvement in the Free Kingdoms as guns have in the Librarian-controlled nations, and guns never really caught on.
    • Alcatraz also mentions that Smedry talents and other supernatural abilities tend to be disproportionately effective against things with lots of moving parts, making guns less than practical to use against Smedries.
• Guns aren't specifically mentioned in Pamela Dean's The Secret Country books, but high tech items you bring from the earth dimension tend to turn into their medieval equivalents in the Secret Country, e.g. a flashlight becomes a lantern, and a digital watch becomes its 15th-century equivalent. One presumes that if you brought a gun it'd turn into, say, a bow and arrows.
• Averted in Septimus Heap, where a gun made out of silver plays a major role in the first and third books.
• Shadow of the Conqueror: The Magitek of the setting can be used to produce shotspikes, the local equivalent of firearms, which function like compact and upgraded versions of Automatic Crossbows. There is, however, literal Fantasy Gun Control, as Dayless forbade the common people from using such powerful weapons.
• The Shannara series by Terry Brooks plays this straight for a while, with no firearms in the first twelve novels. Beginning with Tanequil, the series averts the trope by skipping directly from swords and longbows to ray guns. (The Genesis of Shannara prequels are another matter; they take place during the late 21st century in the U.S. and have everything from gun-equipped sport utility vehicles to nuclear weapons.)
• A gun is one of the undead magician Skulduggery Pleasant's favourite weapons. It's an old-fashioned revolver, matching his sense of style. An old Necromancer adept uses a flintlock in one book, and in a memorable scene in Dark Days where a group of assorted supernatural villains pull machine-guns rather than magic on the heroes. The books still have some fantasy gun control... it seems some sorcerers consider them crude.
• Guns and explosives exist in the universe of the Soldier Son trilogy. In this universe, iron kills magic, making the Gernians' guns a very effective weapon against the plainsman mages.
• A Song of Ice and Fire has no guns, although the Westerosi do seem to have invented a kind of ersatz Greek Fire in the form of wildfire (even this is at least partly magic). Something suspiciously similar to gunpowder is used by Far Eastern entertainers for fireworks and fire shows. Melisandre carries a small amount of the stuff for spicing up R'hllorian rituals, but is, most likely, unaware of the powder's potential military usefulness.
• Averted in Tales of the Branion Realm only in that naval ships are mentioned to have cannon, in two books set 250 years apart — you'd think that the technology would have percolated onto land by that point, but it hasn't. On the other hand, Seer Archers with the prophetic ability to See where their arrows will land are more accurate than any gun of the period could possibly be.
• In Tales of the Otori, firearms are rare curios brought to the Three Countries by Western traders. Takeo sees their devastating potential and, upon gaining power, outlaws their import and takes pains to ensure that nobody outside his regime gets access to them. This becomes a source of conflict in the sequel The Harsh Cry of the Heron when a general of the greater Empire wants in on the secret.
• Justified in The Tide Child trilogy by R.J. Barker, humans of this setting should be at the Age of the Sail level of technology. However the world they're on is a Metal-Poor Planet and also appears to be deficient in many other materials as well. This lack of resources goes a long way to stunting their technology. Instead of a brace of pistols, a sailor here will be carrying many smaller crossbows with stone-tipped bolts. which has much the same function.
• In The Three Worlds Cycle two of the Ambiguously Human races are extremely advanced in certain technologies. Additionally two parts of the series are sent centuries after the first book and humanity developed an industry out of making combat MiniMecha that's based on Magitek. However these "clankers" use catapults and ballistic, this is especially eye-opening since gunpowder-based explosives was commonplace even before the Time Skip. These explosives were uses for mining.
• In Diana Wynne Jones's The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a parody of the fantasy genre, it's enforced on most tours. Gunpowder usually fails to explode, unless it's part of an ancient gun like a musket or flintlock pistol.
• Played with in The Traitor Baru Cormorant: gunpowder is commonplace, but it's known as "rocketpowder" because in this setting rockets are far more widespread and advanced than guns, especially in the hands of Falcrest. The Oriati Mbo, who invented rocketpowder, are shown to be pursuing gun technology in the second book: first as experimental dromond-mounted cannons (which bounce right off of Falcrest's copper-sheathed warships), and second in blunderbuss-like "pistols" supplied to the anti-Falcrest Canaat insurgents (which are described as close-range terror weapons more frightening than effective). In short, the "gun control" is that guns aren't useful enough to adopt yet — when Falcrest wants a lot of people dead from long range, it wheels out hwachas instead.
• The Traitor Son Cycle is generally a medieval fantasy setting, complete with knights and dragons, but one of the latter has clearly gotten tired of that and is slowly introducing gunpowder and guns into Alba. It's also implied that such weapons are already known elsewhere. Gun technology eventually plays a major role in the Red Knight's company.
• In V. Zykov's War for Survival series of novels, a whole city is transposed into a Magical Land. The humans liberally use firearms from the city's police and army compounds to wage war both against the world's inhabitants and in the city. As firearms are either underpowered or downright useless against some opponents, the city dwellers begin to resort to the arcane and divine magic which has awakened in some of them.
• David Weber's Bahzell series don't have guns until a short novella has Wencit use magic to summon help from beyond. Bringing a pair of US Army troops (they were US Marines. Specifically: A Gunnery Sgt and a Corporal) in a Stryker gives people who see it ideas. And averted in his Safehold series where culturally the whole planet is in stasis, but cannons of varying sizes are commonplace, and then the spirit of a long-dead Interstellar naval officer arrives in a cyborg body and teaches them about rifling.
• In V. Zykov's Way Home series of novels, gunpowder has been invented long ago. The invention was forgotten as an Area of Effect gunpowder-exploding spell was developed, rendering all firearms (personal to vehicular) moot. Averted later as the protagonists encounter unidentified ships carrying cannons and a ship-ranged counterspell, preventing mages from both detonating the ammo chamber and from destroying loaded cannons.
• Averted in Weavers of Saramyr, rifles are common and the main weapon of the stories. Practically everyone knows how to use a gun, even women of nobility are trained in its use at an early age. It reaches a point where swords only see play in desperation battles against Aberrant beasts and heavy casualties for their users are to be expected.
• In The Wheel of Time, black powder exists but is used solely by the Guild of Illuminators for fireworks, which are sold at astronomical prices with many dire (and often sensationally untrue) warnings against ever trying to open them. Mat Cauthon uses fireworks tactically a few times, then jury-rigs them into bombs in Knife of Dreams, and finally partners with a rogue Illuminator and the Crown of Andor to manufacture the first cannons, which are used to devastating effect in the Last Battle.
• Averted in Barbara Hambly's The Windrose Chronicles. Handguns are not uncommon, and anyone expecting to go up against wizards with one has magic-nullifying runes carved on theirs, so it doesn't end up exploding in their hand.
• The Witcher generally plays the trope straight, but it's referenced in Season of Storms that Ortolan had developed firearms as one of his many pet projects, which he would abandon as soon as the next idea distracted him. One of the weapons he developed was an artillery piece that was described as Cool, but Inefficient by the person assigned to test it for him. The video games add grenades to the repertoire of Witchers, showing that gunpowder at least has become somewhat viable.

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