Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s theme is Settings I’d Like to See More Of (Or At All).

Well, first, because my husband has been talking about it, more set in Mongolia during the era of the Huns. There were a lot of fascinating things happening there, and at least here in the US we don’t see much fiction set during that time. It’s possible it exists but hasn’t been translated. One notable exception is the trilogy beginning with The Tiger’s Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera, which my husband just finished and has been poking me to read!

I’d like to see more post-climate-apocalypse fiction about surviving the world as the climate changes. I don’t like zombies, so a lot of the standard apocalypse fiction is not to my taste. Disease-based apocalypse just aren’t that interesting to me, though they don’t give me nightmares like zombies do. (I’m not someone who jumps at shadows, but zombies trigger something in my subconscious that flips out while I’m sleeping!)

I always enjoy finding books set in Baltimore, or the wider Maryland area. I love reading books in which I can personally recognize some of the landmarks. That’s about the only thing that got me through Clock Dance, which is absolutely not my normal kind of read. (It was a Barnes & Noble Book Club pick, back when I didn’t have a D&D game on Tuesdays!)

Similarly, anything set in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon specifically, since that’s where I grew up. Every time I run across Eugene mentioned in a book (which is always unexpected, and happens far more than you’d think!) it makes me grin.

I want to see more dragons coming back to present-day. There’s plenty of dragon-shifter romances, but I mean like Smoke Eaters and The Great Zoo of China, where the dragons suddenly come back and modern society has to deal with them. I wouldn’t mind seeing intelligent, non-animalistic dragons come back, that could be interesting.

I don’t read a lot of hard sci-fi, but one setting that always intrigues me is Generation Ships, or spaceships that are huge enough to be worlds unto themselves. The Diabolic and Dust are both examples of this, and so, apparently, is A Memory Called Empire, which I have yet to read but really want to. Bonus, the author is local! Tor has a roundup of this particular setting, so I now have more books to read!

More underwater settings. Whether that’s mermaid kingdoms, cities built in domes underwater like Bioshock, humans genetically modified to breathe underwater, I don’t care. Just get us in the oceans!

Honestly, just things set in countries we don’t typically see things set in. Often this means written by people from those countries and translated, which is even better. The Hangman’s Daughter, (and its sequels) set in Germany in the 1600s, is a great example of this, but more far-flung would be even better. Madagascar? Taiwan? Nigeria? Guatemala? Peru? Finland? I don’t read much contemporary, so historical (or fantasy!) written in those settings would be my preference.

So here’s one I have seen very little of, but watching Legally Blonde 2, and reading Red, White, and Royal Blue recently made me think of: I want to see more fiction set in the halls of Congress. Give me characters who live and work in the White House and the Senate. It doesn’t have to be political intrigue – I don’t want Bourne-style John Grisham stuff. I want politicians living their lives.

I could only come up with nine this week – this was a really difficult topic! I have such wide-ranging tastes in books that I don’t have too many settings I’m really committed to. I can’t wait to see what other people came up with this week!