Nope: it's humanity's future.
And that doesn't mean the future's technology is mixed with the fantasy (that would be Science Fantasy instead); we mean that the technology is gone in the future, perhaps reduced to a medieval or renaissance level, and the fantasy setting is what's left.
The reasons for this may vary: perhaps some decades or centuries from now, the fairies and gnomes have decided to come out of the shadows, and are now living alongside humans. Perhaps the story is set in a post-apocalyptic world with mutants that resemble folklore creatures and radiation-induced superpowers akin to magic. Or maybe the time IS cyclic after all, as the Buddhists and Hindus have taught us, and at some point in the future the humanity will return to the times of King Arthur and Merlin.
Often a result of The Magic Comes Back, and frequently overlaps with Feudal Future; also compare Alien Fair Folk and Digital Abomination. May be the result of The Unmasqued World. May also involve Magitek. The setting may result in Humans Are Psychic in the Future, where humans end up becoming supernatural-y in one way or another.
When it's played as a plot twist, it overlaps with Earth All Along. Since such instances are common, there will be unmarked spoilers.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Bastard!! (1988) takes place in a post-apocalyptic future Earth where magic and monsters rule the land. The setting is a result of scientists inadvertently discovering supernatural forces and, in an attempt to harness them, awakening a destructive goddess who threw the world back into the Middle Ages.
- My Hero Academia has a supheroic Urban Fantasy variation of this. The story takes place in a future where 80% of humanity has manifested some form of superhuman ability called a "Quirk", which run the gamut from super-strength and flight to shape-shifting and mutations that cause people to take on the traits of animals. The exact time period is never given, but narration mentions that if not for the societal upheaval caused by the manifestation of Quirks, humanity likely would have colonized Mars by now.
Fan Works
- The Modern Age
: Implied by the ending of The End of Days (the final fic in the series) as following Sauron's defeat during Dagor Dagorath (during which Elves both alive and deceased join forces with the modern military of men alongside with the awakened dwarves) the resulting world features, among other things, Elrond being a representative at the United Nations on behalf of the Elves.
- Paradise (Slywit) goes into detail about Celestia and Luna's backstory — they were a pair of Earth Pony foals born thousands of years before the creation of Equestria, when humans still existed.
- Ruin Value posits that the entirety of the Equestria seen in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic grew out of the ashes of what was once the United States of America After the End and after magic returned, with the revelation that Luna, Celestia, and Discord are the products of genetic engineering.
- The Writing on the Wall: The twist at the end is that the seventy one-thousand-years old ruin that Daring Do and company are exploring isn't any sort of tomb at all, but a nuclear waste storage facility left behind by humanity. The titular writing isn't a curse, but a warning from the now extinct species that built it about the dangers within.
Film — Animated
- Onward: Inverted, as it's the past that used to be a fantasy. It was never really forgotten, but mostly deemed as an exemptable relic, except for originals such as Barley. In the end however, fairies or centaurs and manticores such as Colt and Corey are back to their old capacities, thanks to Barley's influence.
- Rock & Rule is set in a post-apocalyptic world with magic and demons, inhabited by humanoid mutant animals.
- Wizards takes place millions of years after a nuclear war has reduced all but a handful of human survivors to hideous mutants, with the rest of the Earth repopulated by the mythical elves, fairies and dwarves of old awakening from their ancient slumber.
Literature
- The prologue of The Age of Scorpius states that it takes place on Earth thousands of years in the future; following some vague apocalyptic event where Earth was ravaged by technology, the surviving humans developed magic based around the Western zodiac and reformed society centered around that.
- James Maxley's Bitterwood initially seems to be set in a fantastical past, with low-tech humans struggling against mighty dragons. In fact, it's the future, with the dragons being the descendants of genetically-engineered monsters made for humans to hunt after they killed all the natural animals. Unfortunately their human neocortexes made them clever enough to fight back, and eventually take over.
- The Death Gate Cycle has a nuclear war on Earth in its backstory, and its various fantastic elements such as fantasy races and magic are explained as mutants and quantum mechanics, respectively.
- The Dying Earth series is set in humanity's far future as their sun slowly fades in the sky, in a world populated by all sorts of arcane and dangerous beings, with humanity themselves reduced to isolated communities of selfish jerkasses.
- Empire of the East is set on a future Earth where people speak of the Old World of technology, where old bits of tech still show up, and where The Metric System Is Here to Stay. It turns out that The Magic Came Back as a side effect of preventing a nuclear Armageddon, thus producing the fantasy future of the New World.
- The Goblin Reservation takes place in a future where fantasy creatures like goblins and banshees exist simultaneously with aliens, time-travelers, and bio-mechanical pets.
- I'm Quitting Heroing has the Hero Leo Demonhart, who hides his identity as the only remaining Super-Soldier created by 21st-century Japan, and has survived over 3,000 years into a regressed Standard Fantasy Setting due to humanity's Forever War with the invaders from the Demon World.
- The Irregular at Magic High School is set in a future a century after magic was revealed to the world. Both Sufficiently Analyzed Magic and Superpowerful Genetics are a huge part of politics and everyday life.
- The Kate Daniels series is set in the near future, when magic is returning to the world and slowly supplanting technology. It has also brought the return of mythical creatures like vampires and werebeasts.
- The Locked Tomb takes place over 10 000 years in the future in a Solar System-spanning theocracy of Necromancers. Nona the Ninth reveals that the main divergence happened 20 Minutes into the Future, when the Genius Loci of Earth first granted magic to the man who would become the immortal God-Emperor.
- The Long Earth: The series is set 20 Minutes into the Future, as humans discover a technology that allows them to travel within a chain of alternative versions of the planet where things such as evolutionary processes or cosmic events went differently. This "long earth" is inhabited by alternative hominid evolutions with their own traits and quirks, and their appearances to humans throughout history are attributed to the development of myths about such beings as elves, trolls, kobolds, sasquatches, et cetera.
- Lord of Mysteries: As revealed late in the story, in about 2020, the oil digging operation in Chernobyl Dug Too Deep and provoked the restart of a Divine Conflict. Celestial Worthy gave various people a few subtle hints to prepare them as his potential backups and cocooned them for an unspecified amount of time, while almost everyone else died in the apocalypse. As more gods arrived, they've introduced magic and used the remains of the civilization in their Cosmic Chess Game. The cocooned plan got sabotaged and only three people were released in various time periods, taking over the bodies of recently deceased and becoming important figures while under the impression they were simply Trapped in Another World. The protagonist wakes up about 7 millennia after magic was reintroduced and eventually discovers it was Earth All Along.
- The Prophecy of the Stones takes place in a standard fantasy setting where magic and chivalry rule, but which is eventually revealed to be the Earth's future where the magical creatures came out of the hiding, but the techologies were regressed to Medieval level in an attempt to avoid wars (and the city Thaar, where the Big Bad resides, is actually Paris).
- Scrapped Princess: The setting looks like a fairly standard Medieval European Fantasy at first, but is actually a prison planet for humanity established by aliens and the rogue A.I.s that sided with them during the war.
- Septimus Heap at first appears to be a low-tech fantasy world with little relation to our own, despite mentions of real-world cultures such as Rome and Egypt. In the fifth book, the characters encounter modern technology including a submarine and an elevator, and mention legends of "men visiting the moon". In the seventh book, Septimus writes the date: 12,004. That book also ends with a quote of Clarke's Third Law. In the sequel series, a map shows the continents of Earth with a rise in sea level.
- Although the Shannara series' setting is implied to be future-Earth in the first book, with Allanon describing the Great Wars that destroyed human civilization and adding that when the survivors discovered mutants who had become shorter and adapted to live underground they named them dwarves after "a fictional race of the old days", The Genesis of Shannara definitively confirms that the series is set in the North American Pacific Northwest thousands of years After the End. In addition to Dwarves, gnomes and trolls are also mutated humans; elves make an appearance and there are still insane killer robots in remote places.
- The Wheel of Time: It's not relevant to the story and is mostly limited to early books, but there are occasional hints that the setting is the distant future of Earth (and its past, given the cycle of the Seven Ages). There are fairy tales of the giants Mosk and Merk warring with spears of fire that reached around the world and of Elsbet the Queen of All; an archaeological museum has a three-pronged star that radiates pride; and so on. Modern Earth might be the First Age, given the Second was a golden age of magic and technology and the books are set at the end of the Third.
Live-Action TV
- The Librarians (2014): A variant; "The Librarians and the Loom of Fate" shows an alternate timeline where Cassandra was chosen as the Librarian instead of Flynn in The Librarian in which magic came back to Earth in full force, including dragons and witches. Cassandra has become something of a sorceress herself in this timeline.
- The Shannara Chronicles is set on a world long After the End, where humanity has branched off into various other races, including elves, half-elves, dwarves, and gnomes.
Tabletop Games
- Shadowrun is a blend between Cyberpunk and Dungeon Punk, taking place in a future with futuristic technologies and megacorporations, but where magic also returned to our world on December 21, 2012.
- Warhammer 40,000 is Warhammer Fantasy Battle Recycled IN SPACE!. The game borrows a lot from traditional fantasy tropes such as orcs, elves, magic, evil demons, gods, and dudes in big armor fighting with melee weapons, but adds a sci-fi twist to everything. The setting, as the name implies, is stated to pretty much our universe but 40,000 years in the future.
Video Games
- The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble is set in a post-nuclear war city where humans coexist with mutants known as Bouzouks. While the human parts of the city are futuristic, the Bouzouks have a quasi-medieval society structure, and some of them can do magic. Moreover, the main antagonist of the game, a corrupt human government official, turns out to be possessed by the Beast, a Bouzouk demonic spirit.
- In the Guilty Gear universe, magic had replaced technology after an incident in 1999, when the Universal Will tried to manifest itself from the Backyard into Earth though electronic devices on a global scale, which led to its worldwide ban. To prevent total collapse of society, the Original's apostles taught the world magic, and over 150 years later, technology remains a taboo, with only one nation actively developing it.
- The world Harvestella takes place in contains unicorns, goblins, sirens, fairies connected to the seasons, and all sorts of magic. It is eventually revealed to be Earth's moon, terraformed by Earth's planetary DNA, and many of the magical creatures on it are revealed to be creations of the AI beings known as Omens who watch over the moon.
- The Little Tail Bronx series starts with the innocent Tail Concerto, which takes place on floating islands populated by dog and cat people called Caninu and Felineko respectively, with the only hint of anything greater being lost artifacts left behind by a precursor species. Then Solatorobo: Red the Hunter drops the bombshell that said precursors were humans of the Old World, who drove themselves into extinction after devolving into World War III eventually culminating in a mass-eradication event called "The Reset" in order to preserve Earth's integrity. Those floating islands? Leftover landmass from former continents of the world, and the Caninu and Felineko was Juno's attempt in making a new human-like species that purposefully had dog and cat DNA mixed within.
- The setting of Loom is said to be our world, in the year 8848 — that is, the 81st century of Earth, in the Age of the Great Guilds. The setting is more reminiscent of a medieval world, though, with Bobbin, the protagonist, casting spells with music notes and even meeting a dragon on his journey.
- Might and Magic is a Zig-Zagged case. The series takes place in a Science Fantasy setting where Precursors built planet-sized spaceships using a combination of technology and magic. However, the Kreegans disabled the Web of Worlds, cutting off each of the nacelles from each other and eventually causing the technology to fall into disrepair. Over centuries, each of the worlds devolved into a Standard Fantasy Setting, with their true origins lost to myth and only scattered amounts of Lost Technology remaining.
- The premise of Palia is that humans, having disappeared thousands of years ago, are now suddenly coming back to a world where magic (known as Flow, which has since been outlawed) shaped the land in their absence.
- The third Rock of Ages game reveals that the future of the world is for everything to turn into Wonderland, though it never elaborates upon the hows and whys of this revelation. But then, this is a silly game, so it's to be expected.
- A common setting of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise is a post-apocalyptic Tokyo decades (if not centuries) After the End that is teeming with demons, referring to all manner of creatures from Earth's religions and mythologies, and where the forces of Law and Chaos vie for complete domination.
- Warframe is set at least a couple of thousand years in the future, in the solar system, and while a lot of the inexplicable powers in the game can be handwaved by way of Clarke's Third Law, a lot of stuff to do with the Void — ranging from the existence of Duviri to the Man in the Wall — is fairly mystical.
- Xenoblade Chronicles 2: The world of Alrest consists of civilizations built on the backs of enormous Titans, who float through the interminably deep Cloud Sea. Come the endgame, it's revealed that the decaying remains of human civilization rest under the fluffy waves. The Cloud Sea is a massive nanomachine swarm that digests the ruins and recycles their material for those still living.
Webcomics
- Daughter of the Lilies is set in a ISO-Standard western-European fantasy, but the character's home city is within spitting distance of the ruins of Vienna, and a flashlight and some D-cell batteries are seen in an antiques shop. The main characters are a cave-elf, an orc, an elf, and a quarter-orc. Technology has regressed to the Medieval period, and Magic and God have come back since.
- The Dragon Doctors takes place 2,000 years in the future, after an ancient secret society of mages went public and caused the first of four "Breakings". The protagonists are magic-using doctors and one of their patients was a mage from the modern day who was betrayed and turned to stone by the first other mage she met, demonstrating the problems with the old masquerade and why it was broken.
- Out-of-Placers is strongly implied to be a Low Fantasy example of this. It takes place in a medieval world where humans live alongside several other sapient species and some very bizarre animal and plant life, but there is little to no magic. It is believed that humanity once was far more advanced, but nearly all history and scientific knowledge was lost in an unknown disaster a few hundred years ago. Pieces of modern technology keep being dug up, but strangely no evidence of the civilization that made them has been found. The main plot of the comic is set off by the discovery of a Transformation Potion-like artifact, but it is unclear if the artifact was magical or just technology far more advanced than anything previously found.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time presents itself as a magical, fantastical world before gradually revealing itself to be a post-apocalyptic Earth.
- Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Implied by "Cleaved", the Series Finale, in which the fantasy land of Mewni is combined with Earth, although magic itself has been destroyed by the queens.
- Thundarr the Barbarian: The series' intro describes a rogue planetoid narrowly missing the Earth. It's gravitational wake creates chaos that shatters the moon and sunders civilization. From the ruins emerge powerful wizards that tend to make slaves of the surviving humans. Thundarr is one such slave who broke free of his wicked masters, and goes Walking the Earth on horseback seeking other wizards to thwart and free their human slaves.
- ThunderCats (2011): Co-creator Dan Norton revealed that had the series made it to a third season, Third Earth — a planet where magic is abundant and the most powerful civilization is a society of humanoid Cat Folk stuck in Medieval Stasis — was eventually going to be revealed to be Earth in the far distant future, after Earth had drifted into Jupiter's orbit.