Well now that you put it that way... lol This is the best. Agreed! It took LOTR to get me to see the appeal of fantasy even though I've been a huge scifi fan for nearly all my life. haha I guess I was hardheaded or something. What a surprise.
This link seems pertinent to this discussion. 10 great books you didn't know were science fiction or fantasy: http://io9.com/10-great-books-you-didnt-know-were-science-fiction-or-599469515
How does "Fantasy" not require technical knowledge? You may not need modern technical knowledge, but you sure need a whole lot of medieval technical knowledge. Which I daresay is a lot harder to research and understand in this day and age. And how is life experience not applied to "Fantasy?"
I thank you kindly for this list, downloading as we speak. I think, if anything, the idea that Fantasy requires no life experience is inherent in its perception, not its autonomous reality. Stripped of it's clothing (the props and cues that make us know that something belongs to this or that genre) all storytelling has the same fundamental skeletal structure. A well written story is a well written story regardless of what costumes it wears, and the same clearly holds true of a poorly written story. Humans seem to have a need to categorize and label things to make them easier to the think about. There is a species wide discomfort with the idea that divisional lines are arbitrary, fluid, and nearly always meaningless. The Western zeitgeist has taken Fantasy and put it into a box (where it doesn't fit) and said, "You are for children. Trivial, juvenile, masturbatory." That same zeitgeist then turns on the TV to watch "You won't believe I survived this horrific event!" complete with actual live footage so shocking and grizzly that it actually induces nausea, and pretends that it's not porn because, "No, look, the porn box clearly says boobies and peepees." These boxes limit the perception of things as they actually are, their autonomous reality, and imposes on them a subjective reality (as is oft stated by [MENTION=18889]Steerpike[/MENTION]), which is sold as an objective reality, yet another box in which things really don't fit.
Some of those books fall into the category of magical realism, which is a little different from fantasy. I know, I know, it's sometimes an arbitrary distinction, but I still thought I would point it out.
No, I think it's a very valid thing to point out, and I agree with you. Not all cultures embrace all genres with the same joy. Those cultures that were heavy hitters during the Industrial Revolution are the same cultures where Science Fiction is most fondly embraced. Fantasy as we think of it today is not something all cultures are comfortable with, particularly those where theosophic ideation is very important. In these cultures, my own Spanish culture for example, Magic Realism is much more fondly embraced and serves as the equivalent of Fantasy because it has a tendency to less offend the delicate comfort bubble that wraps the epistemology of religion. It's also embraced here because there is a tendency in Magic Realsim to ask the reader to sympathise with a particular cultural construct that the culture holds dear, though it may be difficult to understand from an outside POV.
Yeah, it is arbitrary. Magic realism is fantasy by any reasonable definition you can really apply to 'fantasy.' More like, it is the name used to refer to a subset of fantasy that the person applying the label considers 'literary' and doesn't want to call fantasy
Actually, it gets back to the fact that genres are little more than marketing tools. So, if I want to distinguish my book from fantasy, get it to stand out more, I highlight some aspect of it that doesn't quite fit the fantasy label and call it something else, like "magical realism". There's nothing wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with pointing out why you might consider a particular work to be more of one genre than the other. I conceived my first novel attempt as part of a historical, but when it was finished, although it was set in well-researched historical contexts, it was much more about one particular family (3 generations), so when I tried to get it published, I called it a "family saga".
Yes, I think that's true. But putting aside the publishing categories, for purposes of discussing the nature of the fantasy genre and its merits or lack thereof, I think magic realism falls squarely within the fantasy category.
Magical realism is a subgenre of fantasy and, to the best of my knowledge, always has been. I simply don't see how a novel that qualifies as magical realism can not fall under the umbrella of fantasy. It's like saying cyberpunk and space operas aren't sci-fi. Frankly, I have always felt the term "fantasy," as a genre, is much too broad and burdened with too many misconceptions, many of which I've watched play out in this very thread. For marketing purposes, publishers and writers would be wise to distance themselves from the term and transition into something more specific, such as "urban fantasy," "magical realism," "high fantasy," "supernatural romance," or any number of other subgenres. (And I think this is what EdFromNY is saying above.) Any story with a few drops of magic, a ghost in the attic, or a werewolf on the prowl gets tossed into the fantasy bin (and rightfully so) but, for some absurd reason, the average Joe/Jane erroneously leaps to the conclusion that "all fantasy = high fantasy." Guy 1: "Hey, I heard you're writing a book. What's it about?" Guy 2: "Well, it's a fantasy novel about-" Guy 1: "Oh, so it's got wizards and swords and stuff? That's kinda cool... I guess... if you're into that sorta thing." Guy 2: *facepalm* Conversations which begin like ^this^ are why I don't write "fantasy"... even though I do. Some bookstores I've seen already break fantasy down into subgenres. There, you won't find George RR Martin and Stephanie Meyer next to one another on the shelf. They both write fantasy and both fall under "M," but Twilight would be filed under "romance" and ASoIaF under "high fantasy," because they have almost nothing in common.
There is a subtle difference between magical realism and fantasy. A work of magical realism has fantastical elements, but the work is otherwise set in a realistic environment. The fantastical elements are subtle. Take One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for example. One of the characters lives to be around 140 I believe, and there is mention of flying carpets as well. But these things happen in the background and aren't the focus of the story, and the author never draws attention to them. Of course, this is just my definition. There are sub-classifications within magical realism. For example, the magical realism of Kafka is different from that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I still don't see how that isn't fastasy. Not all fantasy has to be in-your-face with its magical and/or supernatural elements. I understand the differences. My point is that one is a subcategory of the other. To put it simply, "all magical realism is fantasy, but not all fantasy is magical realism." That is how I see it. I think where we differ is in our definition of "fantasy," not our definition of "magical realism." I don't believe the fantastical elements have to be front and center for a work to be considered fantasy. They need only be there. But, as has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread, genres (and subgenres) are very flexible.
I don't agree with this. There are fantasy novels that have no magic and are set in a realistic environment, and other fantasies that have magic present only subtly and are otherwise set in realistic environments. With respect to the latter, they'd fall squarely in your definition of magic realism, but they're called fantasy and shelved with it. I don't see the distinction, because it doesn't seem to play out in reality. I think it is a distinction without a real difference, but used to shelve books in certain areas.
Magic Realism has defining features, but it is without a doubt part of the spectrum of Fantasy in the same clear way that a haiku and a quatrain are both part of the spectrum of poetry.
According to Wikipedia, You could argue that in magical realism, the fantastical element(s) aren't the primary plot element(s). Here's what one professor has to say about it (also from Wikipedia): For the record, I don't care what genre a book is placed under. I just wanted to put some of the definitions of magical realism out there.
I don't think the distinction by the professor works, Thirdwind. There is a lot of fantasy where the supernatural or magical is part of every day occurrence and not considered problematic or unusual, and also where that tension between the natural and supernatural doesn't exist. This looks to me like someone who is trying too hard to come up with an academic justification, presumably to elevate magic realism because they don't like the association with fantasy, when it just doesn't exist. I think you can come up with definitions of magic realism that work fine as a subgenre of fantasy, but you can't come up with a reasonable one that takes magic realism outside of the umbrella of fantasy. So when someone presents a list of fantasy books, saying that some of them are magic realism has no bearing on the discussion of whether fantasy books exist of a certain calibre, because magic realism books are fantasy, even if you further define a subgenre for magic realism.
What do you guys think of alternative history? For instance, what would the world be like if the Axis had won World War II? No magical elements at all, nothing overtly fantastic, but I would consider that a subgenre of fantasy.
I would consider it a subgenre of historical fiction. It has no fantastical elements, and that for me is enough to not put it under the fantasy genre.
Recently finished "Red Country" by Joe Abercrombie in which it's alot like this "alternative it reality". His book was top on the fantasy charts so I picked it up, read it, set it down and said "....how was that fantasy?" No magic, no dragons (real ones), no non-human races, no setting explanation. It was a good book, but hardly the great best sellers I was expecting. It was incredibly disappointed since it didn't FEEL like fantasy to me. The wild west...with swords and arrows. That's what it was.
Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is an alternative historical novel. It posits that the isolationists within the Republican Party joined forces to stop Wendell Willkie in 1940 by nominating Charles Lindbergh, who could have conceivably been popular enough to defeat Franklin Roosevelt in the general election. In the novel, that is what happens, preventing the US from being drawn into the war in 1941. There are others out there as well, but that's the one that jumps out at me. Alternative history novels, if they're to be done well, require at least as thorough a knowledge of history as historical novels do, since what is altered has a lasting effect on what else follows. In this regard, I felt that Roth did well at first, but then decided he couldn't live with the result and spent the last quarter of the novel trying to force history back on track.
Not having read the entire thread (11 pages!) Here are my two cents why new writers are doing fantasy: 1. The previous paradigm of "cool," science fiction, is somewhat in a rut, because it cannot apprehend the future well anymore. Our world changes way too quickly, that by the time the book is out, it's already dated. Moreover, the coming singularity event promises a post-human experience utterly unlike anything we can understand. 2. If science fiction is exhausted with the future, then writers whose antenna is hyper-tuned will sense this and move to the next available genre, fantasy. But recent books show that they are smudging the boundaries between the two. 3. By losing faith in the future, writers develop a sense of nostalgia with alternate histories, which is a nice way of saying that if only the past was different, then perhaps we wouldn't be in this quandary. 4. Many writers are not from Anglo-American backgrounds - which makes them more concerned with politics than future speculation. Basically writers from heretofore marginalized countries have insider views of other countries, and develop or join genres not dominated by straight white males (space age scifi, at least). 5. The world has become more science fictional, encouraging writers to step away from the direction of neoliberalism, and towards a wholly different reality.
