I wrote a Fantasy novel by accident. That’s not an easy
accident to have; not like tripping over your own feet or walking into a glass
door. It’s not that I was trying to write something else and it turned into
Fantasy. I wasn’t aiming for any genre in particular – I just wrote the story.
It was only when I had to pitch the book to agents and publishers that the
penny dropped. I worked down the list of literary genres looking for the best
fit and ended up at Science Fiction and
Fantasy.
And that’s when I got confused.
What kind of SFF novel is The Shining Ones? It’s set in the modern world so it could be Urban
Fantasy, but half the story happens in the frozen wastes of Greenland so the
urban label doesn’t really fit. It’s also set in the near future and has
supernatural elements in the form of angels, but incorporates some science
fiction genetics, so is it Science Fantasy? Or perhaps Alternative World
Fantasy?
What about the use of ancient mythology – does that make it
Mythic Fantasy? Some of the characters develop superpowers, so it could be a
Superhero Fantasy, but then again, magic isn’t the main focus (as it would be
in High Fantasy) so perhaps it’s Low Fantasy. Or is it Magic Realism?
Speculating on Reality
I take a hard-line on this: as far as I’m concerned, all fiction is fantasy. It’s called
fiction for a reason – it’s made up. When you enter the world of a story,
you’re entering the world of imagination. It may resemble the real world, but
it’s not real. Imagination and reality are different things, although the
distinction may not be as obvious as we think.
But when we’re talking about genre, fantasy means something
else entirely. So what is Fantasy Fiction?
Fantasy is a sub-genre of Speculative Fiction, which also includes Science Fiction, Horror,
and Magic Realism. The spec fiction
label isn’t used much now, unless you’re talking about literary works, so most
of the time it’s just called Science Fiction and Fantasy (or SFF). Fantasy is defined as stories that
include magic and supernatural elements. It’s similar to Science Fiction, but
in Fantasy the world of the story isn’t expected to be scientifically feasible.
Not now, not ever.
According to Best Fantasy Books, there are 58 subgenres (and
growing) of Fantasy. It’s all getting very complicated, with endless variations
spinning off from the main genre categories, which then spawn more iterations
and cross-fertilisations. Hence my confusion.
This interminable hair-splitting doesn’t say much about the
Fantasy genre. It’s more a symptom of the mind’s tendency to dissect and
categorise and put things in neat little boxes. But regardless of subgenre, Fantasy
is fantasy. When you pick up a Fantasy novel, you know what you’re going to
get: a story where things happen that could never happen in real life.
And this is where I start to get picky.
Fantasy fiction exists in contrast to Realism – that is, stories that are set in a world we recognise as
this world, a.k.a. the real world. Some of the things that happen in a Fantasy
novel could never happen in real life, but the stuff of reality-based fiction
could, and does.
Realism seems to imply that we know what the real world is.
We know the kinds of things that happen and understand the rules of the world.
If a story following the usual rules of reality suddenly breaks those rules, we
tend to lose interest. We’re thrown out of the story and become aware of the
fiction. We stop believing the story.
But here’s my question: do
we really know what reality is? (Clue: no)
Reality is stranger than we think and the line between our
imagination and what passes for the real world is fluid and ever changing.
So-called ‘realistic’ novels are nothing like reality. If you were to write a
true ‘Realism’ novel it would make no sense, the narrative would ramble all
over the place, the protagonist would spend most of his time repeating the same
stupid mistakes and never learning from them, only to die and be forgotten.
Nobody wants to read that.
On Why Do Writers Write? cabrogal reminded me of this when
he commented:
“Herman Hesse once wrote a story called The Prodigy. A young man grows up and acquires knowledge, skills, insights and a complex, interesting personality. He is obviously going places. But he just falls in a river and drowns. End of story.”
We want fantasy. We need it. We’d go mad without it. But
it’s dangerous to assume we know where the line should be drawn between reality
and imagination. And that brings us to Magic Realism.
Real Magic
Reality has never made much sense to me. Perhaps it’s
because I’m a mystic, but I never could get along with conforming to the
consensus reality. There are too many logical holes for me to be comfortable
living inside a box built of self-deception. But then, it’s through those holes
that the light gets in…
My tenuous grasp of so-called reality means that I’ve always
enjoyed reading stories that blur the line between reality and imagination. I
especially enjoy books that leave you guessing or deliberately confuse the
boundaries of the mind. In other words, Magic
Realism.
Two examples: The
Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and More
Than This by Patrick Ness. One of these books is a Fantasy novel, the other
is Magic Realism. Why the distinction? The
Angel’s Game is literary, therefore magic realist and not Fantasy. More Than This is YA, therefore sold as
Fantasy, even though it’s clearly magic realist. I couldn’t care less which
category they fall into; both are brilliant.
Magic Realism deserves a post all to itself, and this one’s
getting rather long, so I’ll get to the point:
Magic Realism isn’t really speculative fiction because it’s
about a particular view of reality. These stories blur the boundaries in order
show the real world from a subjective perspective. Reality is revealed as
miraculous and interconnected and inherently mysterious.
Which brings us back to the question: where is the line
between fantasy and reality?
It’s possible to explore that question in Fantasy and Magic
Realism, but not, by definition, in Realism. Reality-based fiction is always
going to be stuck in a self-contained box built out of assumptions that have no
basis in reality. But I don’t see why you can’t have something strange popping
up in a straight fiction story. Strange things happen all the time in so-called
‘real life’. Why are we so surprised or annoyed when they happen in fiction?
That’s one to ponder. In the meantime, I’m using my
confusion over the proliferation of Fantasy genres as an excuse to read loads
of books. I want to familiarise myself with the genre I’ve wandered into as a
writer. So I’m starting a Fantasy Reading List and will be blogging about some
of the books I encounter, or have already encountered. Stay tuned for more…
Image: Imagination; Into the Light
