Fantasy with Friends is a weekly meme hosted by the good people over at Pages Unbound. Fantasy with Friends poses questions each Monday about fantasy, either as a genre as a whole or individual works.
This week’s prompt is:
How do you define “fantasy” as a genre?
This is tougher than I’d think—you know it when you see it? Nah, that’s not satisfactory. Well, there’s that old line from Clark about sufficiently advanced science, right? Fantasy is like that—just there’s no science involved (and no interest in it).
It’s a work of fiction with an accepted active supernatural world—magic, creatures like dragons, owlbears, hippogriffs, etc. Usually set in some sort of pre-Industrial world (frequently one where Industrialism isn’t needed—see Abercrombie’s recent The Age of Madness trilogy to see an exception). Even if it’s a work without a lot of evidence of magic or those creatures, and so on Our friends at Merriam-Webster use phrases like, “conceived or seemingly conceived by unrestrained fancy” and “so extreme as to challenge belief” to define “fantastical,” and that’s pretty close to me.
Even the no science thing is slippery, Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan books have a science. Just nothing we’d recognize as such. And there’s enough fantastical elements to that science to keep it in the world of Fantasy. Other examples I can think of fall into similar paths (I just can’t think of a more science-y Fantasy…oh, Blood Over Bright Haven, too). Even outside of Urban Fantasy (set in a world much like our own with matching technology), there are plenty of exceptions to the above. So many, in fact, that my definitions are useless. Bringing me back to the “you know it when you see it.”
Okay, it took 200+ words for me to just say, “I dunno, really.” And that’s after two drafts of this post. I don’t have the time or patience for a third–and I’m pretty sure it’d just be adding more words and coming up with the same result. I’m really looking forward to some of the other posts in response to this prompt to help me come up with a definition that I like.
Do you have responses to this? (either for the comment section below or from your own post)
sarahwittle845
100%
HCNewton
Thanks!!
Briana | Pages Unbound
Ha! I had the same thought, that I was hoping someone would say something brilliant to inspire me because . . . I didn’t think I really came up with an answer!
HCNewton
Briana–I was counting on you! (Although it is encouraging to see I’m not alone in the struggle)
HCNewton
what you did post was pretty good, you have to admit.
Krysta
I don’t know that I have ever come up with a really satisfactory definition for fantasy! To me, it’s something that contains magical or imaginative elements that do not really exist. And it’s separate from science fiction, which might have things that don’t exist, but those things are sort of realistic–i.e. they could theoretically happen with advanced technology.
But, then, I think works can have fantastic elements, but not necessarily be classified as fantasy. Maybe this is where theory and practice diverge. Perhaps a ghost story, for instance, could theoretically be called “fantasy” if the argument is that ghosts don’t really exist (debatable, presumably) or at least that the ghosts in question are not really how we think of ghosts existing in our own world (thinking of something like the Lockwood & Co. books, set in an alternate London where ghosts are fought by children). But, then, I don’t think that, in practice, I would call a ghost story a “fantasy” when describing it to someone. I would say “supernatural” or “paranormal.”
And the same goes for other things like superhero stories. I think I have seen people call superhero comics “fantasy,” but, even if I could make an academic argument for that, I think people in real life would be confused if they asked me for a fantasy recommendation and I named a superhero book.
It’s one of those things that I feel like I could navigate more successfully if talking to someone. But, if I have to come up with an all encompassing definition that fits everything that seems like fantasy to me, while excluding things that do not feel like fantasy, I would admit that it’s a struggle!
HCNewton
Nice to see someone else stumbling so much over this 🙂
Becky's Book Blog
Great post! I just tried to show examples of the elements that make a book instantly scream ‘fantasy’ to me, but it’s definitely something that’s hard to define.
HCNewton
That was a clever approach–and didn’t leave you flailing all over your screen.
aquavenatus
Off the top of my head, I want to say that both: “A Chorus of Dragons,” by Jenn Lyons” and “The Rook & the Rose,” by M.A. Carrick are very underrated. Both series contains concepts and themes we’re familiar with from fantasy narratives, but the depths of the worldbuilding and the magic systems in them are worth reading and thinking about throughout the entire series.
KWHR
My rough attempt at defining something that, as many of you note, seems more definable by gut observation than by an actual helpful definition. Pardon if it falters:
Modern fantasy is a work of creative fiction where the author utilizes to some degree elements that are fantastical or miraculous to the normative experience of the audience reading it. Because of the circumstances of publication history, people tend to associate classic tropes of their historical imagination, which produced mythological creatures, magic, and settings, as expected components of fantasy books even if minimally. To another time and audience, such “fantastical” elements may not seem fantastical at all such as elves potentially dwelling in the nearby dark woods, or sorcerers providing charms of warding or love potions.