What separates the fantastical from the merely fictional? I was thinking about a comment that Ellen Kushner made when talking about her book Swordspoint. She said that went she wrote it she didn’t intend for it to be a fantasy novel, and that she wasn’t all that clear on why it was categorized as fantasy since there was no magic in it.

It took me some time to hit upon the answer to this. In fact, it wasn’t until my roommate and I started planning out a series of novels that, while they also didn’t contain any magic (nor did the world that they are set in), were clearly fantasy. It seems to me that there is this conception that for a book to be classified as a “fantasy novel” there has to be some sort of magical element in it.

I would like to propose that no, this is wrong.

Clearly if something does have magic in it, then it is fantasy. But not everything that doesn’t have that particular element to the story is simply going to be fictional. The dictionary in my computer (an application that is so incredibly useful) says, “the faculty or activity of imagining things, esp. things that are impossible or improbable.” Fantasy is something that takes place in a reality that is not our own. (It now becomes clear why Alternate Histories are thrown in with fantasy. Also, for the record, I will say that my computer’s dictionary also has this to say in the entry about fantasy: “a genre of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure, esp. in a setting other than the real world.” As you might imagine, I don’t entirely agree, but I can’t change the thing.)

In my mind, the distinction is simple: “fantasy” is something that is set in a world that is imagined. It is in the very definition of the word “fantasy.” Fantasy is something that has to be imagined, because it simply is not real.