Fantasy without the fantasy?

[Weaver]

Time period resembles ancient antiquity so definitely fantasy as opposed to sci fi.

Um... No. Time period is not one of the defining elements (as far as there is such a thing) between fantasy and science fiction. Julian May's Saga of Pliocene Exile comes to mind. It's science fiction, but the time period is a lot further back than, say, ancient Egypt. For that matter, there are plenty of emphatically fantasy stories that are set in the future. Shannara, anyone?

I generally think that alternate history (a story playing with "What if Rome never fell?" to use the cliche example) is science fiction, but an alternate world (not necessarily any magic, but it's not related in any way to our world) feels more fantasy-ish to me. Of course, I think that the "line" between the two is wide and blurry and not subject to simple definitions.

 

[Mythopoet]

Islandia, for instance, is a novel that details the culture and customs of a fictional island nation somewhere out in the Pacific. The worldbuilding is extensive, I would argue more detailed than even Tolkien's, but it is firmly within the bounds of Earth science and law - and not advanced enough to be considered science fiction, either.

Which is why if someone recommended Islandia to me as a fantasy novel I would be pissed at them for wasting my time. There is simply nothing fantastic about it.

So don't worry about it; publishers will find a place for it as long as you write it well.

This isn't true. Publishers will reject a book, no matter how well written, if they do not think it can be effectively marketed. The amount of authors who have experienced rejection letters that say something like "I loved it, but we can't market this" is astonishing. You can find them all over the internet.

As for the "just write historical fiction" comment. I think it's valid to a certain extent. I have read books that so closely resembled the real world with only names and geography slightly changed (sometimes with minor "fantastic" elements that are seemingly only thrown in so the author can call it fantasy) that as a reader I sat there wondering "Is the only reason this author didn't write historical fiction because they didn't want to do the research?"

I read fantasy for fantasy. If the only fantastic thing about your story is that it takes place somewhere that doesn't actually exist, in my opinion it doesn't qualify. You could say the same thing about any mainstream book that takes place in a made up town in America.

 

[Steerpike]

There are authors who do quite well writing fantasy closely modeled on actual history, with no magical elements. Near as I can tell, it has nothing to do with a lack of research. They still have to know their stuff, the story they want to tell just diverges from history in some way, or they prefer to set it in their own world. I think when we don't like something, as individuals, we tend to want to find reasons to criticize, as though humans have a need to justify preferences.

There are also good fantasy stories set in a completely made up world, with no relation to actual history, that just happen to not have magic in them.

I think the admonition to write historical fiction instead, or the idea that these are just authors who don't want to do research, are both off base. They're just there to justify personal preferences. The latter charge (regarding research) is often leveled at fantasy as a genre, and I don't find any basis for it their either.

 

[Devor]

I think my comment has been wildly distorted.

I didn't tell anyone to go write historical fiction. I said that if there aren't fantastical elements, a question I would ask is why it isn't historical fiction. Telling someone to go write historical fiction would be to presume that the question doesn't have an answer.

If you're not using fantasy elements in your fictitious world, then I think there should be some other element about the fictitious world which ties in to the story in a way that justifies the setting - the same way that I think the fantasy elements should.

I don't care about what genre or subgenre it's called. I mean, there's only space for so many shelves with so many labels at a bookstore.

 

[Steerpike]

For some of the closer stuff I've seen (by closer, I mean adhering more closely to history), it seems like the author is playing a "what if" game. The events of the story play out differently than in real life. In other cases it is filling in the gaps (i.e. we don't know enough of the historical details).

Guy Gavriel Kay's later work has been called historical fantasy. The Lions of Al-Rassan, Last Light of the Sun, the Sarantine Mosaic, and other s are all set in the same world. It's a close parallel to actual history in a lot of ways. See the Wiki on Last Light of the Sun, for example: The Last Light of the Sun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kay is no slouch when it comes to research. He knows his stuff. His current work is set in the same world but in a part of the world similar to historical China.

I don't know that the reasons for the setting have to be justified beyond the fact that these are the stories he wanted to tell, and they didn't happen this way in history so he can't tell them as historical fiction. As I noted above, it sometimes is called Historical Fantasy.

On the other side of the no-magic or fantastic elements, you have Peake, whose Gormenghast books take place in an entirely made-up, and often alien setting. The setting is part of the theme, in that case.

 

[Weaver]

The latter charge (regarding research) is often leveled at fantasy as a genre, and I don't find any basis for it their either.

It reminds me of what 'everybody knew' at the unversity I attended: people who studied art were only doing so because they weren't smart enough to be able to study anything else. (I was bad; I had great fun at times showing off how much I knew about some subject, like astrophysics or history or literature, and then adding, "By the way, I'm an art major." Just to wobble their worldview a bit.) History is hard; math is hard; astronomy is well-nigh impossible, and getting an education degree is not for the faint of heart. But getting a degree in art is just going to class and playing around with paint and stuff, and any little kid could do it, right?

One of the reasons fantasy gets a bad rap from people who don't know it is that they assume it's 'too easy' compared to any other kind of fiction. After all, if you write historicals, you have to do all that research. Ditto for sci-fi, although the research is different and you also have to extrapolate from it. Regular contemporary fiction in all its forms requires extreme attention to detail because if you make any mistake, there is probably a reader who lives in the city you just described incorrectly, and they'll call you on it. (Eastern New Mexico University's campus has no trees? Seriously? Not in the version I know.) But fantasy lets you make it all up, and you don't have to worry about facts, right?

We all know otherwise. Even in a made-up setting, there will be many, many things that are somewhat like real things from the world our readers live in. If a horse can only run at up to a certain speed in the real world (not to be confused with the Real World -- thought I'd throw that in as a joke for anyone who gets it), the author had better have a really good explanation if horses in his/her setting can run three times that fast. There's also the little matter of 'making stuff up' being harder than some people realize. (That's why non-writers sometimes think that any fiction writing must be easy: It's just making stuff up, right? Anybody can do that.) Creativity doesn't happen in a vacuum; if we don't fill our brains, we don't have any raw material with which to make something new. And there's a lot of research necessary in building a whole world from scratch.