Aaand somehow it’s Monday again already, meaning Fantasy With Friends discussion time (prompts hosted at Pages Unbound). This week’s theme is about the definition of the genre:

How do you define “fantasy” as a genre?

The simplest answer I can think of is “a story that somehow pushes outside of our reality, in a way not intended to be explained by science” (which would put it more in the realm of science fiction). I think the conventional definition is usually that fantasy includes magic or supernatural elements, but I think that excludes some stories set in an alternative world that may not have magic, but definitely aren’t our world and read to me as fantasy (like Freya Marske’s Swordcrossed).

I was actually for a long time a member of an online book group called The Alternative Worlds: our interests were mostly sci-fi and fantasy, but alternate history (like Jo Walton’s Farthing) also fell into that, and I think that widened my definitions and shaped what I wanted from genre fiction a lot: alternative worlds, alternative ways of being, alternative ways things might have happened. For quite a while, I found the term “speculative fiction” more descriptive of what I’m interested in.

There are a lot of different subgenres of fantasy where different elements are more or less important, but for me being set in a world that doesn’t work quite like our own is what does it (though I wouldn’t argue that Farthing is fantasy in the traditional sense). That might mean adding magic to our world in hidden corners (like Caitlin Rozakis’ The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association), by adding it into our world where it didn’t exist before (like Chugong’s Solo Leveling or singNsong’s Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint), or by creating whole new worlds with different histories and belief systems (like Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor or Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor).

Inevitably the definition isn’t perfect and can get a bit porous: is horror fantasy? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Buuut I think that’s a feature, not a bug: we needn’t get too rigid in our definitions, less we miss out on stuff that’s new and fun, or stuff that we’d love that’s just outside our clearly defined box. Humans like to define things very narrowly and it’s pretty much always more complicated than that, and things might be better if we could be better (as individuals and as a society) at noticing that putting things into clearly defined and separated boxes is only useful up to a point.