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one of the submissions in the backlog i'm working through is Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. i never read it myself, and based on the blurbs i'm seeing i wanted to get some input from you all on how much of it is rooted in scientific explanations. i'm wondering if it's in a similar vein to Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, where all the seemingly fantastical elements are actually backed up by (fictional) science. any explanations are appreciated!
you wanted non-english books? please consider this offer:
Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek (1973, Thea Beckman)
De Gouden Dolk (1982, Thea Beckman)
Hasse Simonsdochter (1983, Thea Beckman)
Kinderen van Moeder Aarde (1985, Thea Beckman, first of a triology)
Sans Famille (1878, Hector Malot)
some of these might be stretching the definition of fantasy a bit, but i would say they count
hello! I’ve been looking through blurbs and reviews for these and I’m not sure about these as fantasy.
De Gouden Dolk and Hasse Simonsdochter seem to me to just be historical fiction (there are some reviews of the latter in particular that praise Beckman for seamlessly blending her fictional protagonist with real historical events).
Sans famille looks to just be realist (though sentimental/romanticized and a bit picaresque) 19th-century fiction.
meanwhile, Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek — since Dolf is transported to the 13th century by a time machine — and Kinderen van Moeder Aarde — since it’s set after the Third World War and I don’t see any mention of supernatural elements in the blurb or in reviews — both look to me like science fiction. (given these sci-fi elements, I would definitely accept both for the sci-fi blog even if they do also have fantasy elements.)
could you, or someone else who’s read any of these, elaborate on what makes these fantasy?
hii you asked for non english fantasy so id like to submit Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Marquez and La casa de los espiritus by Isabel Allende. theyre magical realism but personally i think thats fantasy so idk. Cien años de soledad is definetly the more fantastic of the two though
hello! as I elaborated on way back in the day (on like day 2 of the blog, lmao), I do not generally consider magical realism to be fantasy as such. here’s what I said at the time:
———
> this will perhaps be a controversial stance, but as a rule I don’t consider magic(al) realism to be fantasy. a text like Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo / The Kingdom of This World — in conjunction with which Carpentier developed the idea of lo real maravilloso — is using apparently “fantastic” elements clearly within a “literary” and, ultimately, fundamentally realist framework: Carpentier’s contention, explored by later Boom writers, is that aspects of life in Latin America as experienced by Latin Americans cannot be adequately accounted for or expressed within the bounds of traditional European realism. [addition on 7/7/24: this is a fundamentally different theoretical and literary project than genre fantasy or even from gothic or gothic-adjacent texts.]
> this opens a much bigger can of worms re the social construction of “reality” in and by Western literary realism — Daniel Heath Justice, for example, has critiqued the reduction of work by Indigenous writers to the realm of “mere” allegory or simply to unreality. I’m not satisfied with Justice’s solution to the problem (the concept of “wonderworks”), because I think it cedes too much ground to Western literary realism’s claim to a monopoly on the real, but his underlying point stands. I have increasingly found that “magic(al) realism” is used, in popular contexts, less as a serious engagement with the theoretical problems that the authors of the Boom were grappling with and more as
a way to bracket off as “unreal” work by Indigenous, African, and other authors who are writing from within a different baseline realism than Western literary realism presupposes, without seriously engaging with the ways this work interrogates the hegemonic constructed “real” that Western states use to justify, for example, the destruction of Indigenous sacred sites for resource extraction purposes;
alternately, a kind of “fantasy lite” that wants to stay within the realm of “literary fiction” rather than risk being tarred with the genre label “fantasy”; or
a label for things that are simply fantasy, not engaged with any of the theoretical problems that define magic(al) realism as a genre, but are either liminal fantasy or more realism-adjacent than secondary-world fantasy or urban fantasy.
> things in categories 1 and 2 I would generally exclude from the category of fantasy (if you don’t want to be here, I don’t want you here either!); things in category 3 I would probably consider fantasy (and not consider magic(al) realism).
> my second and third questions / points about the gothic are also relevant here, and help clarify some fringe cases. Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier were clearly working in the realm of literary fiction and not the “popular” literature that has come to be grouped under the label “fantasy”; conversely, Jorge Luis Borges was heavily influenced by anglophone pulp writers, including H.P. Lovecraft — I am comfortable identifying texts like “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as “fantasy” (for all that they predate the genre).
———
while some of Allende’s other work is more definitively fantasy (e.g., the Memorias del águila y del jaguar trilogy, which is currently queued), if La casa de los espíritus is less fantastic than Cien años de soledad I’m probably inclined to exclude it.
ALL OF THAT SAID: I admit to feeling a bit more ambivalent now, having since accepted Kafka’s Die Verwandlung / The Metamorphosis (as well as Haïlji’s The Republic of Užupis, which in some ways I think resembles the Boom writers’ magical realism). my four guiding questions for fringe cases between fantasy and realism are:
does the text contain an unequivocally fantastic element (something that, as Samuel Delany puts it, “could not happen” — some sign of magic or the supernatural)?
was the text composed as fantasy or as literary fiction?
for fiction published in the English-speaking world or other areas where there exists a separate fantasy market, is the text published and marketed as fantasy or as literary fiction?
if someone came to me and said they liked (e.g.) N.K. Jemisin, Patricia McKillip, and Charles de Lint, do I feel I could recommend this book to them and expect them to enjoy it on the basis of some similarity to these other authors?
my feeling is that most Boom magical realism is a maybe on question 1 (accounting for the fact that part of the point of the genre is to interrogate the social construction of “reality”) and a solid no on questions 2-4. but if you or anyone else wants to make a strong case for either Cien años de soledad or La casa de los espíritus, I am open to being convinced otherwise!
as i'm going through the submissions that were handed over to me, just want to give a heads up to the person who submitted Honeycomb by Joanne M. Harris: since this is a collection of original fairy tales that do not appear to be interconnected as a larger, overarching story in any meaningful way, i will not be posting the book to this blog!
this is based on the synopsis i have found online, so if i'm wrong about them not being meaningfully interconnected, i invite people to clarify this for me in the replies!
Mr Fox (Helen Oyeyemi), Gleaming Bright (Josepha Sherman), Wolfsong (T.J. Klune), Six-Gun Snow White (Catherynne M. Valente), Daughters of Sparta (Claire Heywood), Half a Soul (Olivia Atwater), Kiki's Delivery Service (Eiko Kadono), Eon (Alison Goodman), The King in Yellow (Robert W. Chambers)
hello! most of these are queued.
The King in Yellow is a non-linked short story collection, which I’m not accepting for these polls.
re Alison Goodman’s Eon, were you looking for just the first book, or did you also want the sequel?
Violet Evergarden (ヴァイオレット・エヴァーガーデン, Vaioretto Evāgāden) by Kana Akatsuki
hello! the Wikipedia article is a bit ambiguous — is this one novel in 3/4 volumes (depending how you count the “外伝” book between vol. 2 and vol. 3), or is it four separate novels?
if the former, I should have formatted the poll differently, but it occurred to me too late to ask, so I’ll let it stand for the whole thing. if the latter, I will add the other books to the list as well.
The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher
hello! based on the blurbs and the reviews I’m seeing this looks to me like fantasy, rather than sci-fi. could you, or someone else who’s read it, elaborate on whether there’s a (pseudo)scientific explanation given for the portal, or other elements that would make this sci-fi?
The Starless Crown by James Rollins
hello! this looks to me like fantasy, but the references to the distant past and things happening millennia ago are raising possible far-future science fantasy flags for me — but neither the blurb nor the reviews I’m seeing are clear on this point.
could you, or someone else who’s read this, elaborate on what would make this science fiction? in particular, is this set in the distant future of our world, or is it a secondary world entirely?
