Does It Need Magic to Be Fantasy?

Does it?

I don’t think so.

I love books about magic. A favorite of mine is the kind of story set in a world like ours, where magic exists, either integrated and accepted, or as part of a secret world or “secret history.” My second favorite kind of fantasy story is one set in a richly imagined, beautifully defined world other than this one, with well-developed characters having some sort of adventure, or at least a kerfuffle that needs smoothing. That second favorite doesn’t require magic.

All fiction is fantasy, in the sense that it’s made-up. I know, that’s playing with words, because there’s this category called “realist fiction” that came to prominence in the 18th century. Historically, though, when we look back at works of fiction that are centuries old or older, what do we find? We find quests for magic plants that bring people back to life; we find dragons and monsters [Waves to Grendel and Grendel’s mom.] We find mysterious lands with strange creatures. Check out the Arthurian story cycle and count up how many wizards, witches or magical people show up. Fantasy was the norm. “Realism” was a conscious, philosophical break with the convention, planting the flag for the everyday person. Or, excuse me, in English-language literature, the “common man.”

“Fantasy” is now generally used as genre category for stories with magic. In the fantasy field, however, there are writers who want to explore and experiment with aspects of society. They want to fiddle with economic and religious systems, and concept of identity and family, but they don’t want to have to navigate around decades of actual history to do it. And there are editors who want to publish these experiments.

Certainly “alternate history” is one way to do this. Thank goodness for quantum physics so all we fantasy writers have a excuse for “it’s an alternate reality!” The challenge here is to keep it from becoming portal fantasy, unless portal fantasy is truly what you want to write. For the group of writers I’m imagining, portal fantasy is not their interest. Alternate history requires a lot of research and thought given to what else would change in a world almost like ours, where a certain historical event happened differently. For portal fantasists, that takes time and energy away from the important part of the story.

I’ve read several books and series with magic, where it was subordinate to other aspects of the plot, and several where there is functionally no magic at all. Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series falls into the first category. There is a system in place that works much like magic, even though its true aspect is revealed to the reader early in the series. While there are wizards who manipulate that system, it doesn’t drive the plot of the books. Its source is an important part of the plot, so I can’t say this is a magic-free series.

Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough Dossier series has, to my knowledge, zero magic. It is a detailed world, set in a time period that would be familiar to us, with countries and political jurisdictions we all almost recognize, and it charts the stories of several characters in shadowy circumstances.

[Disclaimer: Marta Randall is a longtime friend and mentor.] Marta Randall’s duology, Mapping Winter and The River South also gives us a richly imagined, vividly detailed world. This world is on the cusp of technological and societal change, and we follow two characters, a mother and daughter, years apart, each trying to live her life as these changes blossom. One of Randall’s original goals was to image a society where no particular religion assumed political prominence and there is no religious persecution. It keeps the spiritual aspect of people’s lives their own. Randall also imagined technology moving forward from different starting points, and evolving differently. They have something they consider a telegraph, but instead of being sound-driven, it’s a network of semaphore towers. The fixation of the various city-states is less about armed conquest and much more about trade. And there’s not a smidge of magic to be seen.

The Lady Trent books, by Marie Brennan, follow the adventures of a woman explorer and natural scientist, who studies the flying reptilian creatures who inhabit her world–dragons. Trent lives in a country that is technologically and socio-politically at about the level of Victorian England. The books are second-world fantasy for sure, but except for the dragons, which function like fully “normal” biological creatures, there is no magic that I remember. The series in quite popular and I’ve never heard or seen anyone complain about the dearth of magic.

Earlier writers who wanted to conduct fictional sociological experiments often turned to science fiction and space journeys to accomplish it. “See, we’ve colonized another planet, light years from Earth, and oh, no, we’ve lost contact, so I guess we can do what we want!” Usually, these books imagined a return to a feudal or dictatorial political system, or an evolved militaristic society. Economics, identity, societal roles didn’t change in any interesting way.

As the field has matured and we’ve all become more conversant with the concept of narrative, more writers are skipping the trappings of the generation ship or the “Faster Than Light Travel” hocus-pocus (because, hey! It’s just magic) and heading straight to world creation.

I’m sure role playing games assisted with this. Starting from classic fantasy, role-playing games evolved into their own worlds, with histories, political, religious and social factions less and less connected to some “real world” starting point. Creating a game is an act of imagination, and the crossover into written fiction, looking back, seems inevitable.

Randall once called Mapping Winter “an historical novel set in an imaginary world” and I like that description. (Yes, we can argue that any historical novel is by definition set in an imaginary world, and no, I’m not going to.)

Anyway, here is a new, wonderful different world, filled with interesting, complicated people. It has no magic. Welcome! And yes, it’s fantasy.