Different Fantasy Genres - Part Two

Faerie Fantasy 

This subgenre is related to mythic fantasy and folkloric/fairy tale fantasy, although not identical. It consists of books that make the fae (or fay, they have many names) the source of magic. These stories usually synthesize the many stories of the fae folk from folklore, fairy tales, myths, etc., and make them into a coherent magical system. Sometimes these stories are portal fantasies or invasive fantasies. Sometimes magic is a given in the world. 

These stories can be contemporary or historical. Sometimes the fae are called elves. Tolkien’s elves were largely inspired by a fusion of the sidhe and Icelandic elves. 

Sometimes, especially in urban fantasy, the fae are placed alongside other magical beings like werewolves and vampires. Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake books include the fae, as do Patricia Brigg’s Mercy Thompson novels. YA fantasy focused on the fae tends to be a bit erotic. Outside of urban fantasy, the fae are the source of magic in Guy Gavriel Kay’s historical fantasy The Last Light of the Sun, as well as John Crowley’s Little Big.  

Prose in this genre ranges stylistically from utilitarian (most urban fantasy) to lyrical. They tend to share a preoccupation with the ineffable and mysterious. The fae are not pleasant tidy faeries, nor the benevolent elves of Tolkien derivative fantasy. They are closer to their older forms. Compelling, inhuman, and dangerous. They have inhuman goals and desires. Their presence is frequently used to show that humans aren’t the apex predators of the world. The fae are like nature, beautiful and potentially deadly. 


Portal Fantasy / Invasive Fantasy (or Intrusive) 

A portal fantasy occurs when characters are transported from a less magical world to a more magical one. Often this happens via an object or cataclysmic event. The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter are two famous examples of portal fantasy. Portal fantasies for adults have been written by authors including Ursula K. Le Guin, Guy Gavriel Kay, Neil Gaiman, Alix E. Harrow, and S. A. Chakraborty. Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series riffs on the long history of children’s portal fantasy. Passage between worlds can be voluntary or involuntary. 

Invasive fantasy is the inverse of portal fantasy—the non-magical world is invaded by the magical. 

Often not everyone in the world is aware of the change. Sometimes it’s a state of affairs that has been constant but hidden, and the main character breaks through the illusion of ordinariness. Urban and dark fantasy are often invasive fantasies. There are mythic fantasies that dance on the line between portal and invasive fantasies, like Charles de Lint’s Newford books. Both types tend to feature a protagonist or protagonists that are set apart or chosen for special knowledge of both worlds. 


Magic School Fantasy / Academic Fantasy 

Both academic fantasy and magical school fantasies take schools as their primary setting, often schools for learning magic, drawing upon the tradition of the novel of school, and the Bildungsroman (novel of education/growth). 

Diane Wynn Jones and Ursula K. Le Guin wrote early magic school fantasies. A certain young wizard named Harry made this subgenre one of the most well-known forms of fantasy for children, though plenty is aimed at adults. Examples include Charlie Jane Ander’s All the Birds in the Sky, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, and Leigh Bardugo’s The Ninth House. Some novels include magical schools, but don’t use the school as the sole focal setting. Academic fantasy centers a school but doesn’t focus primarily on the students. Sometimes the academics are the center, and it’s not a school for magic at all. For instance, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman’s The Fall of Kings takes place at a university and concentrates on a professor and a graduate student who both study history. The novel is a secondary-world historical fantasy, and there’s no magic—until suddenly there is. There are also novels that focus on academics who uncover something uncanny through research, like Possession by A. S Byatt, or The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Magic school novels are frequently coming-of-age stories with themes of finding, belonging, and discovering one’s true self. 

Academic fantasy novels are usually focused on adults, and so not coming-of-age narratives, but they do focus on a sense of discovery. Academic fantasy can overlap with Dark Academia. 


Paranormal Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / Contemporary Fantasy 

This is a complicated series of interlocking genres that are still emerging and defining themselves. Contemporary fantasy is any fantasy set in roughly the present of the writer, altered to include fantasy elements. This can manifest as fabulism but can also be overtly fantastical. Highly fantastical contemporary fantasy is often categorized as urban or paranormal fantasy. Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks and Charles de Lint’s Newford novels are credited with crystalizing urban fantasy. These novels are set in cities, which at the time the first of them were written (1980s) was in direct contrast to the agrarian, rural, and historical settings of the majority of fantasy. Bull’s novel included elements which would later become nearly obligatory in urban fantasy; magical beings disturbing the life of a relatively ordinary young woman causing her to believe in the supernatural and radically change her life. There is also a love story between her and one of the fae. In some urban fantasy few people know about the supernatural existing alongside the real world. In some, almost everyone knows, like works that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s by Patricia Briggs, Laurel K. Hamilton, and Charlaine Harris. When a love story and sexuality become the primary narrative drive, the story is paranormal romance rather than urban fantasy. Both often involve characters who have historically been associated with horror, like vampires and werewolves. Many urban fantasies borrow from noir and detective fiction. 

The main characters frequently get pulled into crime solving, their expertise in the supernatural valuable to supernatural beings and human police departments alike. Sherlock Holmes and other 19th-century detective stories that include the occult or the appearance of the occult are influential. While this genre is dominated by female-identified writers, there are male writers who work within it, from Glen Cook to Jim Butcher, and Daniel Jose Older. Butcher’s Dresden Files series is popular but became polarizing when they were part of the Sad Puppies campaign (not by the writer’s choice). This is an active genre with new writers emerging all the time. Most books within it are series books. Any list of influential writers working within the genre, because it is a young one, includes writers from the early days alongside newer writers, from L.A. Banks to Kim Harrison, Marjorie Liu, and many others. 


Fabulism, Magical Realism, and Surrealism 

These three genres are often confused. They are related, but not identical. Magical realism primarily refers to Latin American literature from the 20th century and beyond that depicts a realistic world infused with magical elements. These elements are natural, not invasive. Awareness of this genre burst upon the English-speaking world with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, though it predates this awareness. Jorge Luis Borges was one of its early advocates. The decentring of the Western rationalistic worldview that occurs in these novels is a form of resistance to fascism and colonialism. 

The term “magical realism” is sometimes applied to novels by English speakers like Alice Hoffman, but many argue that applying the term outside of Latin America or other colonized countries degrades the identity of the genre and is potentially appropriative. The term was also used in Germany to refer to Kafka’s work, and other works by German writers who treated the extraordinary as matter of fact. The work of indigenous writers like Louise Erdrich are sometimes considered a form of magical realism since they frequently take for granted events and forces that are outside of Western notions of causality. Many European writers, like Italian writer Italo Calvino, have preferred the term “fabulist” to describe their work, which has in common with magical realism the tendency to describe the extraordinary in a matter-of-fact tone and draw upon oral narrative traditions to go beyond rationalist modes of thought, while infusing magical elements into an otherwise naturalistic or realistic setting. Surrealism uses these elements more metaphorically, rather than literally. While there are arguments about magical realism, the term has cultural implications that the term “fabulism” does not. Further, fabulism is more likely to draw upon well-known folkloric elements, instead of a general sense of magic. 

Novels and stories that fit within any of these traditions are likely to cross between mainstream, literary, and fantasy publishers. Many writers of fabulism identify as fantasy writers, some don’t. 

Writers like Kelly Link, Karen Russell, Helen Oyeyemi, and George Saunders are fabulist and fantasy writers. These genres are complicated to parse, and the ways in which they cross the publishing worlds has led to a lot of arguments about if they are fantasy, or just fantastical, which strikes this author as saying more about those who argue about it than the texts themselves, since all of them self-evidently include magic. 


Space Fantasy / Science Fantasy 

The lines between fantasy and science fiction have never been particularly thick. While high fantasy and hard science fiction are relatively distinct, there is a lot of wiggle room in between. 

Planetary romance is secondary-world fantasy that uses another planet as the setting. Sharon Shinn’s Samaria books are set on a world which was colonized by humans who set out to create an agrarian theologically driven utopia. Sheri S. Tepper, the ecoscience fantasy writer, writes novels that blend magic with the scientific. Star Wars, and similar works, are sometimes considered space fantasy since psychic powers are at the center of the narrative. Further, the themes of space fantasy, such as overthrowing an evil empire, are more common to fantasy narratives than science fiction narratives proper. N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series includes magic that is science to the characters within it. These are only a few of the endless examples of work that blends science fiction and fantasy. 


Hybrid Fantasy 

In addition to the specific hybrid genres I have described, you can find fantasy that blends any genres you can think of. There are steampunk mysteries and fantasy thrillers— the options are endless. Genres and subgenres aren’t rules so much as guidelines. Most successful fantasy uses conventions strategically but avoids being trope-ridden. “Rules” exist to be learned and broken. Countless novels are many genres simultaneously, or none in particular. Genres and subgenres evolve as quickly as humans can imagine. 

Read Part One

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