Must fantasy include magic

[Ice fyre]

Dammit JD you've just beaten me to a point I was going to make.

In a fair few Fantasy novels especially Mr Moorcocks we see the use of technology far enough advanced to be considered magic.

As to it being necessary, I do wonder if a novel is actually fantasy unless it actually involves a little "higher power" divine or magical.

While I like the Gormenghast books, are they fantasy? Depends on what we percieve as fantasy I suppose. Isnt all Sci-Fi just fantastic fiction really?

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Ice fyre

Dammit JD you've just beaten me to a point I was going to make.

LOL... Whoooops!

In a fair few Fantasy novels especially Mr Moorcocks we see the use of technology far enough advanced to be considered magic.

As to it being necessary, I do wonder if a novel is actually fantasy unless it actually involves a little "higher power" divine or magical.

I'd say, again, that it has to touch on the numinous, yes... but not necessarily "magic" in the accepted sense of the term; the mysterious, the sublime, the ethereal, the suspected violation of natural law... all of these can (and do) qualify a book as "fantasy. It's like the book I'm reading now, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. While nothing overtly supernatural has taken place so far (and, from what I gather, this is true of the rest of the novel as well), the intimations of the eerie, the supernatural, the uncanny, are all there, giving it that atmosphere of the weird tale. Add to that the subtle suggestion of the worldview that permeates the novel, where you can feel the presence of the unseen, and it lands squarely in the tradition of the supernatural-thriller-cum-late-Gothic. This is something that applies with fantasy as well, the Gormenghast books (and Leslie Barringer's Neustrian cycle, and Lud-in-the-Mist, and many of Dunsany's stories, etc.) included.

I would use as an analogy a passage from H. P. Lovecraft's brilliant essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature:

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space....

Moreover, much of hte choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in whic the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfil every condition of true supernatural horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down.

In fantasy, you have something similar, though the emphasis may be vastly different: it is a suggestion of the numinous or the "other" hinting of something vaster, perhaps grander, certainly alien (yet more fascinating than fearful) than the world (or reality) we know. Such may not actually be present in the incidents, but if the air of such is there, that qualifies that piece of work as indeed fantasy.

[Teresa Edgerton]

Although in Lud-in-the-Mist you do have the direct intervention of fairies and ghosts in human affairs (for all the efforts of the citizens of Lud to obscure the matter with their legal fictions about smuggled silk).

Here are definitions from three dictionaries:


(Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary)

fan·ta·sy
Variant(s):
also phan·ta·sy \ˈfan-tə-sē, -zē\
Function:
noun
Inflected Form(s):
plural fan·ta·sies
Etymology:
Middle English fantasie — more at fancy
Date:
14th century
1obsolete : hallucination
2: fancy; especially : the free play of creative imagination
3: a creation of the imaginative faculty whether expressed or merely conceived: as a: a fanciful design or invention b: a chimerical or fantastic notion c: fantasia 1 d: imaginative fiction featuring especially strange settings and grotesque characters —called also fantasy fiction
4: caprice
5: the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need <an object of fantasy>; also : a mental image or a series of mental images (as a daydream) so created <sexual fantasies of adolescence>


(Oxford University Press)

fantasy, a general term for any kind of fictional work that is not primarily devoted to realistic representation of the known world. The category includes several literary genres (e.g. dream vision, fable, fairy tale, romance, science fiction) describing imagined worlds in which magical powers and other impossibilities are accepted. Recent theorists of fantasy have attempted to distinguish more precisely between the self‐contained magical realms of the marvellous, the psychologically explicable delusions of the uncanny, and the inexplicable meeting of both in the fantastic.


(American Heritage Dictionary)

an·ta·sy (fān'tə-sē, -zē) Pronunciation Key
n. pl. fan·ta·sies
The creative imagination; unrestrained fancy. See Synonyms at imagination.
Something, such as an invention, that is a creation of the fancy.
A capricious or fantastic idea; a conceit.
Fiction characterized by highly fanciful or supernatural elements.
An example of such fiction.
An imagined event or sequence of mental images, such as a daydream, usually fulfilling a wish or psychological need.
An unrealistic or improbable supposition.
Music See fantasia.
A coin issued especially by a questionable authority and not intended for use as currency.
Obsolete A hallucination.


None of these say that magic or the supernatural have to be present.

Going by the Merriam-Webster definition, Gormenghast definitely qualifies.