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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48945
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

## **Fantasy isn't defined only by magic.**

I was a fan of fantasy literature for many years before coming across anyone trying to define "fantasy" as "stuff involving magic", which I've never really understood. For me, being set in an **alternate world** (including a fictional world-within-a-world like _Harry Potter_ or _Artemis Fowl_) was always a bigger fantasy indicator than the involvement of magic. Of course that's not a perfect indicator either. The boundaries of any genre are fuzzy and hard to define, science fiction and fantasy perhaps more than most. (We know this over at the [Science Fiction & Fantasy SE](https://scifi.stackexchange.com), where we don't even try to nail down a firm definition of the genre(s) and essentially adopt an ["I know it when I see it"](https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/12540/31394) approach.)

**But it may depend on exactly how you define "magic".** For example, does the appearance of a ghost count as magic? (Is Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ fantasy?) Does a prophetic dream which comes true count as magic? (Those happen in real life too.)

- My go-to example of "fantasy without magic" would be the [_Redwall_ series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwall) by Brian Jacques, at least assuming that your answer to the two questions above is no.
- Another good example would be some of the stories of [Borges](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges), many of which are surely wacky enough to count as "fantasy" without involving anything that could be described as magic. ["The Library of Babel"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel) is a short story describing a [possibly infinite](https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1062/17) library containing books with every possible combination of characters, meaningful or not. That doesn't require any _magic_, but I'd sure as hell call it _fantasy_.

Even the Great White Whale of fantasy literature, _The Lord of the Rings_, has very very little magic involved. The only magic that's really important to the plot is the nature of the One Ring itself; most of the story is about ordinary people, unaugmented by magical powers, struggling to achieve great deeds. But that's _very little_ magic rather than _none_, and there's more in the backstory that lays out Tolkien's legendarium in more depth.

Original score: 6