Maledicte

I had an epiphany while on the train to mental_tsunami's graduation. It had to do with books. I was specifically thinking about Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint. I went to a reading once where she said that when she wrote it, she didn't intend for it to be a fantasy book, and she wasn't all that clear on why it was categorized as fantasy, because there wasn't any magic or anything.

I didn't really think about this until Mira and I started writing something that specifically didn't have any magic in it. But both of us knew it was fantasy. This we never questioned. But I was thinking about it on the train, and I realized what separates fantasy from the simply fictional.

Fantasy takes place in a place that is not of our reality. Fantasy is just that: a fantasy that we create for our own enjoyment, something that could not happen in this world. The merely fictional is generally something in our own world, but not necessarily true.

This is the difference between the fantastical and the simply fictional.