: Re: How little "fantasy" can be in a story and it still be recognizably fantasy? How little "fantasy" can be in a story and it still be recognizably fantasy, and not mainstream fiction? The "recognizable

@Sarah872

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I think the key question here is: what element in your story do you see as being a "fantasy" element?

There's no denying we've seen plenty of fantasy published that skirts the edge of mainstream. I've seen this pretty frequently in F&SF, in several flavors; I've seen magical realism in Fantasy Magazine; Andy Duncan's excellent "Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse" was published in Eclipse One, and made the Nebula ballot. How little can you pull off? In a lot of venues, pretty darn little.

The bar isn't a lower bound on fantastic content; it's just the requirement that whatever you've got should be felt. If you yourself sense that your story is a fantasy story, you should be able to work out why you feel that way. Would you feel the story wouldn't work well in a mainstream venue? If so - why? That's the element you should be homing in on. And if you feel like this element might not be clear, or might not be clearly fantastical (or fantasy-related), in the eyes of a potential reader - then you'll want to polish that particular aspect, give it more prominence, make sure it gets noticed.

Your own "The Radio Magician," I would say, serves as a wonderful example.
For almost the entire length of the story, there's no real fantastical element - quite the opposite; the story is largely about Charlie's fascination with "magic" that's as fake and unwonderous as magic can be. And yet the story is suffused by the sense of wonder that Charlie feels; that's a worthy fantasy element, even though it isn't fantastical. And you introduce and develop the concept of a "radio magician" almost exactly like SF premise, taking the (well-known) phenomenon of old-fashioned radio and giving it a twist; it's "mundane" in the same sense that "mundane SF" is mundane - it's not unrealistic, but it requires a certain extrapolation and flight of fancy. And again, you've put the showcasing of the "radio magician" concept into the very heart of the story - you made the story about your pseudo-fantastical concept, about showing it off and making the reader consider how very close it was to real-life parallels.

If you feel your piece is fantasy, it probably is; you just need to make sure other people know it. Figure out where the fantasy is - even if it's subtle, or just the style, or just the theme - and make that element stand out.

And, of course, aim for the venues that aren't looking for straight-up sword and sorcery stories :)

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