: 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

@Yeniel532

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A friend of mine, Alma Alexander, writes fantasy pretty much exclusively. Her book The Secrets of Jin-Shei was, however, marketed as "mainstream" fiction. She considers it fantasy because:

The setting is a fictionalized version of ancient China, much as the setting of much genre fantasy is a thinly disguised version of medieval England
About halfway into the book, it becomes apparent that a character who is said to be a sorcerer has actual magic powers (up until this particular scene, it was all hearsay and could be taken to be simply the way an ancient culture would frame such things)

Her publishers disagreed with her, marketed the book accordingly, and it went on to be a reasonable international success (though, sadly, it did not do so well here in the U.S.).

Genre is a marketing tool that can serve publishers and readers equally well: it allows readers to easily find things they might like to read, and it allows publishers to reach an audience who will be predisposed to buy certain types of books. The question a savvy publisher will ask is not "does this book have dragons in it?" but "would people who never go to the Fantasy section of a bookstore pay to read this?" If it has dragons in it, to be sure, it's probably going to be fantasy by either definition, but give some credit to some publishers for knowing something about marketing books.

To more directly address the question, although this is still pretty tangential, science fiction readers have a word "sfnal" which means "it's not exactly science fiction, but if you enjoy science fiction you'll probably like it." I've heard it applied to nonfiction books like Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and to Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which is technically historical fiction. Some techno-thrillers are also taken to be sfnal (one definition I heard of a techno-thriller is "a science fiction story with the President in it") -- Neal Stephenson in fact wrote one of those, too, under a pseudonym.

This is all to say that the dividing line is not necessarily sharp and may vary from author to author, reader to reader, and publisher to publisher.

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