Is there a word for the not-fantasy-but-odd genre?
June 27, 2022 5:14 PM   Subscribe

You’ve got speculative fiction, you’ve got fantasy. What do you call fiction that is kind of fantastical—nothing impossible or magical, yet also not regular fiction? I mean the opposite of kitchen sink realism but without being supernatural. Like what about whimsical Wes Anderson movies?
posted by Monochrome to Writing & Language (21 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Magical realism?
posted by The otter lady at 5:15 PM on June 27, 2022 [12 favorites]


There’s magical realism, and I think that’s what the question is getting at, but I think of Wes Anderson as kind of a mannerist.
posted by kevinbelt at 5:17 PM on June 27, 2022 [6 favorites]


Best answer: I'm very fond of this 2020 essay by Lincoln Michel which proposes categorizing fiction along two axes: mimetic—fantastic and naturalistic—expressionist. So stuff like Wes Anderson movies and Oscar Wilde plays and Agatha Christie novels would be in the "stylized" quadrant. They're not "realistic," but their lack of overt fantasy or sci-fi elements mean they're not "speculative" or "fabulist" either.
posted by clair-de-lune at 5:33 PM on June 27, 2022 [12 favorites]


It's an older term, but that sort of thing has sometimes been called "Weird Fiction".
posted by Hatashran at 5:35 PM on June 27, 2022 [5 favorites]


I'd vote for hyperrealistic, or enhanced surrealism
posted by Jacen at 5:49 PM on June 27, 2022 [4 favorites]


I agree that "magical realism" is probably what you want, but you might find the term "slipstream" useful also. It's more recent than "weird fiction" but still slightly dated; coined by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling in the 1980s, it was getting bandied about a lot in the first decade of the millennium, when people like Kelly Link, George Saunders, Jonathan Lethem, and Haruki Murakami were all becoming prominent. (Prior to Sterling's coining, one might point to someone like Angela Carter.)
posted by snarkout at 5:54 PM on June 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


Alternate history falls into this category. (Counterfactual history appears to be another category. Huh.) So, for example, The Years of Rice and Salt, which imagines a Europe destroyed by plague and conflicts between Muslim and Chinese empires. It's a very different world, and in that sense fantastic, but not magical.
posted by SPrintF at 6:07 PM on June 27, 2022


I call it low key magical realism. A little offbeat, but no one’s actually flying, or at least not much.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:17 PM on June 27, 2022


Not that I have a name for it, but Robertson Davies would fit the same mold, right?
posted by LizardBreath at 6:34 PM on June 27, 2022


+1 to kevinbelt. Wes Anderson is manneristic.
posted by adamrice at 6:55 PM on June 27, 2022 [3 favorites]


Yep. He’s a bit of a gadfly with his influences, but his personal style is basically the dictionary definition of “mannered”.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 7:05 PM on June 27, 2022


I don't understand why people are saying magical realism. That includes magic, and unless I'm forgetting something major, Wes Anderson's work does not.
posted by FencingGal at 7:12 PM on June 27, 2022 [6 favorites]


Sometimes I use the word "uncanny" for this, especially if it's more on the creepy than whimsical side.
posted by sigmagalator at 8:38 PM on June 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


Magic realism is a pretty controversial term, for example, is it cultural appropriation to use it outside of its original context of Latin American literature, and how it relates to the genre fiction /literary fiction divide. This article gives a good overview.
posted by Zumbador at 11:04 PM on June 27, 2022 [3 favorites]


I call it whatever Michael Ondaatje wrote.
posted by oldnumberseven at 2:46 AM on June 28, 2022


There are a lot of works of fiction with a tone lying somewhere between quirky and fanciful, but I'm not aware of a larger generic term for this style.
posted by Morpeth at 4:34 AM on June 28, 2022


A subset of what you're looking for might be 'Gothic'. It's common in the English cultural scene, where it overlaps with 'folk horror'.
posted by glasseyes at 7:07 AM on June 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


I don't know that this is an accepted term, but I'd call it "Hyper-stylized."
posted by Ragged Richard at 8:21 AM on June 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


This sounds like the New Weird literary movement. Jeff Vandermeer was a big part of it from the start, he's probably the most well-known of the authors.
posted by ananci at 10:09 AM on June 28, 2022


Wes-Anderson-esque
posted by othrechaz at 10:44 AM on June 28, 2022


Absurdist.
posted by vitabellosi at 2:56 AM on June 30, 2022


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