I hadn’t been looking at Duotrope or Ralan in a while. Since Speculations.com went pffft, I have been out of touch with the Spec Fic community. Another Realm’s board is all but dead, and the SamsDot board is primarily SamsDot business. I have even tried browsing sff.net, but their Usenet based discussion is clunky and for the most part not relevant.

I stopped by Ralan’s site to check out what is new and I noticed that he has a new genre classification. It is MagReal, short for Magic Realism. This used to be an artistic genre from the 1940s where realistically depicted subjects are presented with a fantastic or magical element. Literary MagReal is when a story is set in modern, very real settings and situations, but a fantastic element is added that is treated as real.

I immediately think of Heinlein’s Magic, Inc., which is a crime story about a society where magic is very real, but there is a crime syndicate that blackmails, murders and robs legitimate business. It is a pun on Murder, Inc. The story is told as a modern crime story with modern settings, except that magic is possible.

I think that Harry Potter might be the inspiration for MagReal and the reason why zines are looking for this kind of story. Harry lives in a modern, realistic England, yet there are fantasy themes that are treated with equal realism.

This kind of story was popular in Unknown Stories from the 1940s and was the forte of L. Sprague deCamp, one of my favorite writers. It was well done by writers like Poe and especially Hawthorne, who wrote some of the best fantasy stories ever. In Hawthorne’s stories, the fantastic is presented as ordinary and quite real.

The MagReal mode is quite old, but it seems to flourish as a contrast to the harsh realism of modern fiction. Adding an element of fantasy makes reality that much harsher and more threatening, and that is also one of the selling points of modern MagReal. The purpose of MagReal is often not escape, as in the Potter Books, but in contrasting the real and punching the impact in the harsh non-fantastic world.

Magic realism–a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the ‘reliable’ tone of objective realistic report. Designating a tendency of the modern novel to reach beyond the confines of realism and draw upon the energies of fable, folk tale, and myth while maintaining a strong contemporary social relevance. The fantastic attributes given to characters in such novels–levitation, flight, telepathy, telekinesis–are among the means that magic realism adopts in order to encompass the often phantasmagoric political realities of the 20th century. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)