Genres & Forms
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fantastic literature that creates a coherent invented world in which magic, mythological creatures, and supernatural forces operate, their existence requiring no scientific explanation but resting on its own internal logic and a folkloric-mythological tradition. Unlike science fiction, fantasy appeals not to reason but to imagination and archetypes. The classic canon was established by J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings), drawing on Germanic-Scandinavian mythology; the genre was developed by Ursula K. Le Guin and C. S. Lewis. Ukrainian fantasy draws actively on Slavic mythology and folklore: it was taken up by Maryna and Serhii Diachenko, Volodymyr Areniev, and Dara Kornii, while the sources of its imagery reach back to the demonological motifs of Mykola Hohol (Gogol) and the folk tales collected by Ivan Franko.
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Compare “Fantasy” with another term
Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two genres of invented worlds, separated by the NATURE of their premise. Science fiction builds the impossible on a RATIONAL, pseudo-scientific basis — technology, space, the future, the consequences of discovery — and seeks at least imagined plausibility. Fantasy rests on MAGIC, myth and the supernatural as the self-evident given of a secondary world, requiring no scientific explanation. One extrapolates science; the other revives fairy tale and myth.
