Historical/fantasy fiction blog Fresh-scraped Vellum has a good post on defining the “historical fantasy” genre here. Figuring out what genre my WIP should be classified in has been something of a headache for me; it’s reassuring to have some outside confirmation that I can still call it fantasy even though it has no magic.
Personally, I think that imaginary setting + constructed language should be enough to qualify a book as fantasy. But I admit that when I wrote the thing I wasn’t really thinking about how much of a challenge it would be to query it. How do you a query a book that reads like historical fiction but isn’t (and has elements of a political thriller and a family saga thrown in)? If I call it fantasy, most people are going to assume it has some sort of magic component; if I call it historical fantasy, most people are going to assume it has some sort of magic component and takes place in our real-world past.
Guy Gavriel Kay is the obvious go-to guy for comparison here, though from the (embarrassingly small amount of) Kay I’ve read, he still typically has some kind of skeletal magic system in the background. Lian Hearn, too; her Otori series still has a subtle magical thread running through it.
I console myself by telling myself that I wrote what I want to read. And I remember a quote from Charlaine Harris: If it pleases you and you can write at all, it’s gonna please somebody else.