There’s a particular subgenre of speculative fiction that scratches an itch for me like no other. It’s where you find yourself in a world very much like our own, except one thing is slightly… off. Perhaps there’s a movie theater that plays only memories, or the story centers on a child who learns the language of cats. Or in this familiar-yet-unfamiliar world, everyone wears electronic bracelets that monitor their moods.
These stories place the fantastic alongside the mundane, yet their speculative elements feel subtle compared to other works classified as fantasy or science fiction. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, for example, has a contemporary setting that features one distinct speculative element: the titular midnight library, which is a manifestation of purgatory that allows the main character to travel along alternate life paths.
It’s a fantasy novel, certainly, but to group it with the fantasy worlds of Brandon Sanderson or Robin Hobb feels akin to calling cereal a soup. They’re related but distinct categories.
Maybe I’m simply trying to find stories that recreate the wide-eyed beguilement I felt when watching Pushing Daisies, a whimsical show wherein a pie-maker can resurrect the dead with one touch, but a second touch returns them to the grave forever. When I think of this brand of speculative fiction—the real world but one notch off—dozens of examples spill into my mind, many of them crossing other genres. I think of Every Day by David Levithan, a young adult romance that sends its protagonist into a new body day after day. In V.E. Schwab’s historical novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, a woman gains immortality yet is cursed to be forgotten by others. A man inexplicably transforms into a giant insect in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in a work that blends horror and philosophy.
What all these stories have in common is that they explore human relationships and daily life through the lens of an often-singular or anomalous speculative element. Although terms like magical realism, fabulism, low fantasy, soft sci-fi, and light speculative fiction already exist, I don’t think any of these adequately encompass the narratives I’m talking about—the type of fiction I want to devour as a reader and replicate as a writer.
That’s why I suggest a new subgenre label: curio fiction.
The Defining Features of Curio Fiction
Curio fiction fits snugly under the broad umbrella of speculative fiction. Simply defined, it is a story set in a world identical or similar to our own (whether that setting is contemporary, historical, or near-future), with a twist—an added fantasy, science fiction, or horror element that is examined for its effect on the story’s human characters. Not all stories will fit into genre or subgenre boxes, and there are always overlapping categories.
I wanted to choose a label where the meaning is immediately understood and felt—or at least implied—much as it is with the subgenres of grimdark, noblebright, and steampunk. The term “curio fiction” calls to mind curio cabinets filled with strange delights and curiosity shops where you never know what you’ll find. Merriam-Webster defines a curio as “something considered novel, rare, or bizarre” and also “an unusual or bizarre person.” To me, this perfectly suits the nature of these stories with an unusual component that exists in an otherwise normal world.
In his seminal work on the history of the sci-fi genre, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Darko Suvin proposes the term novum to describe scientifically plausible innovations in science-fiction narratives. The novum—the new thing or novelty—is the element in the story that deviates from the reader’s normal expectations of reality. I’ll use “curio” in a similar fashion to refer to the speculative element that twists a story set in a realistic world into a piece of curio fiction.
Here are what I would consider the five defining features of the curio fiction subgenre:
(1) It takes place in a real-world setting. It need not be a specific, named place in our world, nor does it need to be contemporary. It can be historical or near-future. Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree is set in the Victorian era on a fictional island with a mysterious tree as its curio. When someone tells the tree lies, it delivers hidden truths. Unlike surrealist or absurdist fiction, curio fiction more closely mirrors the logic and human experience of a realistic world.
(2) It explores a story-defining speculative element (a curio) that’s “one notch off” from reality. This could entail a strange place, a person with an unusual power, or a mysterious item. If the curio is a technology, it might be integrated into society and perceived as normal. With a magical curio, the characters typically perceive it as unusual. By contrast, strange happenings are often treated as par for the course in magical realism and fabulism.
If I Stay by Gayle Forman has the hospitalized protagonist stuck between the world of the living and the dead, forced to choose if she wants to wake up from her coma or move on to the afterlife. The curio is that out-of-body experience as the protagonist watches her otherwise ordinary life from afar.
(3) The magic isn’t usually defined as part of a global system, or the speculative element relies on a hand-wavium scientific explanation. The curio is a means for exploring themes or creating conflict, but the author might not explain why it exists or analyze the larger system it operates under (i.e., it’s unclear whether the oddity exists elsewhere in the world or how it came to be). The worldbuilding is smaller in scale and more localized to one character or area, unlike the larger realms of the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Harry Potter.
In Rebecca Serle’s In Five Years, the protagonist spends an hour in her own future five years ahead. When she returns to the present, her experience in the future has changed her perceptions of her present-day life, but the reader never discovers how she went forward in time.
Magic in immersive fantasy has rules and a structure, but in curio fiction, the speculative element stands out from the rest of the world’s rules for no readily apparent reason.
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(4) Humans are the primary focus. Curio fiction centers more on human capabilities than different magical or extraterrestrial species. By contrast, other fantasy subgenres might involve fantastical creatures like dragons or elves, and certain sci-fi subgenres feature various types of aliens or robots. This is also what differentiates curio fiction from most urban fantasy, which often has vampires, werewolves, or the fae folk. The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd is an example of a human-centered approach to the speculative, with the curio being a dash of magical mapmaking.
(5) The story is less concerned about the mechanics of the curio and more interested in its effects on relationships and social systems. Curio fiction is less complex than other speculative genres in terms of worldbuilding but not in terms of characterization, themes, prose, or plot structure. The “what if” question the curio poses often serves as a thought experiment related to time, memory, death, free will, or life-changing choices. Because of that philosophical angle, curio fiction is sometimes more conversation-based than action-based, as in the film The Man from Earth and the TV show The Booth at the End.
Romantic fantasy is a common combination in this subgenre, as it is in the 2009 movie TiMER, where a device counts down the minutes until the user meets their soulmate. Curio stories can involve plots that are more limited in scope, although not always. Stephen King’s The Dead Zone stars a clairvoyant who discovers a nefarious political plot, pushing the novel into the thriller domain with a high-stakes plot.
Human desires take center stage, and the curio often intensifies the desires, fears, and struggles the characters already possess—and would still have in the absence of the curio. The curio simply influences how they confront those challenges.
More Examples of Curio Fiction
Several familiar tropes fit into the curio fiction mold:
Time Loops
- Groundhog Day
- Palm Springs
- The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
- Replay by Ken Grimwood
Body Swap
- Freaky Friday
- Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse
- The Nobodies by Alanna Schubach
Reincarnation
- The Fountain
- Avalon High by Meg Cabot
- My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares
Unusual Aging
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- 13 Going on 30
- 17 Again
The Afterlife
- The Good Place
- Dead Like Me
- Dante’s Inferno
- Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin
Alternate Lives
- Nobody
- Sliding Doors
- Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Telekinesis / Clairvoyance
- Matilda by Roald Dahl
- The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- The Sight of You by Holly Miller
- Numbers by Rachel Ward
Time Travel (when employed as a conduit for a different genre, like romance)
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
- About Time
Portal Fantasy (with dreamlike realities rather than traditional fantasy realms)
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
- The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
- The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
Near-future Technology
- Black Mirror
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- “The Semplica-Girl Diaries” by George Saunders
The one-notch-off fantastical element is even more common in Japanese storytelling. In the anime and manga Fruits Basket, members of a family are cursed to turn into animals of the Zodiac when they’re hugged by the opposite sex. After falling into a cursed hot spring, the male protagonist of Ranma ½ transforms into a woman when splashed with cold water and back into a man when doused with hot water. The films of Makoto Shinkai feature a girl who can control the weather (Weathering with You) and a body-swap narrative with a twist (Your Name).
The Problem with Other Genre Labels
Our present literary vocabulary doesn’t quite capture the idea of realistic fiction that has a single unusual or off-key element. The subgenre labels already floating around aren’t specific enough to pinpoint all the stories sharing that quality. Plus, each label comes with its own set of limitations.
Magical Realism
Magical realism as a genre label is typically reserved for works about postcolonialism, particularly those by Latin American authors. Keystones of the genre include One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, and Beloved by Toni Morrison, all of which tackle the complicated aftermath of white colonization. For this reason, some literary critics question or take issue with the use of magical realism as a label for general fiction that blurs the line between fantasy and reality.
However, because readers don’t have a more fitting term for this genre combination, books like The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender are often categorized as magical realism. In that novel, the main character can taste the emotions of others from the foods they make, but since it doesn’t explore a postcolonial cultural context, and magic is treated as surprising rather than unremarkable, this novel would not, historically speaking, belong in the magical realism category.
Fabulism
Fabulism relates more strongly to fables and myths, as the name implies, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Fabulist stories often feel like the literary cousin to surrealist fiction, where the characters and prose tend to be as surreal and absurd as the world itself.
But in other books that are sometimes labeled as fabulism—like Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane—the characters and writing style remain grounded, staying consistent with the readers’ own experience of the world. Curio stories are not so much an examination of a speculative landscape as they are a look into how the speculative elements affect the real world.
Low Fantasy
Low fantasy is a fair descriptor for stories featuring speculative touches rather than fully immersive worlds, where everything from the geography to the culture is impacted by the fantastical elements. However, this label has become a broad moniker. Sometimes full-on secondary-world fantasy like A Song of Ice and Fire is listed as low fantasy because of the lessened emphasis on magic and nonhuman characters. That just further muddles the definition of low fantasy as a useful term for readers and critics.
There’s also a value judgment in the term low fantasy, although Wikipedia claims the word low refers to “the prominence of traditional fantasy elements within the work and is not a remark on the work’s overall quality.” It still creates an implied hierarchy of low/high or soft/hard world-building, with high fantasy and hard sci-fi sometimes being viewed as more intellectually rigorous.
Soft Sci-Fi
Terms like soft science fiction, fantastical realism, and contemporary fantasy also lean more toward one genre classification over another, but I’m hankering for something more inclusive. With curio fiction, the speculative element functions the same way across genres, no matter if the primary driver of that element stems from fantasy, science fiction, or horror.
For instance, the premise of They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera involves a Death-Cast service where people are told they’re going to die on the day it will happen. It has that speculative element and near-future setting, but it’s not a fully altered sci-fi world. It’s our current world with one thing different.
Light Speculative Fiction
As with low fantasy, the value assumption inherent in the term light speculative fiction is why I’m not a fan of that phrasing. These stories aren’t just “light” versions of larger genres; they merely have different levels of focus and thematic aims.
Light speculative fiction also suggests a lighthearted tone, which isn’t always the case, since curio fiction can overlap with horror and dark fantasy. The film The Brass Teapot, a dark comedy, is one such example. A couple finds a magical brass teapot that generates money when they inflict pain on themselves, and they test how far they can go with that violence.
Why Curio Fiction Matters
I know it sounds like I’m having a “Stop trying to make fetch happen—it’s NOT going to happen” moment here. It might be unclear why this distinction matters at all.
The reason subgenres are important is twofold: they help audiences find these stories more easily, and they give people a way to examine this cohort of narratives using a shared vocabulary. Classification invites us to discuss this subgenre more intensely and thoroughly. And selfishly, I’m hopeful that popularizing a term like curio fiction will give me another way to describe the stories I love.
Like other forms of speculative fiction, curio fiction interrogates real-world questions and problems via the fantastic. The curio is a vehicle for underscoring a particular concept and narrowing the story’s scope, like in The Time Traveler’s Wife. In the novel, a man with “chrono-displacement disorder” tries to manage his relationship with his present/future wife as he uncontrollably travels across the span of his own life, unable to affect any of the events. The time-travel element allows the author to highlight the inevitable nature of time and the chronology of our life stories.
Curio fiction also provides an easier entry point for readers who might not want to navigate an elaborate secondary world. Because the story is grounded in a familiar reality, that lowers the learning curve and mental barriers so the reader can directly compare the story’s themes to their own lives and choices.
For authors, a label like curio fiction might help them set expectations with their readers. Several books and movies I’ve mentioned in this article have been criticized in reviews for not being magical enough or for not providing a scientific explanation for the story’s unusual element. Much like noir communicates the idea of morally ambiguous characters to prospective readers, so could curio fiction inform them that “this story is more concerned with the effect than the cause.”
When we group stories with similar qualities together, we can better explore what they aim to achieve in the larger narrative landscape. Or, if I’m being honest, I just really want to read more fiction that’s like Pushing Daisies.
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Which stories would you classify as curio fiction? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Originally published September 2022.
Diane Callahan spends her days shaping stories as a writer and developmental editor. Her YouTube channel, Quotidian Writer, provides practical tips for aspiring authors.
