d of the Rings and its host of imitators. Fantasy of that sort has much in common with science fiction. It may take place in exotic settings--in the case of fantasy, often vaguely medieval settings suggestive of those of fairy tales--and be peopled in part by fantastic beings such as dragons or elves, possessing magical powers. However exotic the details of these settings, however, an underlying presupposition of such fictional worlds is that they operate in an orderly way. Effect follows cause, though it may do so through mechanisms different from those acknowledged by contemporary science.
The underlying structural assumptions of magic realism are very nearly opposite to those of fantasy of this sort. Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's Children, for example, does not take place in some imaginary kingdom, but in India. At the very beginning of the novel we are fixed in a real setting: "I was born in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947" (Rushdie 3). The narrator wants to begin in fairy-tale fashion, "once upon a time," but then has to admit that in fact it was a specific and historical time.
The situation in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is somewhat different. Here the setting is indeed imaginary; the village of Macondo, somewhere in a world only loosely based upon the actual Latin America. "Jose Arcadio Buendia was completely ignorant of the geography of the region. He knew that to the east there lay an impenetrable mountain chain and that on the other side of the mountains there was the ancient city of Riohacha" (Marquez 10) Real names sometimes intrude, in an oblique way; for example, we are told of Riohacha that Sir Francis Drake once "had gone crocodile hunting with cannons and that he repaired them and stuffed them with straw to bring to Queen Elizabeth" (Marquez 10...