Aquatic Fantasy: A New Genre?

Looking through my books one day, searching for something to read, I couldn’t help but notice a theme. Scanning my shelves, I saw titles like: A Study in Drowning, The Half-Drowned King, He Who Drowned the World, We the Drowned. I laughed to myself, thinking I’d clearly hyperfixated. But I couldn’t help but notice that those weren’t the only books I owned that centered around water. Two other books that I adored were Piranesi and The Starless Sea, and even within the past few months, the books I’ve purchased have included A Dark and Drowning Tide, Tress of the Emerald Sea, A River Enchanted, What the River Knows, and Curious Tides. 

When I saw Curious Tides, I was reminded of a video I’d seen on tiktok, by a user @katiewuwrites, in which she introduced the idea of “a sub sub sub genre of fantasy that I have coined aquatic fantasy.” The books she showed were A Study in Drowning and Curious Tides. I thought about her term, and the books that I own. Excluding We, The Drowned, every book I’ve mentioned is fantasy. I found myself curious about this idea of aquatic fantasy and began my research. 

Understandably, as a proposed new “sub sub sub genre,” there was a limited amount of information available. However, Goodreads seems to have accepted the term, as it had a whole list of books categorized as aquatic fantasy. Within these novels, there is actually quite a bit of overlap between the genres to which they belong. It goes without saying that the novels are fantasy. Furthermore, all that were listed also had romance as a genre, though that hardly feels surprising. Nowadays, many fantasy novels include romance, either as a subplot or as part of the main plot, making it a romantasy. 

More interestingly, the most common overlapping genres for these books were mystery, gothic, and dark academia. Aquatic fantasy books that were listed under mystery include A Study in Drowning, Piranesi, A Dark and Drowning Tide, Voyage of the Damned, A River Enchanted, What the River Knows, House of Salt and Sorrows, and Curious Tides. In these examples of the genre, the mystery nearly always involved the water, or had a setting of water. For example, in Piranesi the mystery revolves around the narrator Piranesi, who lives in a labyrinth of a house, with infinite rooms, with an ocean contained in this labyrinth, changing the paths of its tides daily. The mystery is largely about this body of water. In A Dark and Drowning Tide, there are six students on a boat searching for the Ursprung–the spring that is the source of all magic–when their teacher and leader is murdered, and they must continue on their quest while uncovering who killed their professor. While like Piranesi, there is a mystery directly concerned with a body of water, there is also a mystery that is operating outside of that. Meanwhile, Voyage of the Damned is a novel in which a powerful heir is murdered and the main protagonist–and the only one aboard the ship with no powers–must find the killer while trapped at sea. Thus, while there are varying levels to which water is involved, water is always involved in a way that is central to the plot. 

In the Goodreads list, there were also several aquatic fantasies listed under ‘Gothic.’ Those books included A Study in Drowning, A Dark and Drowning Tide, The Dark Tide, House of Salt and Sorrows, The Starless Sea, and Piranesi. The gothic genre is known for its gloomy, atmospheric setting, exploration of darker–and often supernatural–themes, and frequently, though not always, romance mixed amongst the darker aspects. A Study in Drowning is a novel in which the main protagonist travels to fix the manor of her deceased favorite author, and arrives to find it sitting on a cliff, crumbling into the sea, while her academic rival and love interest investigates whether the author is a fraud or not. House of Salt and Sorrows tells the story of twelve sisters living in a manor by the sea, dying off one by one, and the main character must search for the cause with a mysterious stranger turned love interest. The Dark Tide is a novel about a witch queen, who must make a human sacrifice every year on the full moon to keep the island city from sinking into the ocean, and the protagonist of this novel is chosen as the sacrifice, but ultimately she and the witch queen end up falling in love. It is easy to see the gothic elements that exist within these stories. While romance in general is common in fantasy, perhaps because the higher stakes often create interesting and complex tensions, it is fascinating that, due to the atmospheric settings created by the manors and castles beside the sea, these novels verge into gothic territory.

Dark academia is the final genre most common for these aquatic fantasy novels, often accompanied by mystery or gothic. The novels that fall under the dark academia genre are A Study in Drowning, A Dark and Drowning Tide, The Starless Sea, Piranesi, and Curious Tides. Dark Academia is a newer genre, and one rapidly gaining in popularity, so it seems noteworthy that aquatic fantasy appears frequently within this genre. In a Study in Drowning, the main character is a college architecture student, hence why she goes to fix the manor. A Dark and Drowning Tide was a voyage of university students. Curious Tides is a novel that takes place at a college for lunar magic, where the main character, and a mysterious boy known for his proficiency is dark magic (turned love interest), must uncover the truth about a group of students who drowned at the hands of what they suspect is a student cult. The Starless Sea is about a college student who discovers a book that details his life, and explores the magic and power of stories of all kinds, in search of a place called the Starless Sea. The fact that the setting is college and the characters are all students clearly fulfills the academic part. But it’s the ‘dark’ part of dark academia that perhaps offers the beginning of an explanation. Dark academia is a genre that is to no small degree, concerned with aesthetics. This is in part because dark academia is by itself an aesthetic, something that isn’t necessarily true for other genres on their own. For example, a historical fiction novel might have a 1930s aesthetic, but the overarching genre of historical fiction is not an aesthetic the way that dark academia is. The purpose of the dark academia aesthetic is a romanticization of the arts and higher education, balancing sophistication and mystery with learning and nostalgia. The dark academia aesthetic often has melancholic and gothic undertones, so it makes sense to find it in these books that are known to frequently be gothic in their own right. It’s relation to aquatic fantasy could be many things, water does have a history of being associated with knowledge, and that can be seen in What The River Knows, and while it lacks the scientific backing, some enjoy taking artistic liberties with the disproven theory of Jacques Benveniste that water holds memories, which goes along nicely with the nostalgic element of dark academia. 

So then the question becomes, what is it about aquatic fantasy that makes it suitable for these genres, and what is it about the aquatic that lends itself to fantasy? I think it’s because of what water has in common with fantasy and mystery. Even in modern times, eighty percent of the ocean is unexplored. And fantasy and mystery are both concerned with the unknown.  Mystery most obviously, because one is working to solve something unknown, but fantasy authors also create worlds, universes, or magic powers, all of which are ‘unknown’ to readers. With all that is unknown in the ocean, authors can imagine any fantastical creatures, or magic, or mystery that exists within an aquatic setting. While of course, one can create mystery and fantasy anywhere and from anything, it is nice to have a source that one can say, with confidence, “you don’t know what’s really down there.” It is because of this genuine mystery that fear of the ocean is such a common thing. Given that gothic stories tend to lean into darker themes and fear, it tracks that manors by the sea would make for a good setting (not to mention the mental image it creates). 

However, not all books that qualify as aquatic fantasy are mystery, gothic, and dark academia. Tress of the Emerald Sea is a novel about a girl who lives on an island in the Emerald Sea, but Tress leaves her home in order to rescue her friend, travelling on a sea so dangerous that a single drop of water can be fatal. This is clearly an adventure fantasy novel. Fathomfolk is a novel about a city partially submerged in the ocean, where humans look down from their skyscrapers on the sirens, sea witches, and other magical aquatic creatures living in their city’s flooded parts. The novel tells the story of the ‘fathomfolk’(the magical sea creatures), fighting for equality in a city that might be better off left to drown. This novel is classified as high fantasy, rather than one of the more common genres that we’ve seen. While there are definitely still elements of the unknown, such as the fantastical creatures in Fathomfolk or the magic that exists within the Emerald Sea, these are unknowns that are established to the characters and are only new to the reader. These novels are not so much about the discovery of water but, like many adventure and high fantasy tales, a discovery of self for the hero, in which the water is a part of the journey. 

Yet, I do think that both Tress of the Emerald Sea and Fathomfolk belong under the aquatic fantasy category. I think the easiest and most obvious way to categorize the idea of aquatic fantasy would be this: if in the fantasy novel, having a water setting, or water magic, is integral for the plot and/or characters, it could be considered aquatic fantasy. It’s just that the water in question carries different connotations. The genres that commonly overlap with it, while interesting and worth considering, are not restrictive. These kinds of books are relatively recent, with the majority of them having been published only in the last three years (many having come out this year), and the earliest one classified by Goodreads only came out in 2019.

I’m not making a claim that stories centered around water are new and have never before existed; I am, however, saying that there is a rising popularity in these books coming out that is creating a recognizable pattern, which some want to classify as a sub-genre. Katie Wu’s video was filled with people offering their own recommendations for her proposed sub genre, and I never even would have noticed this rise is water-based fantasy if every time I went to the bookstore, there wasn’t a new book promising this kind of story–a kind of story that I realize I’ve grown to love.