In Things Invisible to See, Schimel combines his interests in LGBT and fantasy themes, producing a collection of LGBT-themed magic realism. In his introduction, Schimel acknowledges the difficulty in defining a term as broad as "magic realism". In the case of Things Invisible, however, it's fair to say that magic realism encompasses the broad generic territory between what we acknowledge as genre fantasy and "realistic" or "mainstream" fiction. In the realm of magic realism, everything might seem perfectly realistic, right up until Aunt Petunia discovers a miniature unicorn grazing on the carpet under the setee.

In the far-future utopian Galaxy of Stone, pervasive nanotechnology has eliminated disease and poverty. War is a distant memory. Crime is unknown. Or rather, almost unknown: the only criminal in all the known Galaxy is Ae, a viscious serial killer, stripped of nanotechnology and left to wither and die, buried inside a star. Ae has nothing to lose when a disembodied voice makes a proposition: freedom from the impregnable jailstar in exchange for the commission of genocide. But, once freed, once faced with the task of genocide, Ae is haunted by unresolvable questions. In a utopian empire, who could aspire to genocide? And why?