splutter splutter urban fantasy splutter

[ellenkushner]

I haven't even finished the no doubt excellent new Salon article by Laura Miller on "the kickass young heroines of urban fantasy fiction" but this had me seeing red:

"...the term "urban fantasy" (meaning fantasies set in the contemporary world) was first applied to the work of such writers as Neil Gaiman and John Crowley, whose aspirations are more literary. . . . "

Oh, the giantness of this GIANT FAIL!!!!!

Of course it's only 2 male authors who are cited - probably the only fantasists who she can even think of with "literary aspirations" . . . . .

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_stranger_here/]

I had the same reaction. "Uh, no!"

[fireriven.livejournal.com]

Neil Gaiman has literary aspirations? (This is not a negative comment. I think he'd hear that and be bemused.)

[fireriven.livejournal.com]

P.S. I tried to read the actual article myself, but I had to stop after the first page was riddled with so many factual errors that I found myself grinding my teeth in irritation.

[shanejayell.livejournal.com]

*chokes on his coffee*

Geeze, what about Tanya Huff? Or Charles De Lint? Hell, Mercedes Lackey has written 'urban fantasy' before them.

[donnaidh-sidhe.livejournal.com]

I was about to say...

[matt_doyle]

When a two-second search of wikipedia suggests that's incorrect... someone needs to do more research. De Lint, Bull, and the Bordertown anthologies....

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

Seriously.

Also ... In what way is "urban fantasy" bounded by "the contemporary world"? Last I checked the world was not exclusively urban. I wouldn't call Peter Beagle's Tamsin urban fantasy, nor Terri Windling's The Wood Wife. Surely "urban fantasy" should mean not only fantasy in an urban setting, but fantasy that explicitly engages with that setting in a way that informs the story?

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Your icon is like unto a god to me. *g*

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

WHAT!!!

[elissa-carey.livejournal.com]

Oh NO she didn't!

Wow. Just... wow. I'm sitting here reading CdL's "Moonheart" as we speak; that somehow doesn't count?

I think our little Salon author needs to be emailed with a gentle correction. With a CC to the supervising editor.

[gerriwritinglog.livejournal.com]

*resists throttling the author of that article*

Ignorance, ignorance, ignorance. It flows. Painful.

Urban fantasy has been around for decades. It's not a nice, shiny, new thing.

*gha*

Urban chic lit fantasy is new. Not Urban fantasy.

[meridym.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[paulakate.livejournal.com]

Heavens, has she never heard of research? Wikipedia has a good basic article.

[avendya.livejournal.com]

Wait, what urban fantasy has Gaiman written? Neverwhere, yes, American Gods is not easily classifiable as anything. Stardust, no, Anansi Boys, I'd say no, The Graveyard Book, no, Coraline, no.

[paulakate.livejournal.com]

Neverwhere.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Not to mention, ye gods--how do you determine an author's aspirations? Auctorial intent is hard enough to talk about with any given work; how does a reader accurately determine what a writer wishes she or he could accomplish, solely on the basis of the printed page?

And what are "literary aspirations?" Is that code for, "I want to be taken seriously outside the genre, so my book gets put on one of those front tables at Barnes & Noble?"

Or possibly code for, "I don't want to write junk; I want to write good books?" I don't know any writers who don't aspire to that.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

You noticed that, eh?

It's what I think of as the "Well, at least they don't have cars on the lawn like that other trash" school of patronizing.

[vcmw]

I think the article was best read on fast skim, but...
at least she talked about the whole host of authors who I habitually read who are completely absent in the discussions at the last three conventions I've been to.

I like Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, Tanya Huff and the Bordertown world a great deal, but when I think of urban fantasy at the moment I'm likely to think of exactly the authors the article mentioned: Laurell K Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews, (I'd add Kelley Armstrong and Carrie Vaughn, but that's me - they sell as well, I think, or better than Ilona Andrews but probably not quite as well as the early part of the list).

And I rarely if ever hear those authors discussed in the fantasy blogs/websites/conventions/panels I've been to. I hear them discussed on the romance websites and blogs I hang out on, but not the fantasy ones.

I hear words that sound intended to be marginalizing, such as "urban fantasy chick lit" and others, thrown at these works, and it makes me feel a bit marginalized. I don't think this article was meant to be a history of urban fantasy, but a snap shot of a particular type of closely grouped urban fantasy novels being written right now, and a bit of writing about some of the psychological/sociological terrain those novels are exploring.

[meridym.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes! At a romance writers' meeting I attended last year in Colorado, a woman came to speak to us about writing "urban fantasy." It was all about the writing being done by Hamilton, Harris, Briggs, et al. (I would add the wonderful Eileen Wilks into that group too), with nary a mention of the urban fantasy I cut my teeth on decades ago and still love. When I tell my romance-writing friends I'm writing urban fantasy, they expect a very different sort of story than the one I'm writing.

[jongibbs.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiousity, to who's work was the term first applied?

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

If you read all the comments to this post, you'll learn a lot.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

There's a solid school of critical thought that would apply urban fantasy to any fantasy set solidly in a city, regardless of time period, too -- which would allow a number of books that long pre-date Gaiman and co, and would include Sir Pterry's Guards books, Swordspoint and arguably Gormenghast (yes, I know it's a castle, not a city, but the argument goes that it is functionally an urban community).
But by any calculation the 'urban fantasy' as we now know it surely goes back to the likes of Sheridan LeFanu, Bran Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe ('Murders in the Rue Morgue') and so forth, via Wheatley, de Lint, Diana Wynne Jones, the luminous Emma Bull and so forth. It's grown partly out of the Romance tradition of Dumas and Sabatini, partly out of folkloric novels like Lud in the Mist and partly out of horror, surely? The first books I can remember reading that had the distinctive urban fantasy feel were by YA author Louise Lawrence, published in the 70s and set in a near-future (Andra, for instance, and Catherine Storr's Tam Lin novel Thursday, which I think was early 70s also.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people are content to pronounce on fantasy having read very little, but being certain that the small amount they have read typifies and represents the whole. (edited to fix italics)

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

You might want, then, to take issue with Wiki's definition: "novels and stories with supernatural content, set in contemporary, real-world, urban settings—as opposed to 'traditional' fantasy set in wholly imaginary landscapes, even ones containing imaginary cities, or having most of their action take place in them."

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

Clearly, lack of research is for fail.

[little-carrot.livejournal.com]

Agreed. We enjoyed the article, and picked up some recs for future fluff reading, but were both aghast at the suggestion that Gaiman started urban fantasy, a suggestion that I think even Gaiman would dispute.

[meridym.livejournal.com]

...a suggestion that I think even Gaiman would dispute

He'd better! ; )

GRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!

[rojomojo.livejournal.com]

Before I read others comments, I must vent! Then I'll be civil and read others comments.

In the past two years I have been traveling on business by plane way more than I bargained for. So, while stuck in hotel rooms and restaurants by myself, I read. a lot. Maybe not three or four books a week anymore. I require more sleep as my hair gets blonder by the day (keep telling yourself that, old farte).

I have seen a trend towards so many young, leather clad, tatooed evil fighters, I would think that Frank Fraschetti is now the dominant fiction writer in America. Sounding sexist, I don't mind reading of the exploits of these young heroines a little. BUT, one or two per year are fine. Crap, the paperback book covers look like the covers of Maxim, more or less. And a lot of the writing SUCKS. I read one book (okay, tried to read) by Laurell K. Hamilton. It received an honor I had only used for Kant and Berkeley. Trash can material. period. If I want to read a Penthouse Variations volume, I will buy that. It is better written. Too damned many tough and sweet young things.

And to say Urban Fantasy begins and ends there begs the question why that person is writing an article in a gig like Salon instead of her high school newspaper. Anybody ever heard of research? I am sure Urban Fantasy was a genre before the Bordertown series, but that was my introduction. There were so many authors and one major editor involved with that, that my reading of their titles still has not been completed. Terry Windling, Delia Sherman, you, Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Will Shetterley, Midori Snyder, et al are not even mentioned. Goodness, what an oversight. That does not even include other writers like Neil Gaiman, William Gibson (computers, not magick), China Mieville, Kij Johnson, Bellamy Bach, Ellen Steiber, Ellen Datlow, Patricia McKillup and others.

Poorly researched to say the least. Not all the world is vampires and vixens. What about heart, magick, other races and unlimited human potential of spirit. And don't forget Coyote and the Crow Girls.

Babes are what sells now. I don't know if I am more angry at the limited scope of the discussion or the lack of research. Suffice it to say, my life would have been much poorer without the contributions of those mentioned above. Thanks to you all.

rojo

Re: GRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!

[meridym.livejournal.com]

What you said, Husband of Mine. : )

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

What, other than urban fantasy, would one call the novels of Charles Williams, the "other" famous Inkling? His War in Heaven was published in 1930.

[auroramama]

Oooh, nice point! Contemporary settings, ordinary people, Good and Evil, fear and faith...

[sandial.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is that we use the term "urban fantasy" in two related but distinct ways. One is as a literary term (fantasy set in cities, often contemporary, as opposed to epic fantasy with its broad landscapes and quasi-historical settings) and the other is as a commercial genre (at the moment, fantasies set in the familiar contemporary world, usually involving vampires and/or shape-changers, usually with a female protagonist, apparently with a majority female audience).

Are the novels of Thorne Smith (Topper etc.) urban fantasy? If you put aside his particular kind of sozzled, bawdily humorous approach, which has long been out of fashion, I think his work has a reasonable claim to being one of the prototypes of the subgenre. But he didn't do vampires, which seem to be the virtual sine qua non of "urban fantasy" in the current commercial genre sense and his books lack true dangers threatening the characters. They anticipate the screwball comedy of the following decade and that's the other end of the emotional spectrum from the links to the horror genre that commonly inform today's commercial "urban fantasies."

And as long as I'm looking at prototypes, what about the many short stories published in Unknown? Most of today's fantasy writers seem to be unaware of them, yet they were putting vampires, werewolves, wizards, and many other more esoteric kinds of supernaturals in contemporary urban settings in the early 1940s. Some of those were lighthearted, but plenty of others had a serious edge. Consider Williamson's "Darker Than You Think," first published as a novelette in Unknown.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

If Thorne Smith (whom I love) is "urban fantasy", then surely Max Beerbohm dipped his toe into it first and more influentially by including Clio and other muses as characters in Zuleika Dobson, not to mention the Devil in "Enoch Soames"?

And then, before that, there was F. Anstey's 1882 Vice Versa, one of the most enduring fantasies with a completely mundane bourgeois setting.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

I think this is one of those things like "modernism", where a term is applied descriptively to a group of artists, and then is adopted proscriptively by a different group of artists, and so there is confusion about who "really" is writing "urban fantasy"--the folks who were first described in the 1980s as writing it, or the folks who currently self-describe as writing it? Charles de Lint and Laurell K. Hamilton could hardly be more different as writers, so it's a thorny question.

[sandial.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

It's /weird/ the way the definition has shifted SO MUCH over the past 3-4 years.

I've been reviewing for Romantic Times for five years now. The first year that I was in charge of making the nominations for Reviewers' Choice Awards for the SF/F section I asked for an urban fantasy category because there was some good stuff that year (2006, I think it was), in particular Tim Pratt's The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. I got tons of pushback on the term "urban fantasy", because some of the powers that be didn't care for the connotations of the word "urban" and I got stuck with "contemporary fantasy".

Fast forward to May 2007 and the magazine is doing a big article on urban fantasy (for which I provided an extensive sidebar, a lot of which they opted not to include) and taking urban fantasy out of SF/F and making it a subsection of paranormal romance. They also thought it was a completely new genre, which it isn't--it was just getting more visibility in the world of romance readers. As to whether or not that's a good thing or bad thing, I can't say for certain. It is, at best, a mixed blessing.

Funnily, the types of things that I consider to be urban fantasy now get counted as SF/F because they don't really fit the current definition at the magazine--a kickbutt heroine, a gritty urban setting with paranormal baddies, an intense romantic relationship that may not have a happily-ever-after. I call that sort of thing paranormal fantasy, but no one's listening to me. ;)

I have, essentially, given up on reviewing any of the paranormal fantasy authors unless they're authors I've been reviewing for a while (C.E. Murphy, Laura Anne Gilman, Jim Butcher, Kim Harrison, Tim Pratt) or unless the cover copy really catches my eye and I'm able to call dibs before the paranormal section person does. However, I do jump all over books that fall into the traditional definition of the genre; sadly, these seem to be few and far between these days.

(edited to fix a stupid typo in the first line)

[(Anonymous)]

No, it was definitely me. I made it up. Me me me.


Neil

(Oh all right. It wasn't.)

[phoenix64.livejournal.com]

Oh gah, they're not talking about urban fantasy at all, really, they're talking about the "supernatural romance" class of books. Fail, fail, FAIL. Don't put yourself with my genre because you're making my genre look stupid.

[harmfulguy.livejournal.com]

Damn, I wish I'd had the spine to step up a couple of years ago at a con panel where Laurell K. Hamilton made some grandiose claims about her importance to the history of the genre.

[lianneb.livejournal.com]

After reading the article, I wanted to smack the writer. Unfortunately, the 'letters' section of the article has been shut down, so a public response is no longer available.

Back in May, Lori Devoti (a writer of what I consider to be Paranormal) posted about *her* definition of Urban Fantasy (http://www.romancingtheblog.com/blog/2009/05/27/are-we-speaking-the-same-language/). When I pointed out that her definition didn't cover a lot of UF, but instead described more the Paranormal, which for me is usually a subset of UF, she said:

Except paranormal romance came first–at least before what we call UF now (by the points I listed).

When I pointed out that UF was being defined as that in the early eighties, while Paranormal Romance didn't really show up until well into the nineties, she said:

Well that is the difference. And there is a reason I’m not using the original urban fantasy as the “start” in this case, because then there wasn’t the cross over readership. Meaning paranormal romance didn’t start from the original urban fantasy novels; it started on its own. But I think the romance-oriented UF did come somewhat from paranormal romance. If any of that makes sense.

I bowed out at this point, since she was limiting herself to UF as romance subgenre, while I was trying to point out UF as fantasy subgenre, and why were they separate. And I completely disagree that PR *didn't* evolve out of the original UF.