I have a confession: I have not always maintained my current, high-intensity level of fantasy fandom. There was a period (which coincided with several years of full-time school), during which I stopped reading so widely in fantasy literature, and let my fan cred slip shamefully. It was only in mid-2010 that I really began to re-connect with the genre as a whole, and I discovered that I had missed some radical developments in the last four to five years.
One of the most significant of these was brought home to me in a conversation I had last summer with the author Tim Pratt about his Marla Mason series (first book, Blood Engines). He was explaining to me that he published the books as T.A. Pratt largely because of the publisher’s decision to pitch the book to the urban fantasy market. I commented that I liked urban fantasy.
“What do you mean when you say that?” Pratt asked.
I replied that I thought urban fantasy meant books like Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks; stories that were set in cities, and that depicted magical creatures and events in urban environments that played a significant role in the way the tale unfolded.
Pratt then had to inform me that, these days, where people say “urban fantasy,” what they often mean is “books about tattooed women who wear black leather, fight crime, and fend off and/or sleep with supernatural monsters.” It turns out that while I was looking the other way, urban fantasy—and its sister subgenre, paranormal romance—had become not only a hugely popular style of fantasy, but a fairly easy-to-pigeonhole one. Urban fantasy is a tag that seems, at first glance, to refer to a significant but narrow phenomenon.
I’m here to tell you that that’s not true. You have to take the long view instead.
From roughly 2007 onwards, the subgenre term “urban fantasy” started being used—and used frequently—in a way that it hadn’t before. Urban fantasy novels (in the current meaning of the term) like those of Kim Harrison, Patricia Clark, Kelley Armstrong, and Carrie Vaughn are stories in which the fantastic component appears as (in descending order of frequency) vampires, werewolves, monsters, angels, or fairies. Their protagonists are powerful, street-smart women, often with supernatural powers of their own. They usually feature an element of, ahem, emotional drama, as the heroine struggles with some level of attraction for the beasties she fights. Stylistically, the books owe a lot to both the police thriller and romance subgenres.
These kinds of books are not new since 2007—the two heroines most frequently cited as models for the genre, Anita Blake and Buffy Summers, first appeared in 1993 and 1997 respectively (1992 for the movie, but Buffy only achieved social phenomenon status after her incarnation in Joss Whedon’s TV show). As Carrie Vaughn tells it in her recent article on the subgenre, authors were conceiving, writing, and publishing urban fantasy novels well before their publisher’s had an easy label to market it under. It didn’t take readers until the past few years to discover they liked these stories, but the trend has certainly attained juggernaut-like proportions since then.
Let’s step back a few years to the end of the previous century, and let me tell you about War for the Oaks by Emma Bull. War for the Oaks is in many ways an old-fashioned, myth and folktale influenced fantasy story. It is about an unsuspecting human woman who gets caught up in the age-old battle of the fair folk, the immortal and Manichean conflict between the Seelie and Unseelie courts. It is a story populated by brownies and redcaps, trickster phoukas and arrogant sidhe. Its heroine must contend with mysterious powers, both beguiling and horrifying, and although she ultimately transcends the eldritch tests put before her, she is strengthened, saddened, and irrevocably changed by the experience.
It’s also a story set in the prosaic city of Minneapolis. Its battles take place in city parks and grungy warehouses, and the main characters are, when not dealing with the forces of faerie, members of a struggling rock band. It does not fit the model of the supernatural-crime-fighting tough-girl protagonist (Eddi McCandry is a strong, smart heroine, but she’s a guitarist, not the slayer). It is unarguably both fantasy and urban, though. It’s also awesome, and probably one of my top-ten fantasy books of all time.
War for the Oaks was published in 1987, and—although it remains a highly original tale—it is not the only book of its time that blended fantastic stories with urban settings in that distinctive way. Other works that were seminal to what might be called the “old urban fantasy” are Charles de Lint’s stories, particularly those set in the “mythic city” of Newford, and the books that came out of the shared universe Borderlands, a place of gritty urban environments that straddle the border between the everyday world and the world of magic. The Borderlands universe was created by Terri Windling, and Bull and De Lint, as well as a large handful of other established fantasy authors, have contributed to it at different times.
Actually, “old” and “new urban fantasy” turn out to be inaccurate terms as well. As we saw, many of contemporary urban fantasy’s ideas predate their current genre-packaging, and the older type of work has hardly disappeared. Emma Bull may publish sadly infrequently, and the grunge aesthetic that informed the stylistic atmosphere of War for the Oaks may seem like a product of another era, but books that focus on the rough-edged encounter between the man-made and the eldritch continue to appear and to influence the genre world landscape. Neil Gaiman, a huge and very active (just try following him on Twitter!) figure in contemporary fantasy, writes books that fall under this heading. Kraken, China Miéville’s latest, critically acclaimed work clearly emerges from this urban fantasy tradition as well. Even more historic products of the subgenre seem to have been granted a new lease on life. Terri Windling’s website reports that a new Borderlands anthology, Welcome to Bordertown, edited by Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, will be published by Random House in May 2011.
As often happens, the problem of defining urban fantasy comes down to the limitations of labels. The subgenre as we know it contains more than just the recent crop of popular demon-hunting tales. “New urban fantasy” is not all that new. “Old urban fantasy” is still developing and evolving. “Urban fantasy,” as a category header, is not very definitive. What is clear from all of this is that the question of what magic, or magical creatures, will do when faced with the environments of human civilization is one that continues to inspire authors of many different stripes.
Richard Marpole
Jennie Ivins
Nice overview. I like the broader historical perspective–it’s one that often gets missed.
Personally, I tend to hew to the old vs. new camp division, simply for sake of comparison in terms of literary trends. When you talk “urban fantasy” in the industry now, most people seem to gravitate to the mega-selling paranormal-romance trend, centering on the above-mention vampires, werewolves, etc. To a large degree, success has re-defined the term, making what is “hot” the de-facto standard for “urban fantasy.” The irony is, as you mention, that prior to Blake and Harrison catching on, the label fell more squarely on the Bull/de Lint camp (something I’ve started referring to as “traditional urban fantasy”, for lack of a better term, although that has it’s own problems as well).
The trick is that if you are talking about “urban fantasy” in relation to the older style of works, you now need to add a qualifier of some sort: no werewolves/vampires, no emphasis on romantic plot line, etc. Simply saying “I’m working on/reading an urban fantasy” sums up a very specific assumption for most people. So, while the archaeology of the term may be more complex, the reality is that current use has been more narrowly defined by the marketplace. There is nothing wrong with that, as that is what’s selling and the winners/sellers get to define the marketing material in many ways; but it makes it harder to find an appropriate label for the other works.
So, in short, while the term “urban fantasy” does indeed have a lot of history, and arguably applies to a broader genre, I fear that the market now defines the term more narrowly. Our challenge, I think, is to come up with a term or descriptor that helps separate out non-vamp/romance efforts like Bull’s from the swath that has come to define a very specific sub-genre, if only so that we’re not always saying, “Well, it’s urban fantasy, but not the kind where…” If nothing else, having to do keep doing that can get a bit wearing in a conversation. 🙂
You make a good point, Douglas. Glad you liked my article