calimac's whole theory of urban fantasy

[calimac]

This started as a response to brisingamen's Bittercon post, but it turned out long and expository enough to deserve a post of its own.

I think that "urban fantasy" as generally understood has to be looked at in terms of the difference between fantasy and horror, and that can be most easily set out in a chart like this.

Genre	Needs to be scientifically plausible	Appeals primarily to
Science Fiction	Yes	Sense of wonder
Fantasy	No	Sense of wonder
Horror	No	Sense of horror

Now, certainly this is a generalization. There is such a thing as science-fiction horror, for instance, and many fantasies appeal to both the sense of wonder and the sense of horror. And to many horror fans, there seems to be no significant difference: the World Fantasy Convention, so-called, tends to consider fantasy and horror completely interchangeable, and if anything they favor horror more. (Their award is modeled after H.P. Lovecraft, the prototypical science-fiction horror author.)

But to me the difference is profound, because I like the sense of wonder and abjure the sense of horror. (The border between the two creates a similar clash to the one I get between folk music, which I love, and country music, which I detest. Bluegrass is right on the edge, and I can never tell in advance if I'll love it or hate it.) Horror, I'd say, is scary or horrifying, and why should one want to be scared or horrified? That's a contradiction to what "scary" and "horrifying" mean.

So what does this have to do with urban fantasy? Simply this: that for a long time in writing of the fantastic, it was a given assumption that supernatural critters and events could be wondrous or joyful if encountered in an imaginary world with a faux-medieval setting, but were creepy or scary if you found them in your own world. Again, this isn't the whole story. Tolkien's Elves are the prototypically appealing, entrancing fairy creatures, though especially in Smith of Wootton Major they are also eerie and scary to Smith. And there were always ways of making fantasy-in-the-real-world enjoyable rather than scary: It could be elusive and ethereal, in proto-magical realism books like Robert Nathan's Portrait of Jennie or Peter Beagle's A Fine and Private Place, or you could write a comedy, like Thorne Smith or any number of children's romps from E. Nesbit onwards, or, rarely, you could emphasize the spiritual and holy, like Charles Williams.

But as a generalization, it held for a long time. And that makes sense, because faux-medieval is the setting of traditional fairy tales, while if you really did encounter a magical creature in daily life, you'd probably wig out. Trying to imagine one that would entrance and appeal to you is a large part of why some of us read fantasy, but it's difficult to conceive.

But then some authors began to break that mold, in the early days of genre fantasy in the late 1970s. The trickle became a flood when Charles de Lint came along in the early 80s and made a career out of writing what had become known as "Contemporary Urban Fantasies." For de Lint's stories were mostly set in a city modeled on his home of Ottawa, and other contemporary fantasies tended to have urban settings. (The touchstone CUF, which didn't come along until the subfield was well-established, was probably War for the Oaks.) And the faux-medieval settings tended to be mostly rural.

But then the urban/rural line that ran along with the border between contemporary and faux-medieval started to get smudged. Mostly due to the advent of Contemporary Rural Fantasies, of which I recall de Lint's The Little Country as a prototype. Gradually a new name appeared, Indigenous Fantasy. I liked that name, because the strongest characteristic of the best stories of this kind was an intense sense of place, when that place was either real or closely based on a real place (e.g. Beagle's Avicenna), down to specific buildings that had inspired the author. Northern California was a particularly rich source for these.* When we chose "Fantasy in the World Around Us" as the theme for Mythcon in Berkeley in 1995 - and had Tim Powers, a notable author of contemporary (and historical, rather than faux-medieval) urban fantasies that just touched the edge of horror, as Guest of Honor - we included a list of 56 novels fitting the theme that the committee recommended, and at least a third of them had local settings. And on the last day of the con I led a walking tour of mythic Berkeley, pointing out sights evoked by various authors whose books were set there. (This tour was reprised in 2007 with an even bigger group.)

But then there also arose non-indigenous fantasies - not closely modeled on real places - that were urban. There had always been sword-and-sorcery stories with urban settings, like Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar, but the prototype of urban high fantasy was Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, and the school of Peakean fantasists of recent times have been mostly urban, China Mieville's Perdido Street Station being the obvious example.

So I don't really consider "urban fantasy" to be a meaningful sub-genre except insofar as it distantly echoes the memory of the days when indigenous fantasies were mostly Contemporary Urban Fantasies.

*Indigenous fantasies were also sometimes set in the far future. Two Northern California settings, otherwise of intensely contrasting aesthetic, can stand for these: Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home and Diana Paxson's Westria.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

The connector I see running through (maybe bypassing de Lint, which makes the subject more interesting) but having at least reflected influence on so many urban fantasies of the present is Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard. It has a strong sense of place--though set in Elizabethan times--but it is her version of the fae which I find reflected down through the years, in so many depictions.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's a different point, but just as - as I point out in another comment - the adventure and conflict elements in most so-called Tolclones stem from Robert Howard, and not from Tolkien, I'd also agree that the Elves and fairies in many post-Tolkien fantasies are Pope's fae, not Tolkien's Elves. This particularly applies to War for the Oaks, and a sudden "click" of ideas snapping together has occurred in my mind thanks to your bringing this up.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

I don't dislike horror, but I was raised on Thorne Smith so my taste has always been towards urban fantasy. Smith's work while humorous also tended to tread heavily in romance territory.
Later work, such as "Heart and Souls" did the same.
Then there were the Fursey stories.
While set in the tenth century, they were urban fantasy written in that time frame (and quite good I might add).
More recently, the "Anita" stories by Keith Roberts.
These days, the best practitioner of horror, fantasy and humor is Christopher Moore.
I can tell you that I have always found that "High Fantasy" bore me to tears.
Likely another aspect of my taste in horror.
The best stuff has to happen in the light of day.
Anyone can be scared in a dark room.
A real master can do so on a sunny afternnon in a field of daises.
I'll shut up now.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The distinction I find most useful is between overt fantasy and covert fantasy. In overt fantasy, the magical elements (to use a short label for them, without intent to endorse a specific definition of "magic") are a known and generally recognized part of the world, and the author's job includes building a world that is different from ours in having magic. In covert fantasy, the magical elements are not generally recognized, and the world need not be any different from ours; the author's job is to show what forces keep the magical unseen (or occult, to use the classical word for it).

Worldbuilding fantasy is not the only way to do overt fantasy. People before the triumph of natural science often believed in magical elements in the world; you can tell a story set in the middle ages, say, where people believe there are spells and faeries and monsters, and have it be true that such things exist. This shades into fantasy set in a past beyond historical record (as with Conan or Tolkien's Middle-Earth) and that into fantasy set in a wholly invented world.

Conversely, it's conceivable that one might do worldbuilding for a covert fantasy story, elaborately constructing a world other than ours where magic was a hidden presence; but it would probably be a weird kind of literary pushmi-pullyu, with one "what if" about the occult forces, and one hidden premise about the surface history of the world, and the two kept insulated from each other. So I think there's a natural affinity of covert fantasy for this-world settings, especially present-day this-world settings, which take place inside of Max Weber's "iron cage" of rationality.

I note that many people use "high fantasy" to mean worldbuilding fantasy, and "low fantasy" to mean nonworldbuilding fantasy. I find this usage awkward; Charles Williams's stories about archetypal powers in (his) present-day London strike me as "high" and Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories as "low." I prefer to think of high fantasy as approaching myth, and low fantasy as approaching realism, with an emphasis on daily life and how it's affected by magical elements. That's a different distinction.

And urban settings can take place in fantasy of any sort: in mythic fantasy and folkloric fantasy, in the real world and in invented worlds, in fantasy with overt magic and fantasy with covert magic. The name "urban fantasy" has taken on the significance it has because the modern world is so urbanized (we have lately reached the point where over half of human beings are city dwellers), and so stories set in the modern world tend to have no overt magic (because the UN doesn't have a delegation from Faerie, or Heaven, or Oz), and to be set in big cities, and to have characters who take a prudential, pragmatic approach to their goals and to magical phenomena. But it picks out an accidental and less important aspect of the complex as the key. It could be called "modern fantasy" just as well, or "cismundane fantasy" as opposed to "transmundane fantasy," or "occult fantasy."

[marycatelli]

If the magic clearly exists in a historical setting, I think you're getting into alternate history -- unless you explain how it was hidden from historical record, which starts to push it into the covert arena.

high vs. low

[marycatelli]

High fantasy is fantasy like The Lord of the Rings.

Low fantasy is fantasy that contrasts with some element of high fantasy. Which element depends on what the writer picks. It gets a lot of meanings, which is why the term is completely useless. 0:)

(World-building vs. not is one such antithesis.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The mapping of your overt vs. covert distinction onto mine of contemporary (and known-historical) vs. outside of known history strikes me as very interesting. It is axiomatic that fantasy set in the known world has to be covert, because "magic does not exist", but there are a couple curious assumptions behind that.

One is, that I think the everyday definition of magic/fantasy in our culture is "that which, according to consensus reality, does not exist," making the necessity for covert settings tautological. This only creates a problem in other-worldly settings which have everyday magic but whose societies make our distinctions. [Insert my diatribe about Elfquest here: some other time, perhaps.]

(This also creates interesting taxonomic problems for authors who depart from consensus reality and themselves believe that things called "magic" really do exist. If the author believes in it, is it fantasy? Examples: Paxson, Starhawk.)

The other curious assumption, as you allude to in your pushmi-pullyu case, comes up in multiple-world portal cases, where our world is always presented as unique among all the worlds in lacking magic. Poor us. There is also the curious side effect that, if the heroes are people from the other world operating in ours, they usually have to be covert*; while if they're from our world operating in the other world, they are always extremely famous. (Examples: the Kings and Queens of Narnia; Poul Anderson's Holger the Dane.)

Do you have any examples in mind of overt fantasies with real-world medieval settings? (I'm excluding imaginary pasts like Howard's and Tolkien's.) I am sort of echoing the point in the first comment from marycatelli.

More on next comment rock.

*Exception: if they turn out to be Arthur come again, or some such.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The first one I would name is The Once and Future King. I suppose technically it's alternate historical fantasy, but White barely alludes to the idea that the Pendragons are an alternate-timeline version of the Plantagenets.

C. L. Moore's sword and sorcery stories about Jirel of Joiry seem to be set in a fantasticalized version of the historical middle ages.

James Branch Cabell has at least some novels that take place in real history, notably the one that takes place in the very decadent France of the early 17th century.

And if you want to go way back, both Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes" and Coleridge's "Christabel" take place in the-real-world-plus-fantastic-elements. Not to mention one of Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," where Castor and Pollus show up to fight for the Romans against the wicked Etruscans.

Bill Stoddard

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I agree with your point that urban settings can be used in any sort of fantasy. See the last paragraph (before the footnote) of my original post.

Now, about high vs. low.

The common usage distinction you find awkward, though not that terminology, was applied by Lin Carter in Imaginary Worlds, his 1973 survey, which he limited to what he called, no surprise, the imaginary-world tradition in fantasy, excluding this-worldly settings.

Two notes about this, however. First, that Carter was not totally consistent about this, and included some books that don't fit, like The Once and Future King, which is nominally alternate-universe but is hardly imaginary-world. He also included a couple imaginary-world stories with NO MAGIC WHATEVER, strikingly among them Islandia.

And second, that he seemed totally unaware that by creating his imaginary-world category he was indiscriminately mixing together two utterly different traditions: the ([then] mostly British) epic myth-fantasy tradition (Morris to Tolkien) and the (mostly American) sword-and-sorcery tradition. This clashed for me tremendously when I first read the book, because I love the first tradition more than any other fiction, while the second merely bores me.

Carter's distinction was continued by Boyer and Zahorski in their Fantastic Imagination anthologies. They're the guys responsible for putting the "high fantasy" label on other-worldly settings and the "low fantasy" label on this-worldly ones. They define high fantasy as 1) otherworldly, 2) archetypal, and 3) elevated. Low fantasy is any fantasy which is not.

In the Mythopoeic Society, we don't find the otherworldly part of the distinction very useful, because we have to rope in Charles Williams' very this-worldly fantasies and CS Lewis's mythic science-fiction. So we use the concept of "mythopoeic fantasy", fantasy employing mythic resonance, which need not be limited to other-worldly settings, but which nicely excludes sword-and-sorcery, which isn't mythic in that sense. (It also excludes most Tolclones, which are actually sword-and-sorcery and not Tolkienian myth fantasy at all.)

Confusingly, Boyer and Zahorski use "myth fantasy" to mean a subset of what they're calling "high fantasy."

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

In my head I often lump some fantasy into high-or-low based on other traits, such as types of characters (e.g., royalty vs. peasants, the elf factor) and how stylized the whole thing seems to be.

For the latter, the distinction somewhat reminds me of the Church of England and the high church-vs-broad church thing, or American Catholics and the guitar mass. Is there lots of incense? Does it use only the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer? Do hippies show up singing "Michael, row the boat ashore" or is it strictly organ-and-choir? If that makes any sense.

For the types of characters, well it doesn't help that bad fantasy tends to take "ordinary" people who turn out to be not just heroes but also secretly royalty or half-elf. Still, there are definite trends where the protagonists are commoners or somehow special.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

As you sort of note, this comes perilously close to defining "high fantasy" as "bad fantasy". And ghu knows there's a lot of it. This was the great achievement of Lester del Rey: before his editorial hand invaded the field with a swath in 1977, there was no such thing as bad high fantasy. (There was bad sword and sorcery, but that's not the same thing.)

What's striking here is how very different The Lord of the Rings is from its many supposed imitators. The quest is to destroy a powerful weapon, not to gain a series of McGuffin trinkets (upon the collection of which the characters can, in Nick Lowe's words, send off to the author for the ending); the lowly achieve the task, but they don't turn out to be the king in disguise (and the person who is the king in disguise already knows he's the king); and there is no prophecy pointing to an anointed or long-expected hero (though some people can't tell the difference between that and what there is).

bad fantasy! no biscuit

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I worked in a new-and-used bookstore in the early '80s, which meant that I certainly encountered a lot of bad fantasy.

As for the McGuffin trinkets, I think that the advent of D&D doesn't help at all, there. I read more than one (unpublished) story that read like a D&D campaign.

Yes, sometimes a hero is just a hero -- and that's often a good thing.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I should also add that it's the necessary covertness of this-world fantasy that led to the assumption that this-worldly fantastic settings = horror. Things that are covert, whose existence is generally denied, are going to be a shock when their existence is revealed.

The challenge for the author, one which CUF authors succeeded at meeting, is to depict these surprising covert elements while generating a reaction, among the characters as well as the reader, of wonder, surprise, delight, awe, instead of horror.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

There is always Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Saint-Germain series, which is supernatural horror, set in real historical pasts from ancient Egypt to the 1930s—but where the vampire is the sympathetic character, and the running trope of the whole series is that human beings are much more monstrous than the vampiric Saint-Germain.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can expect labels to be literally accurate: science fiction doesn't necessarily have science in it. And paranormal romances aren't about what I'd call the paranormal.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Not literally, as this is a generalization. But science fiction is full of people who insist that its wonders have to have scientific explanations, even if they're actually just pseudo-scientific hot air. Some of them, especially hard SF authors of the Niven-Benford school, are eagerly ready to cast out of SF anything that doesn't meet their high standards.

There's a huge gulf here, actually, huger than the SF people realize. For many of them like to look at fantasy with the insistence that there's got to be some kind of scientific rationale underneath there somewhere, and they don't realize that fantasy authors don't think that way. The only commentator I know of who's succeeded at pulling this off, and that only partially, is Henry Gee in The Science of Middle-earth. Most attempts at finding mechanisms by which fantasy would work destroy the fantasy.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Certainly taking any idiom literally is likely to lead to misunderstanding. But I still think that science fiction properly so called does involve science in a certain way.

Fiction with fantastic elements ("fantasy" in the largest possible sense) usually has what I call "disbelief suspenders": rhetorical devices intended to induce, not belief, but willing suspension of disbelief, the sense that the story, whether possible or not, is in some sense probable. Science fiction and fantasy (in the genre sense) has different sets of disbelief suspenders. Science fiction says

"You can believe this because it's based on actual scientific theories, or it's based on invented theories that sound like possible future scientific theories, or it's about more advanced stages of the progress of technology based on general scientific advance, or it's set in other realms that technology could transport us to [the earth's core, the depths of the oceans, outer space, the past, the future, parallel worlds, cyberspace]."

Fantasy, on the other hand, says

"You can believe this because it's told about in ancient myths, legends, or folklore, or because it involves the kind of beings and events that are typical of such stories, or because it involves the kind of magical abilities that appear in them, or because it's set in other realms that might be reached by magic [heaven, hell, faerie, the underworld, archetypal domains]."

Rigorous scientific purists get things wrong when they call a story that doesn't meet their standards "fantasy." That's as if I cut off your arms and legs and then called you a snake. Fantasy is properly so classified not by what it lacks but by what it has. At most, you could call a story with unconvincing scientific justifications "bad science fiction" or "failed science fiction."

But I think a proper use of the term includes things that don't have such rigor, but that have the rhetorical appeal to science as a way of achieving disbelief suspension. We have the label "hard science fiction" for the rigorous stuff; we have other labels for other sorts, such as "space opera" or "cyberpunk." It's the rhetorical appeal to science that's essential. Whereas in fantasy, as calimac says, such appeals are just beside the point.

[marycatelli]

SF is SF because it attempts to suspend disbelief by appealing to the authority of science.

It doesn't matter whether it's a reasonable extrapolation or not. Indeed, many fantasy stories are merely improbable by scientific standards while many SF stories are flat out impossible.

(Rivets. That's a fundamental mark of SF. 0:)

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

SF is SF because it attempts to suspend disbelief by appealing to the authority of science.

Yes. That's exactly what I meant by You can believe this because it's based on actual scientific theories, or it's based on invented theories that sound like possible future scientific theories, or it's about more advanced stages of the progress of technology based on general scientific advance, or it's set in other realms that technology could transport us to [the earth's core, the depths of the oceans, outer space, the past, the future, parallel worlds, cyberspace]. Only stated more succinctly.

The demand for real scientific plausibility in science fiction is like the demand for real orgasms in pornography.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Thank you, calimac; it's as if you're reading my mind--a good example of a desirable SF/F trope that would be horrific if encountered in Real Life.

I published several articles about Urban Fantasy in the 80s and 90s--one was called "Bright Swords, Big Cities" which reminds me that the Brat Pack "mainstream literature" of the 80s seems REALLY dated today. I theorized two explanations for the rise in urban fantasy of the Charles DeLint-Emma Bull variety, especially for novels that brought Medieval knights into New York or Chicago (such as the Peter David books; also Rosemary Edghill and Esther Friesner--and others).
One is that the SCA and the RenFaire phenomenon had made such a juxtaposition commonplace--therefore, the mundane city-dwellers would hardly notice such an intrusion at first. The more recent movie "Enchanted" plays on this when the fairy-tale prince is assumed to be one such person.

The other explanation is simply that the generation of writers of fantasy who grew up loving Tolkien were themselves city-dwellers, or suburbanites for whom the City IS the Dark Wood. Write what you know, right?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Your observations are striking sparks with other points in my mind.

First, of course, that Beagle's The Folk of the Air is a splendid example of the juxtaposition of the SCA and fantasy, although the fantasy element here is not knights mistaken for SCA.

Second, the point I managed to make in my article on the SCA for the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, that SCA style had heavily influenced medievalist fantasies. Westria, in particular, read to me exactly like what a tourney would be like if it were "real".

Third, the urban/suburban fantasist point you make maps interestingly onto Don Keller's theory of Mannerist Fantasy.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

You're doing it again. Both of these points may be found in my late-80s article (which I doubt either you or Don Keller had read, and I couldn't have read your works without a time machine. . .).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Great minds again, etc. Your name has floated around the edge of my awareness, but I regret that I don't believe I've read your work.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Ghost story" is a 19C category that I don't find very useful in discussing material from the mid-20C onward. But stories that deserve that label - these in particular - often do fall into the same box with magical realism, for the reason ellen_denham states in the comments here: that they're serious, yearning stories whose characters basically take the magical elements calmly rather than being excited by either wonder or horror.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, the ghosts in Beagle's book are magical elements to themselves, but they take it pretty matter-of-factly. This isn't a book about ghosts who freak out at finding themselves to be ghosts, or who jump around in glee at it either. They're surprised at first, but for the most part phlegmatic, and the fact that they mostly just fade away reinforces that point.

All I mean by saying that "ghost story" is not a useful category is that if you take mid-to-late 20C fantasy and separate out those with ghosts and those without, and call the former "ghost stories", I don't think you've created a taxonomy that says much useful about the difference. In 19C fantasy I think it does. Those authors were taken by readers as writing in a ghost-story tradition. The 20C authors not, and I doubt they were writing in it, either.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Extreme concern with taxonomy only arises, for me anyway, from an extreme disagreement on taxonomy. I view it as a tool for understanding, which only works if people grok what each other are saying, so they can get past the categorization and into an appreciation of the effect of the actual works.

[asimovberlioz.livejournal.com]

Your negative interest in horror almost exactly mirrors mine. I particularly dislike "splatter" prose and movies, which cuts out those genres, and portions of other genres which overlap, from my realm of knowledge.

Similarly, I do my best under normal conditions to avoid physical pain (unless required for medical or dental treatment), so the idea of people seeking out pain in order to experience pleasure is utterly alien to me. I mean, understand that some people do like it, and I kind of understand why, but that is only an intellectual understanding and I will never have an emotional understanding of it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I fail to understand it either intellectually or emotionally. "Scary is fun", say people who want me to ride roller coasters. No; if it's actually fun it fails to be scary, and if it's actually scary it can't be fun, by the very definition of "scary". I don't get it.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard the term "indigenous fantasy" before, but I see it's been around for at least a couple of decades. Makes me think of a discussion of Bujold's Sharing Knife trilogy at tor.com a couple of months ago. Amongst other things, Bujold comments, "[Y]es, there are some fascinating historical river women, but in this case, you need to look to one of my other springs of inspiration for the tale; a fair river daughter in the European mold familiar to many. What, I wondered, would the American version look like? Lots more calluses on her hands, for one thing."

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I haven't read these books, but it appears from the article that they're based on the American cultural and aesthetic style, the way that Fantasyland (and the more real fantasies that Fantasyland is a cheap photocopy of) are based on the English/European cultural and aesthetic style, without however actually being set in easily identifiable America.

This, if I understand it correctly, disqualifies them from being indigenous fantasies, where the closeness of the setting is paramount (for instance, The Book of the New Sun is not an indigenous South American fantasy).

But there is a long tradition of writing culturally American versions of European fantasies. It goes back at least to Oz, which is not set in America, but Baum consciously planned it to have an American flavor, and it's built almost entirely out of enthusiastic mechanistic tinkering of the Edison/Henry Ford school. Most of de Lint's stories are an attempt at a cross between European and American flavor.

[rwl.livejournal.com]

Good summary. An additional category to condiser would be "Needs to be internally consistent", but the answer for all three genres is "yes".