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

[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.