Is this an actual genre?

[argenianpoet]

Can anyone here please explain Urban Fantasy to me? I am hearing this term used quite a bit, but I lack a real good understanding of what it means in terms of an "actual genre"? In particular, can you give me the names of authors and their book titles that write this genre, because it is really bugging me? Thank you for your time and answers...

 

[j d worthington]

Oooof! "Urban Fantasy" is not generally separated by the publishers and marketing these days, but it's a pretty broad genre, with writers as diverse as Kuttner and Moore, Ellison, Rod Serling, China Mieville, Charles Beaumont, Michael Moorcock, and many, many others having contributed to it. It isn't as tradition-bound as what most people think of as Fantasy, which is more closely allied to High Fantasy or Sword-and-Sorcery fantasy. Serling's "Twilight Zone" scripts are a good example of one type of urban fantasy; several of Richard Matheson's stories are another. Quite a lot of Ellison would fit, and several stories of Moorcock. Fritz Leiber also wrote some, such as "Smoke Ghost" and "The Dead Man". Recent urban fantasy tends to be more gritty, more cynical (usually), and is certainly darker than most of what people take fantasy to be. Usually no struggle between Good and Evil, but people in an urban setting faced with some slightly askew, fantastic intrusion into their everyday lives, that questions their entire view of reality. Much more driven by character than by quest or battle. It frequently crosses over into "urban sf", as it sometimes pushes the story into the very near future, but it is actually fantasy set in a world very close to everyday reality... and is more difficult because it requires absolute verisimilitude with the characters, given the slight touch of the unreal. The characters cannot simply accept this intrusion, as it violates "natural law". A good short example would be Shirley Jackson's story, "The Demon Lover".

 

[argenianpoet]

Oooof! "Urban Fantasy" is not generally separated by the publishers and marketing these days, but it's a pretty broad genre, with writers as diverse as Kuttner and Moore, Ellison, Rod Serling, China Mieville, Charles Beaumont, Michael Moorcock, and many, many others having contributed to it. It isn't as tradition-bound as what most people think of as Fantasy, which is more closely allied to High Fantasy or Sword-and-Sorcery fantasy. Serling's "Twilight Zone" scripts are a good example of one type of urban fantasy; several of Richard Matheson's stories are another. Quite a lot of Ellison would fit, and several stories of Moorcock. Fritz Leiber also wrote some, such as "Smoke Ghost" and "The Dead Man". Recent urban fantasy tends to be more gritty, more cynical (usually), and is certainly darker than most of what people take fantasy to be. Usually no struggle between Good and Evil, but people in an urban setting faced with some slightly askew, fantastic intrusion into their everyday lives, that questions their entire view of reality. Much more driven by character than by quest or battle. It frequently crosses over into "urban sf", as it sometimes pushes the story into the very near future, but it is actually fantasy set in a world very close to everyday reality... and is more difficult because it requires absolute verisimilitude with the characters, given the slight touch of the unreal. The characters cannot simply accept this intrusion, as it violates "natural law". A good short example would be Shirley Jackson's story, "The Demon Lover".

Excellent answer J.D., this clears up a lot of confusion I had and pretty well sums up the genre that I write. Thanks!

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

We had a fairly lengthy discussion of Urban Fantasty only a few months ago. You can find it here:

http://www.chronicles-network.com/forum/9447-urban-fantasy.html?highlight=urban+fantasy

(Before starting a new thread, it's not a bad idea to do a search and find out if one on the very same topic already exists.)

 

[dustinzgirl]

I would imagine a lot of anime is urban fantasy---Full Metal Alchemist, for example, being set more in our era and with magical workings.

 

[Konig15]

Would urban fantasy apply to my character Job Worthington? He's with his girlfriend when he's attacked by a pack of demons. A witch tries to clear the demons but only opens a portal in time, which Job gets sucked into. He finds himself in Mexico City the day Cortez got shown around by the Aztecs. He fights with them for over a year and becomes a figure of romantic lore. He returns to the present, only to find everything more or less the same, except the Third Reich survived world war II (see my intro for details). He fights one demon at the end, the others being scared off and saves his girlfriend.

BUT, this has got vioce over. Throughout the story, Job and his girlfriend Mary are narrarrating the story, though they don't remember a lot themselves. They're in this space they call the theater where they can see the action, but also pause it to experiment with the space. They can recreate different eras, clothing, change their bodies (Job and Mary almost have sex with each other with Job being his female analog and Mary her male analog, but they fear people are watching them). At the end, we find that it is the day before their wedding, several years after the story. Job and Mary are both nervous they are inadequate for their love and actually freeze the worl by saying 'soliloqy.' Job in the story is utterly convinced he's fictional because strange stuff doesn't happen to real people. Job tenatively asks the author to give him the soul of a poet so may 'make virtures of [Mary's] few faults and apostosize her many vurtues.'

At the end Job wakes up, his hotel on fire. He runs out only to be sucker punched by the demon he defeated years before. The demon tells him that he WILL kill him someday. The demon goes outside where a cop tries to arrest him. He bites off the officers throat and eats it. He finds the officers little girl in the squad car. He asks the terrified girl if she wants to help him paint the forrest. Later, the only things they find of her are a lot of blood and her skin hagging from a branch, wholly intact. Very nasty demon, that Cyril. Just horrible, but if I didn't let him do it, he wouldn't be Cyril. Every happen to you a character does something horrid, but you knew if you stopped them, they wouldn't be in character?