Genreville Posts on UF vs. Horror vs. SF (and a note from Marwa)

[alanajoli]

As you all know, I'm very much interested in the inspirations for urban fantasy, and where the genre comes from (as well as where it's going). I've read some great articles describing precursors to UF, most of which I intend to riff on over at FlamesRising.com at some point, when I'm actually keeping up with life.

In the mean time, Josh Jasper over at Genreville had a great post this week about using modern, real-world settings in various genres, from horror, to UF, to SF. He writes (among other things):

The trend in what gets called urban fantasy is to set fantasy adventures in current day Earth, only with supernatural creatures either ignored by most of humanity or living in the open somehow. Science fiction tends towards dystopian reflections of current day places that serve to reflect what might happen if we fall down various slippery slope of capitalism, genetic manipulation, and so on. Horror novels seem to use settings as a familiar backdrop against which horrific unfamiliar things happen.

All of this seems fairly accurate to me, but I think the UF novels that do the best job of using the contemporary setting are the ones where the writer actually knows, by heart, the location they're writing about. Sometimes the twisted version of reality is perfectly fun, and sometimes the anonymous dystopian city with magic lends more toward the SF angle, but as much as I love a story, if the main character is able to drive across Boston in a perfectly reasonable amount of time without hitting traffic, then my suspension of disbelief has crashed. (Likewise, referring to areas of Chicago that are not thusly named by the locals, are more of a disjunction to the imagination than vampires, werewolves, or elves.)

So I think you have a few options: one is to twist the setting beyond recognition, one is to have the setting be generic-city representing the twisted reality, and another is to have all of your details so well done that a native to the area will believe in your version of her city. But that's just my take on modern settings in fantasy.

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On a completely different note, Marwa Rakha, whose novel I linked to last week, is offering her publishing services to others who are having trouble with traditional publishing. You can find more information here.

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I'll try to be around more this week: we've got an exciting guest blog lined up for Friday! Gail Carriger (gailcarriger) is popping by to talk about the distressing illogic of history and how that lead to Soulless, which releases this week.

Comments

[jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com]

He's right, of course. The only fantasy I've ever written ("Whale Meat") was urban fantasy, and the setting was the Chicago Lincoln Park area near De Paul University, where I went to college in the early '70s and tried to draw as accurately as I could. My friend Tom worked at his family's greasy-spoon diner on Clark Street just north of Fullerton, and he and I and our friend George from high school spent a few late nights there, dealing with the local street people and remarking how almost anything could hide on Clark Street. Witches? No problem...

[(Anonymous)]

I completely agree on location in UF. One of the biggest problems I have with the Dresden novels is how little set in real Chicago they are. He goes to the EAST side of Chicago. There IS no East Side of Chicago. The east side of Chicago is the lake. Neighborhoods are seldom named what the are in real life, and as a former Chicagoan, sorry, but if you put a big residential area in the industrial area along the southern Chicago River, I'm gonna call you on it.

I love the Dresden Files, but I much preferred the TV show (which even though set in Vancouver actually had a verisimilitude of Chicago) to the books because I kept getting hung up on the descriptions of where Dresden was running off to, because it was off.

[slwhitman.livejournal.com]

Bah, that last was from me. How did I get logged out?? I haven't logged out in years.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I thought it was you I'd originally heard that complaint from! I went back to check your journal and couldn't find the place where you'd noted it, and as such, left it vague in the entry. :)

[lyster.livejournal.com]

In the day of books like The Time Traveler's Wife, I find myself regularly questioning where Urban Fantasy stops and Literature begins. Given what I know of urban fantasy, for example (admittedly not much -- Dresden Files, plus some browsing in the bookstore), I doubt an agent who specialized in UF would see John Crowley's "Little, Big" as typical of their client list, though it interweaves masterful sense of place (between upstate New York & Manhattan) with magic, fairies, prophecy, astrology, and one of the most deft interrelationships of myth and human character that I've seen. What about Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita"? The devil wanders around Stalinist Moscow, cheerfully destroying the minds of those he encounters in a hilarious fashion, all the while conspicuously failing to reach the levels of horror implicit in the political events taking place around him: imagine a deeper, more honest Terry Pratchett if Pratchett's life had been destroyed by Stalin. Urban, check, fantastical, check, but urban fantasy? What about Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," with its setting in London and urban India and its madcap mythicism? My sense, based on the books I've seen self-identified as UF, is that few UF readers would recognize any of these three as Urban Fantasy, or at least as "their" urban fantasy. Am I correct? If so, where's the line? If not, whence this perception? (It's possible that I'm just a fool.)

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of it depends on marketing... but I feel like I could respond enough to this that maybe I should make it its own entry. :)

[lyster.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to read that entry, for certain.