McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
What do you think something has to have to be Urban Fantasy?
Qualapec:
I'm just curious, what do you all think are the things that something has to touch on to be urban fantasy?
Suilan:
Ingredient 1: a modern city. Modern as in: industrial age. Technology rules. The city is filled with normal people living normal lives.
Ingredient 2: something supernatural lives in the city, usually unbeknownst by the majority of the people.
Everything else is optional.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Suilan on November 22, 2007, 06:55:06 PM ---Ingredient 1: a modern city. Modern as in: industrial age. Technology rules. The city is filled with normal people living normal lives.
Ingredient 2: something supernatural lives in the city, usually unbeknownst by the majority of the people.
--- End quote ---
I disagree on the first count, definitely.
Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan and City on Fire are set in a planet-covering city behind a mysterious Shield where magic arises naturally from the arrangements of buildings, in a feng shui sort of way, and is tapped and provided as a utility like electricity. I think of that as urban fantasy, as being probably as urban as it's possible for fantasy to get, but it's not remotely modern, and the lives of the normal people there are not normal by our standards.
Also, arguably, Perdido Street Station. Fantasy world of a sort, but very very urban, and it includes steampunky robots and demons and peculiar Lovecraft-like aliens with wild abandon.
DragonFire:
--- Quote from: neurovore on November 22, 2007, 07:52:39 PM ---I disagree on the first count, definitely.
Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan and City on Fire are set in a planet-covering city behind a mysterious Shield where magic arises naturally from the arrangements of buildings, in a feng shui sort of way, and is tapped and provided as a utility like electricity. I think of that as urban fantasy, as being probably as urban as it's possible for fantasy to get, but it's not remotely modern, and the lives of the normal people there are not normal by our standards.
--- End quote ---
I'd actually call that Sci-fi, rather than Urban Fantasy.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Lightsabre on November 22, 2007, 07:54:22 PM ---I'd actually call that Sci-fi, rather than Urban Fantasy.
--- End quote ---
Of arguments of definition of that particular line, there is no end. I think of these books as fantasy because a) it's clearly magic, not some advanced science being treated as magic, and b) the author talks about them as fantasy.
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