Province of the union.

May 24, 2005 08:23

It is a Tuesday morning, bright and shiny and sunny and crisp and cool -- the sort of day that San Francisco was invented to provide. I'm wearing a tank top guaranteed to cause vertigo in anyone who chances to look at it directly while I'm in motion, my hair is fluffy and clean, and life is good. (The part where I finished reading Robin McKinley' ( Read more... )

wardrobe, writing, upon a star, self, reading

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stagemanager May 24 2005, 16:37:37 UTC
I'm dreadfully unfamiliar with "urban fantasy" (as in, never even heard the term before today).

Can you recommend an intro title or two? (An anthology of short stories would be even better.)

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djonn May 25 2005, 00:11:05 UTC
The two seminal works of urban fantasy from which most of the genre descends are Emma Bull's War for the Oaks and Charles de Lint's Moonheart. Of the two, the Bull is shorter, more focused, and probably easier to locate just now.

Short stories are a trickier proposition -- it's not that people don't write short urban fantasy, it's that as a rule, they write it for magazines and anthologies that publish it in with Other Stuff. The exception is the Bordertown shared world cycle, overseen by Terri Windling -- except that that's almost a subgenre of the subgenre.

A handful of other books one might look for -- some quite recent, some more obscure: Mercedes Lackey's The Chrome Borne, collecting two of the first in a convoluted cluster of interlinked but mostly freestanding novels; Kim Wilkens' The Autumn Castle; Kara Dalkey's Steel Rose; Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons; the series by Diane Duane beginning with So You Want to Be a Wizard, marketed for young adult readers but eminently readable by all serious fantasy mavens ( ... )

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pknight May 25 2005, 00:44:57 UTC
*tosses in 2 cents*

I just finished re-reading Chrome Circle (the second in the Chrome Borne collection), and I remember why I fell in love with Tannim. Also look for the Diana Tregard Investigations (Children of the Night; Burning Water; Jinx High) as really good examples of urban fantasy. (They were also recently re-released with awesome covers.)

The "So You Want to Be a Wizard" books are awesome, too.

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stagemanager May 25 2005, 02:07:42 UTC
Thank you!

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stagemanager May 25 2005, 02:07:26 UTC
Thank you!

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