December meme, day 10: Urban Fantasy
December ramble, day 10: Urban fantasy (lunasariel)
I am very grateful for the explosion of urban fantasy these days, because it's definitely one of my favorite subgenres at this point. I still love a deeply crafted epic fantasy teeming with the "cats of Queen Beruthiel" -- but let's face it, they're not that common, and it's also a genre that I'm finding it increasingly hard to be satisfied with if it's done insufficiently well, and I find epic fantasy rather excruciating to read if it's done badly, whereas my demands on urban fantasy are apparently much lighter. Basically, I think very few writers have the chops to build an entire rich, believable world from scratch (Tolkien, obviously, LeGuin, GRRM, Tad Williams and Rothfuss, say) and you get those who don't even try (Kristin Cashore, for example -- I think she does some great work in other areas of her writing, but the worldbuilding makes me actually cringe with embarrassment). But with urban fantasy, I find that as long as I'm intrigued by the central premise of the fantasy element and/or like the characters, I can enjoy the book even if it's not the greatest thing ever. Although that's not to say that the setting never matters to me in urban fantasy -- I love urban fantasy books set in San Francisco, for instance (in fact, I will pretty much read any urban fantasy book set in SF, even if it has nothing else to recommend it), and in general find that I enjoy UF books with settings I'm fond of or familiar with (like RoL's London or Kindrat's flashback visit to Prague) more than books whose settings are places I have no connection to, like Dresden's Chicago or Sookie's Louisiana.
Another reason I think I like reading UF more and find myself following more different UF series in progress more eagerly is that by virtue of not being High Fantasy they are not locked into a sort of expected Hero's Journey or quest structure, which either needs to be wrapped up in a couple of books, leaving me sad that I will not get to hang out with these characters again (e.g. Earthsea) or becomes a multi-tentacled sprawly monster with increasingly long waits between books (uh... can't think of an example for this, sorry :P). While urban fantasy can, of course, have a fixed story arc (e.g. Demon's Lexicon), but it also lends itself more readily to an open series, with casefic-type installments that are individually fun even if they do ultimately prove to have a larger overall arc, like both Dresden Files and RoL are shaping out to.
Anyway, so that's why I think I tend to read rather a lot of UF these days, but it all started, oh, probably 15 years ago when I found a paperback of Storm Front at the Ortega library, read the back cover blurb and went, Whoa!, because the idea of a wizard practicing magic in modern-day Chicago (and snarikily narrating his misadventures) was so brilliant and reading-habits-changing for me, and yet so simple -- why wouldn't you bring magic into the modern world? Not in a magic school hidden away from the ken of Muggles way, but in a right-there-in-the-streets, mingling-with-cops-and-pub-owners-and-mechanics-who-don't-ask-too-many-questions way.
So, yeah, the Dresden Files were my portal into this genre, and I think for that I will keep reading the series until the bitter end, even if [mildish spoilers] I find the whole thing with Nemesis annoying and repeatedly want to smack Harry for some of his nonsense and Molly's stupid crush on him needs to die already, like, five books ago. Well, that, and also because the Dresden Files has a really great cast of characters who play off each other very nicely. I do find Harry's "chivalry" schtick annoying, but he is a very fun narrator, snarky and geeky and able to laugh at himself, which I find very important in my first-person-smartasses, and Murphy is pretty great (or at least she has been, mostly; I'm not sure I like the direction she's heading as of the last book), and Molly is growing into one of the characters I'm most interested in following the arc of, and Thomas is my favorite woobie, and Carlos is funny and there needs to be more of him, and Marcone is very much the kind of villain/or-maybe-not that I enjoy, and Lara is terrifyingly competent as well as simply terrifying, and McCoy is a Badass Grandpa of very fine vintage, and Bob is a hilarious and indomitable perv, and Michael and Charity are characters with whom Butcher surprised me by making me like them despite my deep skepticism about Knights of the Cross as a thing, and POLKA WILL NEVER DIE, and I love these guys, basically -- the books are flawed, including in ways that really annoy me, but they're my kind of fun. For a brief shining moment around Proven Guilty (my favorite), I thought it might be able to transcend popcorn fare for me. That didn't happen -- the direction the books turned to, the whole epic Confrontation of Good and Evil with Ever-Increasing Stakes, is not something I wanted from the series, but they're still fun reading.
But the Dresden Files only whetted my appetite for UF, and especially UF of the mystery-flavored PI/cop variety. There are a lot more of these out there that I haven't read, or have read only in short stories and didn't feel sufficiently hooked to go looking for more (P.N.Elrod's vampire PI thing, for instance, or Simon Green's stuff). I've read some of Kim Harrison's The Hollows books, although they tend to be rather hit-or-miss for me, and, really, I'm only in it for Trent. I did enjoy all four books of T.A.Pratt's Marla Mason series (I think there might be a fifth self-published/tipjar eBook out at this point, but I haven't read that) -- Marla is more of a bruiser than a PI, but there are some mystery elements along with thriller ones, and it's definitely got that noirish feel. Mostly what impressed me about these books is the endless inventiveness of the magic -- technomancers and pyromancers and guys who can control fungi and all kinds of neat stuff. And some of the action takes place in San Francisco (the author is a local), which as I've mentioned is a plus for me. Speaking of SF, I also read the first book of Katherine Kerr's series, License to Ensorcell, which was one of those books I had picked up purely for the setting, but which turned out to be not too bad, in that "she's a witch, he's a Mossad agent, together they fight crime" kind of way.
I was very skeptical when I picked up the Sookie Stackhouse books, because I don't like vampire books and I started with book #2, and Sookie really put me off with her dependence on Bill and her willingness to forgive him pretty much anything, but the books were really readable and I kept catching up on the series, and surprised myself by actually genuinely liking at least some of them. Eric is pretty hilarious, Pam is a great character, and, as difficult as I found Sookie to identify with at first, I've actually come to like and respect her as a character and a person. The worldbuilding is actually pretty nice, very inventive in exploring the implications of the "change one thing" type of AU (the one thing in this case being the invention of synthetic blood), but the thing I like best about this series is how grounded in everyday reality it is -- Sookie worries about paying taxes on the house, and regraveling her garage, and switching shifts at the restaurant, and library fines, and having to make time for dry-cleaning because she accidentally bought some clothes that are not machine-washable. These are such mundane details, but they really anchor this series for me, amidst the vampire shenanigans and were-everything, and make me rather fond of the books even though the vampires (except for Eric and Pam) are really not that interesting to me, and the assorted weres outright bore me. Of course, being paranormal romance, the books are plagued by a profusion of romantic subplots, most of them rather lame, but I still enjoy them. (Which reminds me that I have fallen 3 books behind, if you count the epilogue one, and now that the series is closed I probably should catch up, even though I've heard not-so-great things about the conclusion.)
But let's quit beating around the bush, shall we? The pinnacle of this sub-sub-genre for me (and the UF sub-genre in general) is, at least currently, Rivers of London. Which has a protagonist who is brilliant and bumbling in just the right measure, who narrates the series with hilarius cynicism and gloriously dorky asides, who wants to know what makes magic tick; and which has a great supporting case of non-magical characters who are no less formidable or competent for being mundanes, and who may be intrigued or exasperated by the "amount of weird bollocks" (to use Seawoll's wonderful phrase) they have to deal with in their jobs but are really good at what they do; and people like Thomas "Oops was that your Tiger Tank" Nightingale going sewer spelunking in his white Burberry coat and bespoke shoes; and Varvara Sidoravna who is proving to be (a) a badass and (b) a believably written Russian character, which might be a first for a Western author; and consequences to personal decisions including but not limited to magic use, and also terrible things happening just because terrible things happen, and people dealing with them, bravely and human-ly, and people who love them dealing with the fallout, too; and tertiary one-off characters who feel interesting and intriguing in their own right, with lives and unique backgrounds of their own, even if we never see them beyond the one scene; and the concept of Newtonian magic, which, yesplz!; and the full tapestry of a modern metropolis, which feels vividly, vibrantly diverse in all the ways without the feeling of tokenism or checking the boxes or naive utopia. The more mystical elements, like the titular Rivers, don't work for me as well, but that's OK, not every element has to be a slam dunk, and I know (comparatively) lots of people who really love the Rivers. The plots have not been a strong point in the first three books, but I think Broken Homes does much better there. Overall I would say Broken Homes is the best of the four published so far, and I hope the quality continues to climb. This has been hands down my favorite discovery this year, I love everybody in this bar pretty much every character, and can't wait for the next one.
There are other series in this sub-sub-genre that I haven't tried and would like to. sarahtales has spoken highly of the Magic Bites books, and I want to give the Matthew Swift books a try. Oh, and the Mercy Thompson ones, too. Also, always happy for recs in this space, so if you have a mystery/noir urban fantasy series you love that I'm not familiar with yet, lay it on me!
I was going to talk about Seanan McGuire's October Daye books in the preceding paragraph, but then realized that, no, even though Toby is nominally a PI, or was at some point, at least, I don't read the books in the same way I read the other UF/mystery blends because -- how do I put this nicely? -- Toby is kind of terrible at solving mysteries, and as long as I was expecting her to inhabit the detective trope, I was mainly just annoying myself with the combination of how transparent the mysteries were and how dumb Toby was looking by not getting them. So, when that peaked in book 2, some shift must've taken place in my perception of these books, and I just don't read them as mysteries anymore. They're just slotted into the category of urban-fantasy-with-fairies, which is another one of my favorites. That said, I still don't like these book nearly as much as I would expect to given all the elements -- set in the Bay Area, check, urban fairies, check, mysteries, covered, but sort of check -- and yet the series has never really clicked for me, though I keep persevering in the hope that some day it does. I think it's just that I am not finding myself at all attached to any of the characters, and I feel like the writing is trying too hard to be clever, and I feel like a couple of times the narrative took the easy way out and pretended it was a hard way. That said, the Ludaieg is awesome, hands down my favorite character in the series, and I think I would keep reading the books just for her. And lodessa says I'm her mental image for the Ludaieg, which is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me! :D
Urban-fantasy-with-fairies is a thing that I dearly love. I think, next to magic school stories*, it's probably my favorite sub-sub-genre. Hilariously, I think I first encountered it via Mercedes Lackey's ridiculously silly Elves-on-bikes books (and actually quite enjoyed Bedlam's Bard, because San Francisco and also the poly thing), but my favorite example of the genre, and the one I will pimp to people who I think share this predilection of mine, is War for the Oaks. Here's a case where the setting is pretty foreign to me, and the leitmotif of music is not intrinsically interesting to me, and only one of the characters, maybe two, really stand out (the Phouka and maybe Willy Silver), but I really like the book as a whole, because I feel like it caputres the Faerie-ness better than any other, and the Queen of Air and Darkness is my go-to urban fantasy Elf Queen. I also never get tired of modern Tam Lin retellings (non-modern ones, too, but I feel like the UF setting adds even more to the story), including Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, although I must say that I love Dean's book more for the setting and general feeling of it than for the faeries. And I mentioned them under the YA book ramble, but Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales, starting with Tithe, deserve a mention here, too, because Roiben.
*And mention of magic schools reminded m that I haven't mentioned that class of urban fantasy yet. I suppose Harry Potter belongs to it, taken broadly, although I think HP reads much more like a second-world fantasy that happens to exist alongside the real world -- there's too little interaction between the Wizarding World and the Muggles for it to feel like real UF. Lev Grossman's The Magicians is a better example, and I really loved that book (the sequel, a bit less so), and, of course, my beloved Monday Begins on Saturday, which I already mentioned in the Soviet SFF post. (Although my love for magic school stories is not limited to UF, as the stories aren't limited to UF either -- I love Ged's time on Roke and Kvothe's time with the Arcanum every bit as much if not more.)
As with the UF/mystery blends, I'm also always happy for UF with magic schools and UF with fairies recs, if you've got any to spare :)
I am very grateful for the explosion of urban fantasy these days, because it's definitely one of my favorite subgenres at this point. I still love a deeply crafted epic fantasy teeming with the "cats of Queen Beruthiel" -- but let's face it, they're not that common, and it's also a genre that I'm finding it increasingly hard to be satisfied with if it's done insufficiently well, and I find epic fantasy rather excruciating to read if it's done badly, whereas my demands on urban fantasy are apparently much lighter. Basically, I think very few writers have the chops to build an entire rich, believable world from scratch (Tolkien, obviously, LeGuin, GRRM, Tad Williams and Rothfuss, say) and you get those who don't even try (Kristin Cashore, for example -- I think she does some great work in other areas of her writing, but the worldbuilding makes me actually cringe with embarrassment). But with urban fantasy, I find that as long as I'm intrigued by the central premise of the fantasy element and/or like the characters, I can enjoy the book even if it's not the greatest thing ever. Although that's not to say that the setting never matters to me in urban fantasy -- I love urban fantasy books set in San Francisco, for instance (in fact, I will pretty much read any urban fantasy book set in SF, even if it has nothing else to recommend it), and in general find that I enjoy UF books with settings I'm fond of or familiar with (like RoL's London or Kindrat's flashback visit to Prague) more than books whose settings are places I have no connection to, like Dresden's Chicago or Sookie's Louisiana.
Another reason I think I like reading UF more and find myself following more different UF series in progress more eagerly is that by virtue of not being High Fantasy they are not locked into a sort of expected Hero's Journey or quest structure, which either needs to be wrapped up in a couple of books, leaving me sad that I will not get to hang out with these characters again (e.g. Earthsea) or becomes a multi-tentacled sprawly monster with increasingly long waits between books (uh... can't think of an example for this, sorry :P). While urban fantasy can, of course, have a fixed story arc (e.g. Demon's Lexicon), but it also lends itself more readily to an open series, with casefic-type installments that are individually fun even if they do ultimately prove to have a larger overall arc, like both Dresden Files and RoL are shaping out to.
Anyway, so that's why I think I tend to read rather a lot of UF these days, but it all started, oh, probably 15 years ago when I found a paperback of Storm Front at the Ortega library, read the back cover blurb and went, Whoa!, because the idea of a wizard practicing magic in modern-day Chicago (and snarikily narrating his misadventures) was so brilliant and reading-habits-changing for me, and yet so simple -- why wouldn't you bring magic into the modern world? Not in a magic school hidden away from the ken of Muggles way, but in a right-there-in-the-streets, mingling-with-cops-and-pub-owners-and-mechanics-who-don't-ask-too-many-questions way.
So, yeah, the Dresden Files were my portal into this genre, and I think for that I will keep reading the series until the bitter end, even if [mildish spoilers] I find the whole thing with Nemesis annoying and repeatedly want to smack Harry for some of his nonsense and Molly's stupid crush on him needs to die already, like, five books ago. Well, that, and also because the Dresden Files has a really great cast of characters who play off each other very nicely. I do find Harry's "chivalry" schtick annoying, but he is a very fun narrator, snarky and geeky and able to laugh at himself, which I find very important in my first-person-smartasses, and Murphy is pretty great (or at least she has been, mostly; I'm not sure I like the direction she's heading as of the last book), and Molly is growing into one of the characters I'm most interested in following the arc of, and Thomas is my favorite woobie, and Carlos is funny and there needs to be more of him, and Marcone is very much the kind of villain/or-maybe-not that I enjoy, and Lara is terrifyingly competent as well as simply terrifying, and McCoy is a Badass Grandpa of very fine vintage, and Bob is a hilarious and indomitable perv, and Michael and Charity are characters with whom Butcher surprised me by making me like them despite my deep skepticism about Knights of the Cross as a thing, and POLKA WILL NEVER DIE, and I love these guys, basically -- the books are flawed, including in ways that really annoy me, but they're my kind of fun. For a brief shining moment around Proven Guilty (my favorite), I thought it might be able to transcend popcorn fare for me. That didn't happen -- the direction the books turned to, the whole epic Confrontation of Good and Evil with Ever-Increasing Stakes, is not something I wanted from the series, but they're still fun reading.
But the Dresden Files only whetted my appetite for UF, and especially UF of the mystery-flavored PI/cop variety. There are a lot more of these out there that I haven't read, or have read only in short stories and didn't feel sufficiently hooked to go looking for more (P.N.Elrod's vampire PI thing, for instance, or Simon Green's stuff). I've read some of Kim Harrison's The Hollows books, although they tend to be rather hit-or-miss for me, and, really, I'm only in it for Trent. I did enjoy all four books of T.A.Pratt's Marla Mason series (I think there might be a fifth self-published/tipjar eBook out at this point, but I haven't read that) -- Marla is more of a bruiser than a PI, but there are some mystery elements along with thriller ones, and it's definitely got that noirish feel. Mostly what impressed me about these books is the endless inventiveness of the magic -- technomancers and pyromancers and guys who can control fungi and all kinds of neat stuff. And some of the action takes place in San Francisco (the author is a local), which as I've mentioned is a plus for me. Speaking of SF, I also read the first book of Katherine Kerr's series, License to Ensorcell, which was one of those books I had picked up purely for the setting, but which turned out to be not too bad, in that "she's a witch, he's a Mossad agent, together they fight crime" kind of way.
I was very skeptical when I picked up the Sookie Stackhouse books, because I don't like vampire books and I started with book #2, and Sookie really put me off with her dependence on Bill and her willingness to forgive him pretty much anything, but the books were really readable and I kept catching up on the series, and surprised myself by actually genuinely liking at least some of them. Eric is pretty hilarious, Pam is a great character, and, as difficult as I found Sookie to identify with at first, I've actually come to like and respect her as a character and a person. The worldbuilding is actually pretty nice, very inventive in exploring the implications of the "change one thing" type of AU (the one thing in this case being the invention of synthetic blood), but the thing I like best about this series is how grounded in everyday reality it is -- Sookie worries about paying taxes on the house, and regraveling her garage, and switching shifts at the restaurant, and library fines, and having to make time for dry-cleaning because she accidentally bought some clothes that are not machine-washable. These are such mundane details, but they really anchor this series for me, amidst the vampire shenanigans and were-everything, and make me rather fond of the books even though the vampires (except for Eric and Pam) are really not that interesting to me, and the assorted weres outright bore me. Of course, being paranormal romance, the books are plagued by a profusion of romantic subplots, most of them rather lame, but I still enjoy them. (Which reminds me that I have fallen 3 books behind, if you count the epilogue one, and now that the series is closed I probably should catch up, even though I've heard not-so-great things about the conclusion.)
But let's quit beating around the bush, shall we? The pinnacle of this sub-sub-genre for me (and the UF sub-genre in general) is, at least currently, Rivers of London. Which has a protagonist who is brilliant and bumbling in just the right measure, who narrates the series with hilarius cynicism and gloriously dorky asides, who wants to know what makes magic tick; and which has a great supporting case of non-magical characters who are no less formidable or competent for being mundanes, and who may be intrigued or exasperated by the "amount of weird bollocks" (to use Seawoll's wonderful phrase) they have to deal with in their jobs but are really good at what they do; and people like Thomas "Oops was that your Tiger Tank" Nightingale going sewer spelunking in his white Burberry coat and bespoke shoes; and Varvara Sidoravna who is proving to be (a) a badass and (b) a believably written Russian character, which might be a first for a Western author; and consequences to personal decisions including but not limited to magic use, and also terrible things happening just because terrible things happen, and people dealing with them, bravely and human-ly, and people who love them dealing with the fallout, too; and tertiary one-off characters who feel interesting and intriguing in their own right, with lives and unique backgrounds of their own, even if we never see them beyond the one scene; and the concept of Newtonian magic, which, yesplz!; and the full tapestry of a modern metropolis, which feels vividly, vibrantly diverse in all the ways without the feeling of tokenism or checking the boxes or naive utopia. The more mystical elements, like the titular Rivers, don't work for me as well, but that's OK, not every element has to be a slam dunk, and I know (comparatively) lots of people who really love the Rivers. The plots have not been a strong point in the first three books, but I think Broken Homes does much better there. Overall I would say Broken Homes is the best of the four published so far, and I hope the quality continues to climb. This has been hands down my favorite discovery this year, I love everybody in this bar pretty much every character, and can't wait for the next one.
There are other series in this sub-sub-genre that I haven't tried and would like to. sarahtales has spoken highly of the Magic Bites books, and I want to give the Matthew Swift books a try. Oh, and the Mercy Thompson ones, too. Also, always happy for recs in this space, so if you have a mystery/noir urban fantasy series you love that I'm not familiar with yet, lay it on me!
I was going to talk about Seanan McGuire's October Daye books in the preceding paragraph, but then realized that, no, even though Toby is nominally a PI, or was at some point, at least, I don't read the books in the same way I read the other UF/mystery blends because -- how do I put this nicely? -- Toby is kind of terrible at solving mysteries, and as long as I was expecting her to inhabit the detective trope, I was mainly just annoying myself with the combination of how transparent the mysteries were and how dumb Toby was looking by not getting them. So, when that peaked in book 2, some shift must've taken place in my perception of these books, and I just don't read them as mysteries anymore. They're just slotted into the category of urban-fantasy-with-fairies, which is another one of my favorites. That said, I still don't like these book nearly as much as I would expect to given all the elements -- set in the Bay Area, check, urban fairies, check, mysteries, covered, but sort of check -- and yet the series has never really clicked for me, though I keep persevering in the hope that some day it does. I think it's just that I am not finding myself at all attached to any of the characters, and I feel like the writing is trying too hard to be clever, and I feel like a couple of times the narrative took the easy way out and pretended it was a hard way. That said, the Ludaieg is awesome, hands down my favorite character in the series, and I think I would keep reading the books just for her. And lodessa says I'm her mental image for the Ludaieg, which is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me! :D
Urban-fantasy-with-fairies is a thing that I dearly love. I think, next to magic school stories*, it's probably my favorite sub-sub-genre. Hilariously, I think I first encountered it via Mercedes Lackey's ridiculously silly Elves-on-bikes books (and actually quite enjoyed Bedlam's Bard, because San Francisco and also the poly thing), but my favorite example of the genre, and the one I will pimp to people who I think share this predilection of mine, is War for the Oaks. Here's a case where the setting is pretty foreign to me, and the leitmotif of music is not intrinsically interesting to me, and only one of the characters, maybe two, really stand out (the Phouka and maybe Willy Silver), but I really like the book as a whole, because I feel like it caputres the Faerie-ness better than any other, and the Queen of Air and Darkness is my go-to urban fantasy Elf Queen. I also never get tired of modern Tam Lin retellings (non-modern ones, too, but I feel like the UF setting adds even more to the story), including Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, although I must say that I love Dean's book more for the setting and general feeling of it than for the faeries. And I mentioned them under the YA book ramble, but Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales, starting with Tithe, deserve a mention here, too, because Roiben.
*And mention of magic schools reminded m that I haven't mentioned that class of urban fantasy yet. I suppose Harry Potter belongs to it, taken broadly, although I think HP reads much more like a second-world fantasy that happens to exist alongside the real world -- there's too little interaction between the Wizarding World and the Muggles for it to feel like real UF. Lev Grossman's The Magicians is a better example, and I really loved that book (the sequel, a bit less so), and, of course, my beloved Monday Begins on Saturday, which I already mentioned in the Soviet SFF post. (Although my love for magic school stories is not limited to UF, as the stories aren't limited to UF either -- I love Ged's time on Roke and Kvothe's time with the Arcanum every bit as much if not more.)
As with the UF/mystery blends, I'm also always happy for UF with magic schools and UF with fairies recs, if you've got any to spare :)