Urban Fantasy

[alanajoli]

Some of you may have caught the two columns I wrote for Flames Rising (with the intention of writing several more) about the differences in the types of paranormal romances and urban fantasies that make up the scale of books inside the boundaries of the genre (or expanding them). After a conversation with my library boss, I decided to start putting

Comments

[lyster]

I may be off-base, but I think folks who dig on the darker stuff (terror, protagonists under intense stress, high body count) would get into the Pendergast series by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child; they're emphatically not fantasies, except for maybe the last one, but the fact that an immortality potion or a drug that turns you into a rampaging monster is explained with some pseudoplausible scientific jargonwaving doesn't mean your books aren't fantastical in their effect. :)

[alanajoli]

That's a great recommendation -- and definitely fits with my theory. It may not even be the *genre* that you like, but some part of the genre that is shared by other genres entirely! :)

[lyster]

In general point of fact I find genre a less and less useful category these days; people who like space opera of the Lois McMaster Bujold type will love the Lymond Chronicles, which are historical fiction with an emphasis on the historical, & might even go from there into liking The Name of the Rose, and so on. Or, to rephrase: I think it's setting-genres that I find pretty useless, as opposed to story-genres. A techno-business thriller scratches the same itch if it's set in 3092, 1980, 1912, 422 BCE, or The Seventy-Ninth Year of Odegra and Ancient Mu in the sub-duchy of Cazabel on the Blighted Planes. :)