The Dragon Nextdoor

[wingsmith]

Evening all,

At Eastercon there was a chat about what makes Urban Fantasy tick, and I thought I'd add my two cents:

What exactly is Urban Fantasy? It's a question that causes controversy. There's always going to be a scrap when you get a group of people together who are as voraciously intelligent as geeks, and have the hard-on for taxonomy that many

Comments

[anonymous]

Although what I also meant to say before pressing prematurely was that in other words Urban Fantasy is in fact no more and no less than fantasy. The familiar made unfamiliar, the ordinary magical and full of promise. The trees have become lamposts, the castles and crags mansions and towerblocks.
Fantasy started to die when the dragons and elves and quests became preictable, somehow they joined the mundane world and the glamor faded.

[wingsmith]

Cheers Dave

I think that's pretty much true,

I do think though that in the case of Urban Fantasy, the Fantastic feels closer than secondary world fantasy because it exploits the blank spots in out knowledge about what goes on around the corner.

[denni_schnapp]

This must be why I like it (without too much paranormal romance!). You hit it on the head.

Urban Fantasy

[hecallaghan]

Very interesting!

Personally I always thought that the growth of urban fantasy is due to changing definitions of the idea of "wilderness". Fantastical things happen in the wildwood, and lost children stumble on to them. So it has always been.

But now the city has become the wilderness. It is too huge to parse, too crowded and too full of verismultitude. We're also more cut off from one another, so we're now as isolated at Red Riding Hood ever was in the forest in many ways.