Status Updates From Urban Fantasy: Exploring Mo...

Apparently the term hard-boiled is intended to evoke the sense of "a man of (rare) integrity in a society of (ubiquitous) crime." I wonder if this has implications for that hard-to-understand Murakmi book, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”. Perhaps the title just says it all, then.

"Most of modern life, actual and fictional, can be seen and understood, but in urban fantasy, there is also a great deal that stays out of sight and, once it is seen, is incomprehensible. Upon those who see lies the burden to investigate. Whether because of unbridled curiosity, twisted fate, or professional duty, these investigators have to find explanations, reveal secrets, and solve mysteries."

(Timeline of Urban Fantasy history split into several posts)

(1)

Proto-urban fantasy (from the 1840s):
* the Gothic romance
* tales about the modern city
* supernatural stories.

Fantasy (as popularized by Tolkien) encounters modernity in the 1960s and 1970s:
* combinations of mythical and pseudomedieval fantasy with modern society
*the development of a modern, secondary fantasy world.

(Timeline of Urban Fantasy history split into several posts)

(2)
Cities develop as fantasy settings in the 1980s:
*the cities themselves emerge as sources of the fantastic
* fairies and other mythic beings migrate into cities.

The investigators, vampires, and women of the 1990s:
* the investigator plot
* vampires and other monsters become allies
* tough female protagonists.

(Timeline of Urban Fantasy history split into several posts)

(3)

Making things weird again in the 2000s:
* the New Weird—modern, urban, secondary-world settings.

"I argue that urban fantasy can be understood as a form of literature that has been transformed by distinctive sets of additions over time. The way in which someone describes and understands the genre depends on which sets they combine. Over the decades, urban fantasy writers have had a greater selection of such additions to pick from and have learned to combine them in more elaborate ways."

Many urban fantasy writers grapple with or outright challenge the effects of a past or present colonialism.. Examples include... the relation between a war-torn France and its South-east Asian colonies in Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, an early twentieth-century Egypt that rises to power when magic returns to the world in P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn...

Modernity brought with it an increasing understanding and command of the natural world and erosion of traditions. Part of the shift away from the dominant position of tradition is the advancement of professionalization and the rise of expertise. It's as if this book and the book Anime Knowledge Cultures are examining some similar themes...

The general characteristics of modernity can be described as: Political processes include the rise of secular power, the notion of sovereignty, and the idea of the modern nation-state. ... A decline of a traditional social order, formation of new social classes... a turn toward a secular, materialist culture informed by individualist, rationalist, and instrumentalist values.” Instrumentalist? Perhaps robots.

Modern life can be many things: fun, exciting, stressful, predictable, comfortable, safe, boring . . . but it is rarely magical.

Huh. The author argues that Alternate Histories, "Other Worlds" fall under the umbrella of Urban Fantasy. To be fair, he argues that Urban Fantasy is an entirely separate and independent genre, and not a subgenre. He agrees that Urban Fantasy grew out of many different influences but argues that it is now its own thing. He does agree that this claim is the one he gets the most pushback from in his entire work.

[As a means for social commentary, it can be helpful when the world building of the story shares some overlap with reality:] If the world imitated the actual world down to the smallest detail, the story would end up being a documentary. If there was nothing about the world that resembled the actual world, we would not understand the story.

The city itself can be less prominent than other expressions of modernity: The Rivers of London series - reliance on expert systems and a reflexive approach to knowledge in the face of the supernatural; Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles - modernity is primarily judged through convenience and entertainment value; Gladstone’s Craft Sequence - modernity vs. tradition in the problems caused by global capitalism.

There has been no dearth of attempts to pinpoint what urban fantasy is, but in spite of this there is a certain lack of consensus... It might be easy to lose critical heart in the face of such a plethora of opinions, and some scholars seem to have done just that. Alexander C. Irvine claims that “any particularity the term once had is now diffused in a fog of contradiction,”...

Urban Fantasy Today: A mindreading waitress in a small town in Louisiana is attracted to a vampire.. A Lagos godhunter turns down an engagement to capture two high gods. A changeling detective tails a pureblood fae through the nighttime streets of San Francisco. A psychopomp is saved from assassination by a dead girl in a Brisbane food court.

"...[Despite] the great variation displayed by urban fantasy stories, they all seemed to include some criticism of our modern society, often pronounced and mostly with a left-of-center bias. Of course, fantasy, and any other kind of fiction, can be used for social criticism, but I had always believed that to be optional in most genres. In urban fantasy, it seemed to be unavoidable.”