Unsettling Futures - Exhuming the bones of a genre
It's astonishing to watch how fast science fiction and fantasy can take a newborn genre and strip it to the bone.
I've been thinking lately about urban fantasy, about its origins and the permutations it went through over the last 30 years; about how it was born around the same time as cyberpunk, and how its fate was in some ways similar, and in some ways very, very different.
Mostly, I'm thinking about how we reduce genres to their component parts as efficiently as the crew of a whaler breaks down a carcass. It's one of the things that makes me feel very ambivalent about science fiction and fantasy publishing.
Let us go back to the origins of urban fantasy as a distinct genre. It's the mid-1980s. Epic fantasy is still relatively young, but some of the big names are already hip-deep in multi-book sagas. Tolkein's long shadow still hovers over the field. Secondary worlds with quests and magic swords and dragons are the essence of what people think of when they think of fantasy.
There have always been a trickle of fantasies set in the modern world, of course, including by big names like Gene Wolfe and Ray Bradbury. But many of them, as Jo Walton noted, were children's books, like Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising. There was also the long pulp tradition of "weird tales" that involved monsters and ghosts, and there had even been a nascent paranormal detective strand to short fantasy. There were Anne Rice's modern vampire series, and the dark fantasy/horror novels that moved in the wake of that publishing juggernaut.
But urban fantasy isn't a genre yet, no one has recognized or grouped the books that do exist, there's no real name and certainly no editors or agents pestering people for "more urban fantasy."
What there are, starting around 1986 and 1987, are a few books in which magic intrudes into the grimy real world.
The surprising thing is how much these late-'80s works looked like a genre from the very beginning. The early entries include Megan "Robin Hobb" Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons, Emma Bull's The War for the Oaks, Charles de Lint's Yarrow and Jack the Giant Killer, and writer/editor Terri Windling's Bordertown anthologies.
The books reached back to some similar wellsprings, distinct from the ones driving epic fantasy. They looked to folklore and faerie tales and Arthurian myth. They also draw from the counterculture, as it was then. There were a great many musicians and artists, aging hippies and punks and folkies, poor students and homeless heroes.
This early phase of urban fantasy had a surprisingly short run as the dominant mode of the new genre – maybe about 10 years from the first books. The confluence of signifiers from those first few works began to be imitated, enough that years later, urban fantasy writer Carrie Vaughn would refer to the early days of the genre as "elves in rock bands."
But if the new genre had already become predictable enough for that description, it was about to really be melted down by the marketing machine.
Along with the celtic-punk sidhe, the genre had retroactively absorbed influences from contemporary dark fantasy and horror, like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's work. And that sort setting (fewer elves, more vampires) was then merged with the always-present trope of the paranormal investigator. Laurel K. Hamilton's first Anita Blake book came out in 1993; by 2000 (when Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series began) it felt like every bookstore had a shelf dedicated to Hamilton and a whole section to her imitators.
And that's when the genre went through another, more intense round of commodification.
For about a decade, urban fantasy didn't mean elves in rock bands, or Indigenous magic, or liminal stories about myth and faerie in the modern day.
It was narrowed down to a very specific formula: a hero, usually a woman in her twenties or early thirties, with a connection to the supernatural, maybe some powers of her own, embroiled in an action-filled mystery plot. She's likely a PI or a bounty hunter. She's dating a vampire, or a werewolf, or maybe a sidhe or a demon. She can kick ass! She is almost certainly portrayed on the cover from the back, wearing leather pants and holding a knife. (The rarer male version usually has a trench coat, maybe a wand or a staff.) The book is definitely part of an open-ended series.
Naturally, this narrow formula remains wildly successful to this very day and… what? It imploded spectacularly in the early 2010s under the weight of dozens of shoddy, derivative titles rushed into print? You don't say!
What happened to both early period and second-wave urban fantasy was essentially the same thing that happens to every nascent genre – it got troped.
The way we talk about science fiction and fantasy, especially when we talk about genre distinctions, is based heavily on the setting's furniture. Chrome and rain and neon, hackers and yakuza? Must be cyberpunk! Faster than light spaceships and galactic empires? Space opera. Freelance wizards riding motorcycles, fighting one of the seven kinds of available elves? Urban fantasy!
This is where one of the key advantages of SFF is also a problem.
SFF, at its best, can be read on two levels. The premise has to play fair with the readers, even if it's a deliberate symbol or an allegory. Yes, the zombie horde is mindless consumerism, but it still has to function as a zombie horde. Yes, the spice of Arrakis is oil, but it's also a mind-expanding drug.
Usually things are much, much less didactic, less direct. Cyberpunk isn't necessarily about income inequality, but it expresses the anxieties of the age in which it was written.
This kind of writing works because meaning can be allusive, there can be layers and ambiguity even in an adventure story about tracking a dragon to its lair to take its gold. Is the dragon a symbol of greed? Of power? Of the passing of one age into another? All of those things? Have fun arguing with your friends!
Unfortunately, this also makes it easy to strip the surface of those tropes, to peel them from the bones of meaning and context that gave the stories power, to prop them up and taxidermy them and sell them again, now with dead, glassy eyes.
This is how you go from a movement of like-minded authors, to a nascent genre, to a commercial formula.
Were there good books among the derivative wave of late-stage urban fantasy, even in the Xerox-of-a-Xerox period around 2010?
Sure. A good author can write a good story in a formulaic and pulpy genre; that too, is a strength of SFF. You can even write a truly great Star Trek novel, maybe two.
But by definition, a formula is limiting. Fiddling around the edges, finding new spins on old tropes (This book is different because it has werehyenas and revenants instead of werewolves and vampires!) will only get you so far. It's still an invitation to plunge in trope-first.
I am increasingly wary of the idea of building a story out of tropes.
Since TVtropes has exhaustively catalogued every permutation of plot, character type, and interaction, it is, as so many insist, impossible to write a story without using tropes. It's like writing a story without verbs, or nouns.
But there is a difference between reaching for a trope because it's the tool that will help tell the story you want to tell, and using a trope because it's expected in the genre.
Cyberpunk, born just a few years before modern urban fantasy, cast a jaded eye on the era of Reagan and Thatcher and imagined a future of corroded chrome and corporate greed.
The early urban fantasy novels were drawn from the same milieu, but went in a different direction.
What if, they said, there was magic, not for distant kings and questing farm boys in other realms, but right here? The queen of the elves holds court behind chain link in the vacant lot between the 7-Eleven and the Motel 6; the homeless man with the thousand-yard stare is on a quest; that punk band is weaving a cantrip out of three chords and the truth.
Jo Walton noted the impact these works had at the time. She wrote about Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons, its opening lines describing Seattle in fairy-tale language "so charmingly, astonishingly odd."
In the children’s fantasy of my childhood, like Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, you had children in real places coming across the fantastic underlying the scenery of their daily lives and having adventures with it. I had not previously read anything intended for adults that had that feel—Talking Man and Tea With the Black Dragon were what I got when I asked for more.
Let us go back to the origins of urban fantasy.
You had a group of writers with similar sensibilities, groping for a way to tell a particular kind of story. Stories in which people like themselves touched the magical without leaving home. In which you didn't have to be a fated farmboy or step through a wardrobe into another world to encounter magic. Where you could describe Seattle, Pittsburgh, Ottawa in a way that made those cities feel numinous and otherworldly.
When we exhume the bones of genres, we can see not just what tropes were deployed, we can see why. And then, with a clearer eye, we can see what those tools can do now. What does "urban fantasy" look like after two major waves of commodification, after a boom and bust? It seems to have shattered into a million pieces, and is better for it.
The tropes that people found useful are still there, to be picked up as needed, from any period of urban fantasy, or from its many hybridizations into paranormal romance, steampunk, gaslamp fantasy, deconstructed cosmic horror…
This, too, is a strength of SFF. You can go Dumpster diving for ideas, you can build your world from bricolage. You can pick up discarded tropes and dust them off, repurpose them for a new story.
Urban fantasy, cyberpunk, even space opera and epic fantasy have been declared dead before. But all of them will keep coming back, changed. You can bundle up a bunch of tropes into a publishing formula and suck it dry for a while, but if the drive that birthed the genre is still there, you can't kill it off. It'll keep shifting shape, finding new ways to get at that story that needs to be told.
For a long time, I didn't read urban fantasy. I was turned off by the repetitive covers, the Monster Manual approach to worldbuilding, the clones that had flooded the market. (And I missed the first wave stuff, swamped and harder to find amid the second wave.) But now I'm going back. Back to the beginning of first wave urban fantasy, in particular, but also, I think, in search of the best of the second wave. The stuff that married a neo-noir sensibility to horror and magic is definitely out there, and there's a reason it caught on, too.
Like a freelance necromancer, I'm going to exhume the bones of a 'dead' genre, and see what spark of life is to be found there.
Obligatory self promotion section
Hello! Have I mentioned my story Patience Lake is being adapted into an audio drama, Broken Road? I have? Well, I'm afraid I'm going to keep mentioning that!
I'm very sorry to bug you about this!
I'm also sorry I'm sorry, as I know we're not supposed to be bashful about self-promotion?
But I can't help it, I'm Canadian.
For which I'm also sorry.
Anyway, if you enjoyed this newsletter, blah blah like and subscribe and tell your friends. Follow me on the Twitters at @ouranosaurus. Or just look at this picture of a heron! She definitely knows a magic spell. It's probably one for hypnotizing frogs.
