Dazed and Confused: The reality of Urban Fantasy

As an avid book reader, nothing is more confusing to me than genre’s. It all used to be fairly straight forward, with only a few genre’s to keep track of, they were easily classified. Now however, there are almost as many genre’s as books, and some of them walk a fine line between being one thing or something else entirely. So in today’s blog we are going to talk about some of the different types and hopefully educate ourselves a little bit.

Lets start with a relatively new one, that our wonderful Sandra writes in, Urban Fantasy. Urban Fantasy is basically a story set in the “real world” but in an urban setting, featuring supernatural/paranormal content. Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita series and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie series, are both excellent examples of this. Where as traditional fantasy is essentially in a make believe world/s.

In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, John Clute wrote...
“A city is a place; urban fantasy is a mode. A city may be an icon or a geography; the [urban fantasy] recounts an experience. A city may be seen from afar, and is generally seen clear; the urban fantasy is told from within.... Urban fantasies are normally texts where fantasy and the mundane world interact, intersect and interweave throughout a tale which is significantly about a real city.”

There are also different types of Urban Fantasy, like Traditional Urban Fantasy, Mythic Urban Fantasy and Contemporary Urban Fantasy which we absolutely will not get into here or else this blog will be a novel. ;)

Now here’s were it gets confusing, Urban Fantasy is a sub-genre of Contemporary Fantasy. Contemporary Fantasy is essentially stories set in the “real world” and has an element of mystical/magical mumbo jumbo to it. A good example of Contemporary Fantasy is JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

Sounds like pretty much the same thing, right? Well, yes and no. Urban Fantasy is Contemporary Fantasy but CF is not necessarily UF. The main difference being that UF (and yes I shortened these, its getting tedious typing it out lol) is set in a current city or rural area that would be recognizable to any real people that live there. Where as CF may feature cities but its not really specific to any particular one, nor does it really delve into the details so much. Lets try and break this down a bit by using our book examples from above. I’m going to assume here that everyone has read at least a few of LKH’s Anita books and JKR’s Harry Potter. In Anita’s world you are primarily set in St. Louis, Missouri. You walk around the streets, go to different parts of town, etc. Where as in Harry’s world, you never really do get to specific into one particular city or place. Yes you delve around Diagon Alley, which is somewhere in London but its not something that a person living in London would be able to point out. And this is something that is difficult to convey, Diagon Alley is almost like a portal to another dimension through which you enter in London...sort of an off shoot. Again, hard to convey, but I think you get the point.

CF is a sub-genre of Fantasy and is also known as modern-day fantasy, or indigenous fantasy. Fantasy, as a whole, is defined by stories with supernatural elements usually set in fantastical worlds, usually fictional. Fantasy is usually distinguished from Sci-Fi or Horror by its lack of specific scientific themes or macabre horror elements, although as with UF and CF it can overlap. Just as certain UF seems to stem more from Horror than it does Fantasy. Confused yet? You should be. Lol

Think of it as a tree, where many things stem off from a centralized trunk.

Fantasy
----*Contemporary Fantasy (Modern-day Fantasy, Indigenous Fantasy)
---------*Urban Fantasy
---------------*Traditional Urban Fantasy
---------------*Mythic Urban Fantasy
---------------*Contemporary Urban Fantasy

Granted the main tree is a whole lot larger, but I only included the ones I mentioned previously in this blog.

So in conclusion, its really, really hard to tell the difference between a lot of these genre’s, because they all stem from on another. There are also more genre’s to take into consideration like Horror, Literary Fiction, Paranormal Romance, etc, which also can come into play. So how to tell what a book is before you’ve read it? Well, I have always stuck with the good rule of never judging a book by its cover, but in this case its helpful. A lot of the books in a specified genre tend to stick with the same rules or look for their covers. If you’ve seen one female back with a wicked looking tattoo and a knife, you’ve seen em all. So the next time you come across a book you adore, remember the cover art and see if any others out there remind you of it. You just might find a new author to obsess on.

Until next time,
CoD