17 - Urban fantasy

Summary

For the city is a poem, as has often been said . . . but it is not a classical

poem, a poem tidily centred on a subject. It is a poem which unfolds

the signifier and it is this unfolding that ultimately the semiology of the

city should try to grasp and make sing.

A taxonomy of urban fantasy

The term urban fantasy initially referred to a group of texts – among whose early exemplars are the Borderlands series of anthologies and novels, conceived by Terri Windling, Emma Bull's War for the Oaks (1987) and Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates (1983) – in which the tropes of pastoral or heroic fantasy were brought into an urban setting. It quickly grew to encompass supernatural historical novels and overlap with the loosely defined literary phenomena known as new wave fabulism or the New Weird. It has also been retroactively extended to include virtually every work of the fantastic that takes place in a city or has a contemporary setting that occasionally incorporates a city, with the result that any particularity the term once had is now diffused in a fog of contradiction (and, it must be added, marketing noise; the writers of ‘paranormal romance’ have all but co-opted the term for the broad American readership). If it is applied to both Perdido Street Station and The Night Watch – not to mention texts as disparate as Shriek: An Afterword and War for the Oaks, Neverwhere and The Physiognomy, or Mortal Love and The Iron Dragon's Daughter – what can it possibly mean?

The elements common to all urban fantasies – a city in which supernatural events occur, the presence of prominent characters who are artists or musicians or scholars, the redeployment of previous fantastic and folkloric topoi in unfamiliar contexts – hint at a characterization if not a rigorous definition. Within those common elements, there are two fundamental strains of urban fantasy, which might be loosely differentiated as those in which urban is a descriptor applied to fantasy and those in which fantasy modifies urban.