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Urban fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy, placing supernatural elements in a contemporary urban area-affected setting. The combination provides the writer with a platform for classic fantasy tropes, quixotic plot-elements, and unusual characters—without demanding the creation of an entire imaginary world.
Precursors of urban fantasy are found in popular fiction of the 19th century and the present use of the term dates back to the 1970s. Much of its audience was established in the 1930s-50s with the success of light supernatural fare in the movies (and later on TV). The genre's current publishing popularity began in 1980s North America, as writers and publishers were encouraged by the success of Stephen King and Anne Rice.
The urban component is usually found in the setting—typically a large or small city—or even a suburban community in a metropolitan area. Use of contemporary technology (such as automotive vehicles or communications) and everyday community and social institutions (such as libraries, schools/universities, or markets) establish a familiar context. The period in which the action occurs may be the fairly recent past or the near future, but will typically require merely only casual historical or other special knowledge from the reader. The city-setting is a tool; used to establish a tone, to help move the plot, and may even be acknowledged as a character itself.
Urban fantasy is most often a sub-genre of low fantasy (where magical events intrude on an otherwise-normal world) and/or hard fantasy (treating magic as something understandable and explainable), and works may be found mixing with sub-genres of, for example, Gothic fiction, occult detective fiction, or the various "punk"CyberpunkSteampunkCyberpunk derivatives genres.> Common themes include coexistence or conflict between humans and other beings, and the changes such characters and events bring to local life. Many authors, publishers, and readers particularly distinguish urban fantasy from works of paranormal romance, which use similar characters and settings, but focus on the romantic relationships between characters.
The YA author Scott Westerfeld distinguished between urban fantasy and a subgenre called elfpunk on the basis that "Elfpunk is pretty much full of elves and fairies and traditional shit ... Urban fantasy, though, can have some totally made-up fucked-up creatures."
Around the same time, popular mail-delivered periodicals appeared in Europe and the Americas ( The Saturday Evening Post (1821), Godey's Lady's Book (1830), and Harper's Weekly (1857)). The success of these magazines led to ones that targeted specific readerships: Boys' Own Magazine (1855), and Argosy (1882) among them. All of these magazines published short and serialized fiction features, as well as reportage, instructional articles, illustration, and opinion. Before WW1, fantasy vied for magazine space with westerns, romance, mysteries, military adventure, comedies, and horror. Writers often published stories in multiple genres - among them Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert E. Howard, Isaac Asimov, and Elmore Leonard. A sought-after hallmark for many of these writers was " Social realism" - although the stories were outrageously fantastic.Lutes, Jean. (2010). Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (review). The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. 1. 113-117. 10.1353/jmp.0.0009.
also arrived before the Civil War; some of the earliest re-printing serials from magazines. Commonly associated with Western adventure, they also encompassed romance and crime-fiction. Robert deGraff founded Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books in 1939, he distributed not only to the 2,800 US bookstores, but also in more than a hundred thousand drugstores, news-stands, 5-&-10s, cigar stores, groceries, and diners. By doing this, he established a market - not for copies of Shakespeare or Jane Austen - but for collections and book-length versions of popular magazine fiction.
Writer Charles G. Finney's celebrated 1935 experimental novel The Circus of Dr. Lao placed mythical creatures in a contemporary setting to examine the society in a small Arizona town. Gruesome cartoons by Charles Addams began exploring the humorous side of horror in the New Yorker magazine around the same time.
Occult detective stories, such as Manly Wade Wellman's John Thunstone stories - written originally during the 1940s -are credited by many current authors for bringing contemporary characters and American settings into the fantasy and horror genres. These early tales, however, differ from current urban fantasy - they present supernatural beings and acts as unnatural, aberrant, and a possible danger to ordinary citizens.
Unknown magazine (1939–1943) was conceived by its editor John W. Campbell as a fantasy equivalent of Campbell's successful Astounding science fiction magazine; its stories often took place in the present and many had a thoughtful "science-fictional" approach. Writers such as Fritz Leiber ( "Smoke Ghost", published in 1941), Jack Williamson with "Darker Than You Think" (originally published 1940), H. L. Gold (with his "Trouble with Water", published in 1939) and L. Sprague de Camp's "Nothing in the Rules" (1939) presented , , , , and more, in a modern setting, with horrific and/or humorous results. The prolific de Camp and his writing partner, war game inventor Fletcher Pratt, also explored urban material with their stories of Harold Shea in the 1940s and Gavagan's Bar stories in the 1950s.
The 1940s saw a number of comic ghost-movies; some of the best-known today include The Canterville Ghost (re-telling the 1887 story by Oscar Wilde), Blithe Spirit (based on Noël Coward's hit London and Broadway play), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (based on an Josephine Leslie novel), series-fare Topper Returns, Gildersleeve's Ghost, The Smiling Ghost, plus cartoons and short features from The Three Stooges, Olsen and Johnson, Walt Disney Productions and Looney Tunes.
In 1962, Ray Bradbury published the dark novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, which has been cited as a particular influence by writers Stephen King,Bloom, Harold (1998). Stephen King. Chelsea House, pp. 20. R. L. Stine, and Neil Gaiman. The highly successful TV fantasy series Bewitched began its 8-year run in 1964, with its rival I Dream of Jeannie and a less-successful fantasy show My Mother the Car appearing a year later; The Addams Family based on Charles Addams New Yorker cartoons also debuted in 1964. Ira Levin's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby was a best-seller and critical hit; made into a movie directed by Roman Polanski the following year. Chester Anderson's psychedelic adventure The Butterfly Kid was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1968. Also in 1968, the English translation of Italo Calvino's short-story collection " Le cosmicomiche" made his fantastic tales built around minor scientific details available to the Anglo-American appetite for the new urban fantasy.
Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire (a re-working of her own late-60s short story) in 1976 to strikingly mixed critical reviews. Incorporating many genres (horror, eroticism, fantasy, romance, historical fiction), it and its sequels established a new audience for fantasy characters in a real world. Recognizing its potential Alfred A. Knopf editor Victoria Wilson recommended a very substantial advance; later, the paperback rights cost Ballantine Books $700,000.
1972's TV horror-film The Night Stalker spun-off a 1974 occult detective TV series . It featured a Chicago newspaper reporter uncovering and battling supernatural creatures (e.g. vampires and zombies). He was unbelieved and unappreciated, considered by his boss, colleagues, the police and the public as something between a crackpot or an insane murderer as he struggles with both real and metaphorical demons in each episode.
Isaac Asimov's Azazel stories about a tiny demon (less than an inch tall), most of which were written in the 1980s, take some of their urban character of his mystery stories initially published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Dorothy Gilman, a writer known for her genre-merging Mrs. Pollifax "cozy-spy" action novels, wrote The Clairvoyant Countess in 1975 which featured various forms of ESP (and wrote a sequel in 2002).
In the cinema, the re-write of Dan Aykroyd's original 1982 science fiction comedy script for Ghostbusters by Harold Ramis replaced the futuristic setting for present day New York City. This effectively enabled the film to be made, and introduced to the mainstream the idea of fantastical events taking place in a real-world setting. Two years later, Gremlins brought another batch of supernatural beings into our everyday world. At the same time another low-budget supernatural comedy success, Teen Wolf was popular enough to generate a television show, an animated cartoon, and a cinema sequel. Before its run was finished, another general-audience teen comedy with supernatural elements, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was in production.
Terri Windling's shared Borderlands universe, made up of a number of anthologies and novels, launched with the eponymous paperback original anthology, Borderland in 1986, followed up by Bordertown, also in 1986. The series was later touted by Neil Gaiman as "one of the most important places where Urban Fantasy began". An article in Tor.com has stated that "some say, Urban Fantasy was born in Bordertown," which provided "young, beginning writers like Charles de Lint and Emma Bull" with a platform. Emma Bull's 1987 urban fantasy War for the Oaks, where fairy factions battle in present-day Minneapolis, also received interest and attention. Both Bull's novel and the Borderlands books emphasized young, poor, hip protagonists. In this, they had much in common with the usual protagonist of the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction.
Sweet Silver Blues a 1987 novel by fantasy author Glen Cook began his Garrett P.I. series. These tales chronicled adventures of a hardboiled detective in a contemporary fantasy world, and were among the earliest to use a fantastic "underworld" in place of the criminals and thugs of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and their followers. Prolific author Mercedes Lackey started a series in the waning years of the 1980s with Burning Water, exploring the life of a contemporary American witch.
The Vampire Files [2] by featured a vampire detective that begins the series by him solving his own murder. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, the 12-book series pioneered the vampire investigator role. P.N. Elrod has authored more than 25 books and edited many anthologies. She has won numerous awards for her work in establishing the UF genre.
Shadowrun, a tabletop RPG with a similar concept to the Borderlands universe appeared. Like those earlier books, Shadowrun took place in a future Earth setting (specifically 2050, in the first edition), after the reappearance of supernatural powers and beings. Players could play humans ( enhanced or otherwise), elves, dwarves or orcs, all in a dark high tech setting. The more definitely cyberpunk approach (jaundiced and gritty) of the game's universe exerted its own influence.
Anthologist and professor. Dr. Martin H. Greenberg sparked growth in urban fantasy by commissioning established authors to write stories for his many fantasy anthologies (among them Wizards, Witches, Devils, and Faeries). The commissioned work was juxtaposed with older fiction; it frequently used supernatural elements in contemporary urban settings.
Many urban-fantasy novels are told via a first-person narrative, and often feature mythological beings, romance, and female protagonists who are involved in law enforcement or vigilantism. Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series—which follows the investigations of a supernatural Federal Marshal during paranormal cases—has been called a substantial and influential work of the genre. Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan novels, also regarded as inspirational works, feature a bounty-hunting "witch-born" demon who battles numerous supernatural foes. Multi-genre offerings combine urban fantasy with other established forms (e.g.: police procedurals, as presented in the Peter Grant stories of Ben Aaronovitch, or the Charlie Madigan series, by Kelly Gay, which explores challenges a police officer faces while trying to balance her paranormal cases with life as a single mother).
In addition to books which present largely independent characters, certain stories feature men and women who are regularly partnered on adventures—often with an underlying romantic element. The Jaz Parks series, by Jennifer Rardin, follows the titular Central Intelligence Agency operative and her vampire boss as they combat supernatural threats to national security. Jocelynn Drake's Dark Days novels follow a vampire named Mira and a vampire hunter named Danaus, who work together to protect their people from a mutual enemy. Night Huntress, a series by Jeaniene Frost, centers on a half-vampire named Catherine and a vampire bounty hunter called Bones, who gradually become lovers while battling the undead.
Boarding schools are a common setting in teen urban fantasy. Rampant, by Diana Peterfreund, follows a group of young women at a as they train to fight killer unicorns. The House of Night series, by P. C. and Kristin Cast, presents a school where future vampires are disciplined while on the path to transformation, during which several romantic conflicts and other clashes ensue. Claudia Gray's Evernight novels center on a mysterious academy, where a romantic bond develops between a girl born to vampires, and a boy who hunts them. Fallen, by Lauren Kate, revolves around a student named Luce who finds herself drawn to a boy named Daniel, unaware that he is a fallen angel who shares a history with her. Other series, such as Carrie Jones's Need, have characters moving to new locations but attending public schools while discovering mysterious occurrences elsewhere in their towns.
The hidden-world focuses on stories and characters taking place in a fully-realized domain which operates secretly but simultaneously to the world with which we are familiar. An outstanding example are the Harry Potter books of J. K. Rowling - where our own ( muggle) world is unaware of an entire universe of wizards and magical creatures; and intersections of these domains provide plot material and character dimensionality for the action taking place primarily in the magic universe - and so being a type of high-fantasy.
On the other hand, magical charm stories operate mostly in the mundane universe, but where a spell or token provides plot-interest. The protagonist of Robert Lawson's 1945 Mr. Wilmer works as a clerk for a big New York City company - but suddenly one morning he can speak with and understand animals. In the magical stories of Edward Eager, groups of children are granted wishes or transported through time by invoking spells. This makes the stories a variety of Low fantasy.
Possibly the best-known urban fantasy series for children are P. L. Travers' low-fantasy Mary Poppins stories, set in London between the World Wars. As well as eight books, there have been several film and stage adaptations. The high-fantasy Wizarding World phenomenon may soon be in position to overtake Poppins in sales, but not longevity.
Original music is also produced. In 2010, musicians Alexandra Monir, Michael Bearden, and Heather Holley (a songwriter for Christina Aguilera's Stripped) collaborated to create songs for Monir's debut novel, Timeless.
Certain staples of urban fantasy novels are also present in television shows. The concept of peaceful coexistence with paranormal beings is explored in the 1996 series , which focuses on secret vampire clans in San Francisco. Works such as Witchblade present the more common matter of a protagonist attempting to protect citizens.
While urban-fantasy novels are often centered on heroines, television programs have regularly featured both genders in leading roles. Shows such as Beauty and the Beast, The Dresden Files, Forever Knight, Grimm, Moonlight, and Supernatural are based around male protagonists, while other programs, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, and Witchblade, focus largely on female protagonists.
Many urban fantasy video games such as Final Fantasy VII, Tokyo Xanadu, The World Ends with You series, the Shadowrun series, the Dishonored series, and the Mother series feature urban settings with Magic realism .
Urban fantasy video games often include characters from Folklore and religions in modern contexts. Games such as The Wolf Among Us, Stray Gods, Folklore, Dark, Coffee Talk, the Megami Tensei series, the Bayonetta series, the series, the Yo-kai Watch series are heavily inspired by folklore and religion.Andrew Webster, "You should play this extremely chill game about serving coffee to vampires and elves" , The Verge, 12 February 2020. Retrieved 16 February 2020. Other urban fantasy video games put a modern interpretation on other fantasy media. The Devil May Cry series is based on Divine Comedy, and Lies of P is based on The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Teen fiction
Rather than the professional heroes of adult urban fantasy, many novels for young adult audiences follow inexperienced protagonists who are unexpectedly drawn into paranormal struggles. Amidst these conflicts, characters often gain allies, find romance, and, in some cases, develop or discover supernatural abilities of their own. In Kelley Armstrong's Darkest Powers series, a group of teens with paranormal talents go on the run while fleeing from a persistent band of scientists. Gone, by Michael Grant, follows an isolated town in which adults have mysteriously disappeared, leaving a society of super-powered children behind. In Unearthly, by Cynthia Hand, a girl discovers that she is part angel and gifted with superhuman abilities, leading her to seek out her purpose on Earth.
The Immortals series, by Alyson Noël, follows a girl who gains special abilities after recovering from an accident, and also grows close to a mysterious new boy at her school. also play a prominent part in these and several other urban-fantasy novels. Coming-of-age themes and teen 'voices' also often distinguish young-adult urban fantasy from adult books in the genre. Bruce Coville and Jane Yolen collaborated on Armageddon Summer which places a standard teen romance in the middle of an imagined apocalyptic cult.
Juvenile fiction
A helping of the fantastic is often an element in children's literature, but the two major strands of urban fantasy are well-represented in particular.
Paranormal romance
In an online commentary, author Jeannie Holmes described differences between urban fantasy and paranormal romance:
Media tie-ins
Use of other forms of media has become a common part of the creation and promotion of urban-fantasy works.
Music
Several urban-fantasy authors cite music as an inspiration. Certain writers recommend songs or playlists on their official websites, including Courtney Allison Moulton, Jaye Wells, and Sarah J. Maas, who couple their recommendations with links to music-providing services. Publishers have also used music for book trailers, including the trailer for Carrie Jones's Captivate, which features the work of songwriter Derek Daisey.
Video
Book trailers are often used to promote urban-fantasy novels. Publishers such as HarperCollins also produce regular video interviews with debuting authors.
Comics and manga
Adaptations of urban-fantasy novels have appeared in comic books and manga. Among the tales to be adapted are Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series, Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson stories, and Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely.
Film and television
Works of urban fantasy have been adapted to or have originated in film and television. Aside from popular ghost and horror films from the 1930s-60s, well-known examples include the 1992 series and the TV adaptation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is regarded as a seminal work of the genre.
Video games
While most fantasy video games take place in science fantasy or high fantasy settings, the subgenre of urban fantasy has a significant niche in the video game media market.
Authors
The following is an incomplete list of notable authors of urban fantasy. According to 2013 statistics by the fantasy publisher Tor Books, among writers of urban fantasy or paranormal romance, 57% are women and 43% are men, whereas men outnumber women by about two to one in writing historical, epic, or high fantasy. (See full statistics)
See also
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