For example, I would call Gail Carriger's PARASOL PROTECTORATE steampunk, rather than urban fantasy. Other stories might be more paranormal romance than urban fantasy, etc.

As far as examples, Jim Butcher's DRESDEN stories are an obvious one. I like Patricia Briggs' MERCY THOMPSON books. Those are urban fantasy, but her ALPHA AND OMEGA series (set in the same world, with overlapping characters) are more paranormal romance (and I don't like them as well). I bet LDWriter2 could give you a longer list.

Laurell K Hamilton: Anita Blake Series

Tee Morris: Billibub Baddings Series

I could give a very long list but I don't have time right now I may list a few later tonight but I will say that before I heard the term Urban Fantasy I called it modern magic users. In other words it's set in today's time.

Before Tolkien created his legion of imitators, I don't think there was a need for the term. Gilgamesh, Morte d'Arthur, and Bram Stoker's Dracula all used settings that were contemporary with their writing. Mary Norton (of Borrower's fame) wrote the novel that Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks was based upon. That was set in then-contemporary setting, and nobody thought it was remarkable. E. Nesbit (a major influence on J.K. Rowling) also set her stories in the Victorian and Edwardian eras they were written in.

I'd say that the norm for fantasy storytellers through the ages is to set their stories in a world much like if not supposedly identical to that inhabited by their readers, except when they were consciously copying some literary source like Chanson de Roland.

What I think is interesting about the term is that it has come into use in an age where everybody, writers included, has become media-saturated. I find writers have become especially *television* saturated. I often even hear prospective authors "casting" their books with TV actors. As mass media begins to displace other books as inspiration, I wonder if contemporary setting fantasies aren't starting to sound a little too much like each other.

So I'd say the shortest possible relatively accurate definition would be any fantasy in a setting that seems more modern than Middle Earth.

As a writer, the question that really interests me it this: what does it take to create a standout story that appeals to the UF market?

People don't name things by some kind of process of reasoned classification. People name things by association. The linguistic term is "metonymy". 18th C British soldiers were called "redcoats" because *most* British regiments wore red coats. But not *all* of them did. A British soldier in wearing a blue frock would still be a redcoat.

An "urban fantasy" doesn't have to have any scenes in a city, any more than you have to use a laptop computer on your lap. The most sensible demarcation for the category would be that the story takes place in a familiar contemporary setting. That usually means an urban setting, but not always.

I think it would make more sense to call most "urban fantasy" "contemporary fantasy". I think there should be a separate category of "historical fantasy" for stories set in a specific historical milieu like Victorian London. For that matter, steampunk is really just a kind of historical science fiction. If a category says anything, it should say something about the appeal of the book to readers. If you were hankering for a contemporary magic story, you probably wouldn't care if it takes place in a city, suburb, rural town or an Antarctic research station. You'd presumably care if it were set in Massachusetts during the Salem witch trials.

As it stands, I don't know whether every fantasy story set in a modern, urban setting necessarily gets the "urban fantasy" label stuck on it. I think it may have a lot to do with who you are publishing with. I have a friend who repositioned an urban fantasy manuscript as paranormal romance when a romance publisher got interested in it. She had to tweak the manuscript to meet their editorial guidelines, but it was still the same story.

Laura Resnick has out a UF set in a city. A different POV in hers. The MC isn't the magic user, just someone caught in the battle between good and evil. Sort of lighthearted I think.

Of course the most famous one The Dresden Files, takes place in Chicago but also takes place in forests, on an island and in Fariye.

laura anne gillman (which is how she likes her names on her books) has out two UF's both set in New York. The first one )The Retriever series) is excellent, the second one(The P.U.P.I. series) doesn't have the same Ummpf as the first one.

C.E. Murphy has a most excellent UF series, the Walker papers. But that one tales place in a whole lot of places. The MC lives in one city but it's by the country so she can be in a forest, a underground cave- she made by accident-, inner gardens and the spirit lands. According to Walker everyone has an inner garden that is where the true self is. It's more complicated than that but you have to read the books to get it all. A lot of action takes place there. I said spirit lands and I mean the Native American spirit lands, a whole bunch of the action takes place there. So It seems in this case a large percentage of the action does not take place in a city.

Seanan McGuire has a series that takes place mostly in Fariye -her version which is different than Butcher's-and only some in a city. Depending on the book. Some have more city action than others.

Then there's Lyn Benedict's series that does take place in a city, mostly that is.

Oh yes, John Levitt's Dog Days series. It takes place in a certain city. Quite good.

K. E. Mills is the writer of the trilogy I referenced in my original note. The Rogue Wizard series. As I said I'm not sure if it is UF since it takes place in the late 1800s. But most of the action is in fictional city which might be London and a certain kingdom which I have no idea might be real or not .

I'm not sure about the hard boiled vamp stories I mentioned either. They take place in the thirties in a city but they may be more paranormal-- very little magic-- and it takes place too far in the past to be UF... maybe. I think there is an anthology that contents the short stories about this guy but I never could figure out if it was the same guy or not.

I want to write a Noir- hard boiled- UF that takes place in the thirties. I also want to write about a wizard in the wild west. Actually there already is one. Written about many years ago. I forget who write about him but he's a mountain man who rides a unicorn and does a bit of magic. He carries an odd assortment of stuff in his saddlebags including an very old earthen cup that can heal any injury if you drink from it.

Anyway, maybe write a series that tales place throughout history, starting with the West, with the same family or same person. I already have a hero who has lived for a few hundred years.

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Why is this discussion here, and not in the Open Discussions about Writing area?

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'Cause when I put it up I forgot I was in Grist for the Mill. No objections to moving it if you wanna do that.

Mostly I'm (supposed) SF, but I grew up in and live in the suburbs---tract housing with occasional woods or swamps. (More of that in the "grew up" part.) Suppose I wrote a fantasy based on my life then? Would it be "urban" fantasy or "suburban" fantasy? If it reflected life further out, among the farms and the wilderness, would it be "rural" fantasy?

My point is nobody feels the need to call Asimov an "urban SF writer" or Simak a "rural SF writer". The appeal is that they writing about their settings convincingly.

Simak's rural sensibilities come to the fore in, say, the City Cycle (which is somewhat misnamed, maybe,) or a later novel like Mastodonia.

One could take it further with other writers. Who comes to immediate mind is Leigh Brackett, whose work were, more or less, westerns in everything but their setting.

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I've never been a big fan of the decaying city-scapes and scuzzy people that set the tone for much of the "future SF," both movies and literary works. (Thought it might reflect the life experience of people who don't fit in well anywhere.) If "urban fantasy" is of that variety, populated with drug-addled criminals and diseased post-punk rockers, as well as vampires and zombies, I'd just as soon not bother to read it.

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Well, I can't speak for all urban fantasy, but that's not true of what I have read. In fact, the baddies are almost always of the paranormal variety in one way or another.

Patricia Briggs' MERCY THOMPSON stories take place mostly in three small cities in eastern Washington state (and to some extent in the surrounding high desert. Yeah, you're occasionally aware that there are some not nice people around. But the story usually doesn't pay much attention to them because:

• There are much worse things to look out for and
• Most of the characters are, for various reasons, not likely to be seriously threatened by most humans.

Further refinements, mundane meaning the earthly, commonplace, routine alpha reality humans exist in, in a narrative present time, so to speak.

Fantastical in the sense of cultural paranormal motifs like witches, vampires, zombies, werewolves, elves, and dragons and such living among us unseen by the otherwise mundane world.

Somewhat like magical realism in the sense both mundane and metaphysical worlds' boundaries' blur, more emphasis on paranormal metaphysical belief systems for urban fantasy and less boundary blurring; while magical realism emphasizes metaphysical supernatural belief systems, and to some extent paranormal belief systems when they are an inherent part of a culture's metaphysical zeitgeist, and almost entirely dissolving the separated worlds' boundaries.

Paranormal in the sense of temporal cultural belief systems. Supernatural: spiritual cultural belief systems. Finite and subtle distinctions, I'm sure.

Mundane or urban fantastical science fiction, now there's a perspective worthy of investigation. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein perhaps? Rivet and chrome type fantastical science and technology motifs.

Anyway:

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Mundane or urban fantastical science fiction, now there's a perspective worthy of investigation. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein perhaps? Rivet and chrome type fantastical science and technology motifs.

What about science fiction magical realism?

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That would be the Shadowrun novels. Based on a game I hear but they seem to have taken on a life of their own. I would say over twenty of them. Most of them written by different writers, I say most because they are series within the series.

Kinda dark too.

BTW, I think extrinsic may have the best definition of UF here... so far anyway.

http://www.schlockmercenary.com/blog/on-sorcery-and-the-apprenticeship-thereof

I agree that urban fantasy need not be urban. It's just a title, made up because people think so deeply in genres these days. To me the best urban fantasy running these days is Fablehaven, and most of it takes place in the countryside. I think the vital part of it is it is magical happening ostensibly in the 'real' world.

I never heard of paranormal romance until maybe five years ago (not that I am any authority on what is often teen chick lit). It seems to me a series like Sookie Stackhouse would have been called Urban Fantasy at one time, but now there is a much better category to help explain it.

In the broader sense, certainly the term Urban Fantasy has been used to describe works that take place outside of an urban setting, perhaps even synonymous with Modern Fantasy.

So there's a very practical implication to having something you're working on classed as "paranormal romance" rather than "urban fantasy" -- and it's not having to have a romantic story. The editors who self-identify as dealing with "paranormal romance" are different people from the editors who are interested in "urban fantasy" that happens to be romantic, and they may be looking for different kinds of MSS.

This happened to a friend of mine who had an UF MS she tried pitching as a PNR. Suddenly she was dealing with editors who had very, very specific criteria for what they wanted to see, e.g. four to five explicit sex scenes with the first occurring no later than page 40. That's because the editors were looking for MSS to fit in a product line designed to appeal to a specific market segment. It's basic marketing theory: you create a brand that represents a certain experience to a set of customers, and then you deliver that experience consistently on all the products (in this case books) bearing that brand.

I read an account by a screenwriter of a very similar situation pitching a script to a studio executive. What the studio executive wanted was "the same thing, only different." Thats why you get so many high concept movies that can be summed up by something like this: "'Die Hard' but in a subway" or "'Pretty Woman', but at a spelling bee". By an odd coincidence my current project could be described that way: "'His Girl Friday', but in an EE Doc Smith universe."

Normally we fantasy writers approach the world building problem as a trade-off between bringing the reader up to speed and getting the story moving. But maybe instead of thinking of background data as something we've got to slip under the readers' noses, we should think of bringing the reader into the world as part of experiencing of the story.

UF is interesting because it starts with a world we all know quite a bit about. We don't have to be briefed on the difference between New York and Phoenix and San Francisco, although even in a non-speculative novel the writer ought to paint us a vivid and surprising picture of those places if they use them. Furthermore there's a lot of the supernatural landscape readers can take for granted, like how vampires work. So is it "Vampires in San Fancisco", rig-a-jig-jig and away we go?

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After reviewing the comments, I'm starting to think "urban fantasy" is another of those overhyped subcategories that lump a bunch of works that don't go together particularly well in order to produce some new market niche category, rather than some true and new division of popular literature.

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How are you? Where you been? Geez, you, Merlion, BentTree, even saw Tchern pop in. They're all coming back.

A paid internship on a digest. A paid writing tutoring position as an apprenticeship leading toward teaching writing, and coursework and workshops in all of the above.

Where I've been headed toward from where I've been.

Not too long ago, genre grouping definitions exploded exponentially. The creative writing culture had followed seven or eight basic categories, one or two age ranges, and rigid labeling with convention-based expectations. It got kind of stuck in a predictable groove. A breakout was inevitable. After all, for good reason, it's not called conformance writing. Crossover and out-of-category creations is one way creation remains fresh and vigorous. Another way advances the state of the art. What's between them? Or beyond categorizations? More categories.

That's it in a logline.

I think...

In high fantasy, the first 20% of the manuscript is exceedingly difficult because of the enormous burden of briefing the reader on unfamiliar names, places, history, and world rules. In urban fantasy, the challenge is to add a new dimension to the picture of the world already familiar to readers.

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Robert, Merlion-Emrys -- I think there is a sound craft basis for approaching high fantasy and urban fantasy as different kinds of stories.

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All stories are different kinds of stories. Even within various so-called genres there are many differences. And especially in recent history there is a lot of stuff that combines and remixes the elements in a wide variety of ways.

Therefore most genre and especially sub-genre catagories are going to break down somewhat, because nobody can agree on exactly what they mean (much like how nobody can decide what "show" and "tell" me or what does or doesn't constitute "immediacy" or being "in the head,) or, they will fragment into more specific yet even harder to agree upon sub genres and sub-sub genres.

Of course you're right, writing a story set in a middle-ages style setting is going to be different from writing one set in modern times. But does that justify a seperate "genre?" And if it does and we get something like "modern fantasy" people are going to get the urge to divide it into "urban fantasy", "rural fantasy" etc etc. And the thing is also, its not just about setting...various even more nebulous and subjective things get put into thease classifications, criteria of style, tone and aesthetic that have nothing to do with something as relatively definable as setting, or whether or not there is magic.

It's also interesting to me that most bookstores I go into don't actually have sections for these things. Heck most don't even seperate sci-fi and fantasy...there are sci-fi/fantasy shelves and horror shelves...no urban fantasy section or hard sci fi section.

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Not too long ago, genre grouping definitions exploded exponentially. The creative writing culture had followed seven or eight basic categories, one or two age ranges, and rigid labeling with convention-based expectations. It got kind of stuck in a predictable groove. A breakout was inevitable. After all, for good reason, it's not called conformance writing. Crossover and out-of-category creations is one way creation remains fresh and vigorous.

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There are maybe a few exceptions, a few of the terms that can perhaps be used effectively to identify an aesthetic,

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...which I misread as

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...to identify an anaesthetic.

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On second thought, considering my deteriorating opinion of UF and PNR, perhaps I didn't misread it. :/

The problem I have with it, as I've probably ranted before, is that most of it is really mundane fiction in fantasy trappings, rather than being actually fantasy. I'm not sure where the line is, but I know it when I see it.

Maybe the key is the level of reinvention of the wheel. I swear some of 'em reinvent the whole bloody wagon!

How's this for a definition of Urban Fantasy. Found the quote on an E-mail by Lisa Shearin.

"If high fantasy asked you to embark upon a quest to find a magic stone, then urban fantasy would be waiting in the shadows, read to mug you when you got back." --Alan Campbell

Interesting enough Lisa's series has a Magic Stone and isn't UF as far as I can figure.

The "punks"--Steampunk, Deiselpunk, Atompunk, Nuclearpunk, Biopunk--are the Sci-Fi equivalent of Urban Fantasy, Contemporary Fantasy and the New Weirds (which are attempts to advance Lovecraftian style stories), but timeline specific by the prefixes.

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Urban Fantasy is any kind of fantasy set in an urban setting. Urban specifically, as opposed to just contemporary. Downtown more than Uptown, gritty and reflecting society in the backdrop of the metropolitan streets. It can be mythological, monster, wizard, witch, or artifact. There's a million stories in the city...

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I was afraid of that...if that holds true, it's definitely not the kind of story that appeals to me.

Examples.

Young wizard learning to control magic and face a scary villain while dealing with abuse and abandonment issues. Fantasy.

Young wizard in London who escapes his evil aunt and uncle and cousin and goes off to an amazing school where magic is a way of life. Urban Fantasy.

Boy summons a genie and uses it to solve his problems, until he winds up in such a mess that the only way out is with the demon's help. Fantasy.

Boy secretly summons a demon and has it steal something from another summoner, which causes wealthy and influential people in London to begin chasing him, putting him in a situation where his only escape is with the demon's help. Urban fantasy.

Good to see you post, I.B. As a fellow Mainer,I wonder of any story we set here could be considered "Urban" Fantasy. I've begun one that takes place in my hometown during the famous Yarmouth Clam Festival. Would this be considered a "Suburban" Fantasy?

I knew there were UF that is CUF before this crop of but they seemed to be far in-between, now there so many that's impossible to read them all. And I noticed that many of the newer ones are of the Romance-paranormal tales discussed.

I believe I read Lackey's "Burning Waters" and I think they got it backwards about who the MC was. And as a side point: its part of a series, one darker than usual. I didn't finish "Jinx High" because it was even more than the previous ones.

And I came back to add that I don't think, in this context, Urban means city anymore. Or that it makes that much difference. They all seem to be on the same shelves.