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tegory until the 1980s after the phenomenon named Stephen King came along.
More recently, readers wanted a type of fantasy novel that was set in an alternate version of our contemporary/near-contemporary (but not always urban) world with a female (sometimes male) protagonist who usually (but not always) has (or develops) a certain amount of “kickassitude.” She possesses supernatural powers or a connection to those with such powers (or gains them for herself ). The books often had a detective-style plot—or at least something that had to be revealed/discovered—with (usually but not always) a romantic relationship as at least one subplot. Action-oriented, they often included horrific elements balanced with humor. The comedy might be snarky, twinged with morbidity, or downright funny, but the universe was still, overall, dark. When romance (and/or sex) was involved it was written either from the female perspective or a balance of female and male. The protagonist was also usually involved in a journey of self-discovery. This evolving character development, complex universe, and complicated storylines usually required more than one book to resolve.
A type of fiction that didn’t really have a name, this nameless genre/ subgenre/genre blend became the most popular and bestselling fantasy of the last ten years.
How did it come to be known as urban fantasy?
In the 1990s and first years of the twenty-first century, the term paranormal romance was often used by the media and reviewers in publications such as the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, etc. to describe fantasy books like those written by Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris as well as those by Christine Feehan, Maggie Shayne, and others. Previously, Anne Rice’s work—her Interview with the Vampire was published in 1976—had often been referred to as paranormal romance.
The romance genre has identified one of its many subgenres as paranormal romance for at least two decades. (The Romance Writers of America introduced a Futuristic/Fantasy/Paranormal category for the organization’s RITA awards in 1991. It is currently called, more succinctly, Best Paranormal Novel.) As with any long-established subgenre, its definition has changed over the years, but it has never been confined only to a contemporary setting; it included time-travel, historical fantasy, and science fictional romance too.
But of the examples mentioned above, only Maggie Shayne’s (her Wings in the Night series, started in 1993 with Twilight Phantasies) and Feehan’s books (Dark Prince, first of her Dark series, was published in 1999) were published as romance and conformed to that genre’s expectations of a love relationship central to the plot with a positive, satisfying ending in which the reader is assured the couple will remain together.
Rice, although her fame has come from writing about vampires and witches, has always shunned labels and her books are commonly shelved in bookstores simply as “fiction.” It certainly isn’t genre romance.
Hamilton’s first Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novel, Guilty Pleasures, was published in 1993. Set in an alternate world where the supernatural is known to exist and the preternatural have been granted equal rights in the U.S., Hamilton’s earliest books did have a romantic aspect, but Anita Blake was closer to a horrific version of mystery novelist Sue Grafton’s character Kinsey Millhone than a romance heroine.
Charlaine Harris’s first Southern Vampire Mysteries novel, Dead Until Dark, won an Anthony Award as Best Paperback Mystery of 2001. Her heroine, Sookie Stackhouse, lives in a world where supernatural creatures have recently “come out” and co-exist with humans. As a secret telepath, Sookie has problems dating fellow humans until she meets a vampire whose mind she can’t read.
Nobody called these books “urban fantasy,” at the time. Nor, at first, were Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series (first book: Bitten, 2001) or Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking (2004), the first of her Rachel Morgan novels, or any of the other novels of this increasingly popular fantasy. It wasn’t romance and even though it was dark and vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures were involved, you couldn’t call it horror. For the most part it was just “fantasy”—even if reviewers, journalists, and others sometimes misnamed it as paranormal romance.
Meanwhile true paranormal romance set in an alternate world similar to our own—some with the romance occurring in a well-built fantasy universe, some with only a nod to meaningful fantastic elements—was selling well too. Heroines and heroes found each other and a happy-ever-after ending (even if one’s true love happened to be a vampire or demon or werewolf ) while saving the world from supernatural nastiness (often in the form of vampires, demons, werewolves, etc.)
[I edited The Year’s Best Paranormal Fiction anthology in 2006, with a lengthy introduction about the romance tradition and definition. It pointed out the difference between “fantasy with some romance” and fiction from the marketing category called romance, but suggested we just call it all paranormal romance. It was a lame attempt and I now disavow it. The next volume was called The Year’s Best Romantic Fantasy and then (against the publisher’s wishes at the time) I killed the series. But that is another story. Let’s just say I saw the light.]
Around 2005, the term urban fantasy started to be used to differentiate novels that were not “paranormal romance-according-to-romance-genre.” Outside of the simple fact there were starting to be a lot of books of this type being published and they were being published as fantasy—printed on the spine and categorized by BISAC Subject Code (a list used to categorize books based on topical content that theoretically determines where the work is shelved or the genre under which it can be searched for in a database)—I suspect, but have no proof, that the term popped up for two reasons.
First, although some fans could not care less about labels, readers who wanted romance resented books not fitting their expectations being called romance. There seemed to be a suspicion, too, among some more vociferous fans that “someone” was trying to sneak non-romance into the romance sections of bookstores. That being said, many romance readers seemed to be receptive to fantasy and flexible about “crossing the aisle” without prejudice.
Perhaps more importantly, writers of fantasy of this type, primarily women, weren’t getting respect from their peers or the fantasy “experts.” (Books by male authors—most notably Jim Butcher—whose books appealed to the same readership weren’t being called paranormal romance.) They wrote fantasy and wanted it to be recognized as such. These books were the hottest thing in the fantasy field and bringing in throngs of new readers—many of whom had previously read mostly romance or mystery or were discovering fantasy for the first time or realizing fantasy wasn’t what they had thought it was—yet the authors and the fiction as a whole were being ignored (even derided) by the field itself and most of its established mavens.
Somehow or another—sometimes appropriately, sometimes not—this type of fantasy came to be called urban fantasy. It gave readers and authors something new to debate, but I’m not sure it made much of a corrective dent in the perspectives of many in the sf/f community or the media.
Of course there are authors of “this stuff” who can’t neatly be labeled as either paranormal romance or urban fantasy. There are writers like MaryJanice Davidson, Shanna Swendson, and Julie Kenner who write lighter fare that has been placed into one category or another almost arbitrarily. Books can be unintentionally or even intentionally mislabeled by publishers, or series can evolve out of or into one genre or the other.
But, trust me, the terms are not interchangeable.
Calling these books urban fantasy, however, confused longtime fantasy lovers and ruffled some definitional feathers. The term (and the fiction it then described) first gained popularity in the 1980s. To quote John Clute on “Urban Fantasy” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (ed. by J. Clute & J. Grant, 1997):
Urban fantasy…. A city may be seen from afar, and is generally seen clear; the UF is told from within and from the perspective of characters acting out their roles, it may be difficult to determine the extent and nature of the surrounding reality. UFs are normally texts where fantasy and the mundane world interact, intersect and interweave throughout a tale which is significantly about a real city.
Authors (and landmark works) most commonly cited as early examples of urban fantasy include Jonathan Carroll (The Land of Laughs, 1980), John Crowley (Little, Big; 1981), Charles de Lint (Moonheart, 1984), and Emma Bull (War for the Oaks, 1987). Additionally, Terri Windling’s shared-world anthology for teens (co-edited with Mark Alan Arnold), Borderland, (1986) and its subsequent series of anthologies and novels are important early works. When discussing this type of urban fantasy in a larger context, authors like Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, and Caitlín R. Kiernan are often mentioned.
As for the ruffling of feathers, well, most of those feathers belonged to folks unacquainted with a broad enough range of this “new” urban fantasy to make any judgment calls to start with. But, hey, not really knowing much about playing a sport doesn’t keep anyone from second-guessing a team or its coaches, either.
Charles de Lint wrote that he feels the subtitle of his novel Jack of Kinrowan: A Novel of Urban Faerie led to his work becoming termed urban fantasy. He and Terri Windling came up with “mythic fiction” to better describe their strain of the fantastic. It is an admirable and workable definition and now used by knowledgeable readers, critics, and academics.
I don’t like less-than-well-thought-out labels any more than Joe Lansdale does, and agree the more a type of fiction is “directed” like cows through a chute the more likely it is “all going to end in the slaughterhouse.”
I am in awe of these two gentlemen (and gentlemen both truly are). Their intelligence, imaginations, talents, and works are breathtaking. They are masters of the art and craft of storytelling. They (and others of their kind) create wonderful tales that I wish could magically attract folks simply by being what it is: superlative reading.
In a perfect world, great fiction—or even entertainingly adequate fiction—would not be a commodity that has to be packaged and sold.
But publishing is not only an imperfect world, it’s a world with an absurd business model where no one has any real idea why a particular book sells or how to reliably get proper attention for its products. In the last few years, it’
s gotten to be an even stranger and more dangerous a place for writers to survive. What little guidance the best publishers and editors might once have provided doesn’t matter as much. More than ever, whatever simplistic label can be stuck to a book—or, better yet, what already highly successful, previously published book/author that a new title can be compared to—matters a great deal. It matters because without such tagging, books don’t get into brick-and-mortar stores at all and don’t get favorably grouped for online sales.
The chutes are used because they help at least some of the cattle get fat so they can retire to nice green meadows rather than winding up as part of a Big Mac. Some others can at least chew their cud and moo a little longer than they might have otherwise.
