Urban Fantasy

So Charlie Stross is turning his attention from SF to urban fantasy. This is not entirely new for him - the Laundry series is well-characterized as an urban fantasy variant - but it certainly means that those who liked his hard-sf near-future work may have to wait some time for The Lambda Functionary or its equivalent.

Urban fantasy is an odd duck of a genre. The usually recognized root authors are Emma Bull (The War for the Oaks, 1987) and Charles de Lint (1980s on forward). An outlying influence would be Crowley's Little, Big (1981), except that it's too difficult to imitate to have more than a general influence (also, it's rural rather than urban). It's worth noting that all of these are about modern humans stumbling on / interacting with a generally hidden world of the Fae. (From this point of view the honorary grandfather of the genre should probably be Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill.)

However, that's not what most people now think of when considering the genre. Beginning in 1993 an odd crossbreeding of horror tropes (via Anne Rice) and the hard-boiled detective story in the Anita Blake novels provided the base template for much of modern urban fantasy. You can see nascent there "Paranormal Romance", and the hard-boiled tropes have carried through successors such as Harry Dresden and October Daye. Twist towards the police procedural and you get Ben Aaronovitch's Folly books or Cornell's London Falling, and towards the amateur detective and you get Alex Verus. Or shift it into a spy frame and you get O'Malley's The Rook or Stross's Laundry series. (The early ancestor of this subset is Charles Williams' fiction, which also makes Tim Powers' Declare some sort of cousin.)

The genre also began focused on outsiders; it now has a bias towards practitioners: Dresden, Daye, Verus, Peter Grant, Matthew Swift.

There's also a secondary type which could be described as secondary world fantasy in urban settings. Walter Jon Williams' Metropolitan is the ur-text here, with Max Gladstone now producing worthy successors.

Of course, it's now a popular marketing niche, so you can find almost anything under the label that can be conceivably wedged in. It's certainly fair to consider the Laundry books a part of the category: they're modern, they're urban, and they involve magic (including, now, vampires and (I understand) soon, elves). On the other hand, the Lovecraftian elements refer the reader to a different (horror) tradition which is equally modern. (Strict Mythos fiction is less fantasy than SF with horror trappings.)

It's also clear that nestled in among the usual derivative dreck which gets extruded when a given type of fiction becomes popular there's some very good work - so much so that (for all its general absence from the Hugo Awards lists) there may be more authors writing good work in urban fantasy right now than in any other subgenre.

At the same time, the edges of the genre are being extended; if Stross is going to write near-future urban fantasy it will push it in another direction yet again.

It should be interesting.