(1) WHERE THE DEER AND ANTELOPE PLAY. BBC’s report “Grand Theft Auto deer causes chaos in game world” includes a video clip.
More than 200,000 people have tuned in to watch the deer via a video stream on the Twitch site.
Best version
The project uses a modified version of GTA V that let Mr Watanabe change the player to look like a deer. The animal wanders around the virtual 100 square miles of the San Andreas world in which the game is set.
“The most difficult thing during the creation of the project was simply teaching myself to modify GTA V,” Mr Watanabe told the BBC. “There is an incredibly active modding community and I figured out how to programme the mod through a lot of forum searches and trial and error.
“The biggest difficulty was getting it stable enough to run for 12-14 hours at a time without crashing,” he said.
He made the deer impervious to harm so it can keep on wandering despite being regularly shot at, beaten up, run over by cars and trucks, shelled by tanks and falling off buildings.
The trouble it has caused on military bases, beaches and on city streets led, at one point, to it having a four star wanted rating.
The deer regularly teleports to a new position on the game map so it does not get stuck in one part and to make sure it samples the games’s many different environments and meets lots of its artificial inhabitants.
(2) JEDI EVANGELISM. Darren Garrison wanted to be sure I knew about “Jedism in the Wisconsin State Capitol”. I enjoy running Jedi religious stories more when the concept hasn’t been appropriated for the culture wars.
Around Easter every year, the Capitol rotunda becomes cluttered with numerous religious displays, mostly of a Christian nature. This year’s the rotunda features a large wooden cross, several Christian posters promoting Jesus’ death, and pro-life displays, among many others. This time, the Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (AHA) have added a Jedism poster to the mix.
The poster, designed by AHA, is based on a modern, newer religion called Jedism. Its followers worship Jedis such as Obi-Wan Kenobi, from the Star Wars movies. Their poster reads “One Man Died for All”, referring to the Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi. The poster displays a portrait of Obi-Wan Kenobi as a Jedi, but is oftentimes confused as a portrait of Jesus. Their poster asks the following questions with respective answers: “Who is this man?” “Obi-Wan Kenobi”, “Why is it important that we remember him?” “To escape the death star”, and “How does his death help us?” “Because he comes back as a ghost at times and it can be quite surprising”.
(3) ORIGIN STORY. Andrew Liptak praises “The Innovative Jim Baen” at Kirkus Reviews.
Baen returned to Ace Books in 1977, where he began working with publisher Tom Doherty. Doherty had grown up reading Galaxy, and “I had kept reading both of those magazines,” He recalled, “I thought [Baen] was doing an exceptional job, and brought in him to head up our science fiction [program].”
At Ace, Baen continued his streak of discovering new and interesting authors. “He brought in a number of strong authors,” Doherty recalled. His time at Ace was short-lived, however: Doherty decided to venture out into the publishing world on his own, setting up Tor Books. Baen, along with Harriet McDougal, joined Tor Books, where he continued his work under Doherty editing science fiction
Baen followed “the same pattern that had revived Ace,” Drake wrote in his remembrance, “a focus on story and a mix of established authors with first-timers whom Jim thought just might have what it took. It worked again.”
In 1983, rival publisher Simon & Schuster began having some problems with their paperback division, Pocket Books. Their own SF imprint, Timescape Books, run by David G. Hartwell, wasn’t doing well, and was being closed down. They reached out to Baen, asking him if he’d like to run the imprint.
Doherty remembered that Baen wasn’t keen on joining Simon & Schuster: “Look, Jim doesn’t want to join a big corporation,” he told Ron Busch, Simon & Schuster’s president of mass-market publishing. “But he’s always dreamed of having his own company. How about we create a company which you will distribute. We’ll take the risk and make what we can as a small publisher, and you’ll make a full distribution profit on our books?” Busch agreed to the deal: he would get his science fiction line.
Baen formed his own publishing house, Baen Books, with Doherty as a partner, and began to publish his particular brand of science fiction.
(4) KEN LIU INTERVIEW. Derek Kunsken has “The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories: An Interview with Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award-Winner Ken Liu” at Black Gate.
You play with a lot of myths. Good Hunting and The Litigation Master and the Monkey King pull in Chinese myth. The Waves weaves the creation myths of different cultures into the narrative. State Change creates its own mythology of souls and famous people. What are your favorite myths? When writers use myth, do they only borrow that cultural and thematic gravitas, or do you think that writers today can bring to the table a new way of looking at older myths?
All cultures are founded on myths, and modern life hasn’t changed that at all. It’s important to remember that living myths are not static, but evolving, living tales we craft.
Our sense of what it means to be American, for example, depends on contesting and re-interpreting the foundational myths of America—our “Founding Fathers,” our original sins of slavery and conquest, our exceptionalism, our self-image as the city on the hill, the crucibles of the wars that gave us birth, the gods and heroes who laid down our republican institutions and democratic ideals like the bones and sinew of a giant upon whose body we make our home.
Or look at the myths that animate Silicon Valley: the idea that a single person, armed with a keyboard (and perhaps a soldiering iron), can transform the world with code; the belief that all problems can be reduced down to a matter of optimization, disintermediation, and “disruption”; the heroes and gods who founded the tech colossi that bestride the land while we scurry between their feet — some of us yearning to join them in a giant battle mecha of our own and others wishing to bring them down like the rebels on Hoth.
(5) COVERS UP. John Scalzi answers readers’ questions about writing at Whatever.
Listhertel: There’s an adage not to judge a book by its cover, but we all know people do. I know authors get little to no say in the cover art, but do you have any preferences? Painting versus digital, people versus objects, a consistent look versus variety? Are there any of your covers you particularly love or hate (including foreign editions)?
The book cover of mine I like least is the one on The Book of the Dumb, but inasmuch as BotD sold over 150,000 copies, meaning that the cover art worked for the book, this might tell you why authors are not generally given refusal rights on their covers. Cover art is advertising, both to booksellers and to readers, and that has to be understood. I’m at a point where if I really hate a cover, I’ll be listened to, but I also know what I don’t know, so I rarely complain. But it also helps that, particularly with Tor, the art director knows her gig, and they do great covers. I would probably complain about oversexualized covers, or characters not looking on the cover they way they’re described in the book, but in neither case has this happened to me.
(6) TODAY IN HISTORY
- March 26, 1969 — Rod Steiger stars as Carl, The Illustrated Man.
(7) TWO SPACEMEN. From George Takei:
Crossed paths Thursday with Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, at Salt Lake Comic Con Fan Experience, where I am appearing Friday and Saturday. Buzz walked on the moon 47 years ago, back in 1969. Isn’t it time someone set foot on Mars?
(8) MORE FROM SALT LAKE. “Doctors and River reunite to celebrate the infinite possibilities of ‘Doctor Who’” in the Salt Lake Tribune.
Actors from “Doctor Who,” including Alex Kingston, left, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy and Matt Smith fielded fan questions and discussed the popular show among the Salt Lake Comic Con’s FanX 2016 at the Salt Palace Convention Center on Friday….
Even a fleeting moment is going to follow Smith for the rest of his life. A fan in Friday’s audience asked Smith if he would do the Drunk Giraffe. The Drunk Giraffe is a dance move Smith’s iteration of The Doctor does, during which he throws his arms over his head and waves them around like noodles of spaghetti.
Fans count the moment — which takes up just 3 seconds of screen time — as a favorite of Smith’s run. Smith, to uproarious cheering, obliged.
“For the rest of my life, I’m going to have to do that,” Smith said. Kingston joked that McCoy and Davison should join him; alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
(9) NEEDS MORE KATSU. BBC Magazine remembers “The octopus that ruled London” at the Crystal Palace in 1871. Several stfnal references.
“It would have been a bit like a freak show for the Victorians,” says Carey Duckhouse, curator of the Brighton Sea Life Centre, as the aquarium is known today. “They would have featured models of ships in the cases for the octopus to grab hold of. They would probably have loved that, as they enjoy playing.”
One possible visitor to Crystal Palace aquarium was the writer HG Wells, who was just five years old when it opened and lived in Bromley, four miles away. Several octopus-like creatures appear in his stories.
In his 1894 essay The Extinction of Man, Wells pondered a “new and larger variety” that might “acquire a preferential taste for human nutriment”. Could it, he asked, start “picking the sailors off a stranded ship” and eventually “batten on” visitors to the seaside?
More famously, the invading Martians in Wells’s War of the Worlds have tentacle-like arms.
(10) UPSIDE DOWN IS UPRIGHT FINANCIALLY. The Upside Down: Inverted Tropes in Storytelling Kickstarter appeal has successfully funded. A total of $23,206 was raised from 1,399 backers.
The anthology, edited by Monica Valentinelli and Jaym Gates, is an anthology of short stories and poems that highlights the long-standing tradition of writers who identify tropes and cliches in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and twist them into something new and interesting.
(11) SANS SHERLOCK. “WonderCon 2016: HOUDINI & DOYLE Screening and Q&A” at SciFi4Me.com.
During this year’s WonderCon, there was a preview screening of the first episode of the new Fox show Houdini & Doyle, “The Maggie’s Redress”, followed by a short Q&A with Michael Weston, who plays Harry Houdini, and executive producers David Shore, David Ticher, and David Hoselton.
The series follows the two men in 1901 as they go about investigating cases that involve supposed paranormal events. Houdini, riding high on his celebrity as a magician, is the doubter, wanting to bring reason and expose those who would take advantage of people who are looking for comfort from the great beyond. Doyle, on the other hand, has just killed off Holmes and is trying to get out of that shadow, and is the believer, wanting proof that there is something more to this life beyond death. We will be recapping the series when it premieres.
(12) GRAPHIC PREFERENCES. Barry Deutsch completed review of “2015 Science Fiction and Fantasy Graphic Novel Recommendations, Part 3: Crossed + One Hundred, and, Stand Still, Stay Silent”.
….Moore returns to the reinvention game with Crossed + One Hundred, a new graphic novel set in Garth Ennis’ awful Crossed universe. Crossed was Ennis’ attempt to make the zombie genre more disturbing and violent: the premise is that most of humanity population gets infected with a mysterious disease that turns them into torturing, murdering, rape-happy idiots. In many ways Crossed is the comics equivalent of the Saw movies; cheap, gratuitous, and compelling…..
(13) VOLTRON WILL RETURN. Engadget has the story and a gallery of images — “Here’s your first look at Netflix’s ‘Voltron’ series”.
As Netflix expands its suite of original programming it’s going to the nostalgia well once again. The good news here is that instead of another sitcom spinoff like Fuller House, we’re getting Voltron: Legendary Defender. Today at Wondercon 2016 its partner Dreamworks Animation showed off a teaser trailer and some artwork that confirm everything at least looks right to children of the 80s.
(14) BACK TO BASIC. The video “How to Send an ‘E mail’–Database–1984” is an excerpt from a 1984 episode of the ITV series Database where viewers learned how to send emails. Major retro future action is obtained where they get onto the net through a phone modem with a dial on the telephone… (Yes, I’ve done that, and I have the white beard to prove it…)
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, Darren Garrison, JJ, and Barry Deutsch for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]
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Ilona Andrew is very good, definitely a cut above the usual urban fantasy. Another really good and IMO vastly underrated urban fantasy author is Rob Thurman. And if you don’t like romance in your fiction, there is fairly little of it in her books. Rachel Caine is another excellent urban fantasy author who doesn’t get a whole lot of attention.
@Vasha
Ilona Andrews – fated mates – yes and no. I hate, hate, hate fated mate trope. In the Kate Daniels books while eventually couples end up together and maybe it’s fated this is Urban Fantasy not paranormal romance. Story, plot, friendship, getting to know each other, is the meat of the books. Courting in strange and unusual ways is either done in short stories or as side plots to the main story. Not a lot of mind-mind connection – very much depends on species of creature and magic skills as well as when magic is up. Lots of humor and the main couple doesn’t get together for several books.
Patricia Briggs in both Mercy Thompson and spinoff Alpha & Omega are more fated mate but still not IMHO done in the syrupy alpha male typical manner. Alpha & Omega comes with trigger warnings of rape/abuse but IMHO really well handled from survivors standpoint and her later mate is appropriately supportive without treating her as victim. Again these books are Urban Fantasy not paranormal romance so each book in the series is not about another couple. In Mercy Thompson series I don’t remember which book the main couple get together as it’s been a while since I read it. Alpha & Omega series couple is together 1st book due to circumstances otherwise I had the feeling even though fated the male would have held off.
I highly recommend starting with Kate Daniels by Ilona Andrews. If you enjoy that give Mercy Thompson by Patricia Briggs a try. Only try Alpha & Omega if you really like Mercy Thompson and your ok with dark as the cases the couple in Alpha & Omega end up on are pretty gruesome in addition to the main female protagonist struggling as a rape survivor. Normally I can’t read books which have a lot of focus on rape/serial killers but this 4 book series is one I’ve reread several times now. Patricia Briggs handles the experience well from my perspective as a rape survivor.
I hope that wasn’t too spoilery. I’ve reread all 3 series at least 3 times now. These are my comfort reads. They all have good worldbuilding, great supporting characters as well as main protagonist, humor, friendship, respect for others, loyalty, and I like the way they play with tropes and mythos.
If “airboy” isn’t a pseud for someone we saw last year, they represent yet another example of a very *odd* approach toward evaluating “award-worthy”. This is a line of argument that we’ve seen before from the Puppies (or Puppy-adjacent), that failure to nominate novels with high sales (and good reviews on Amazon/Goodreads) is evidence of bias.
Who actually expects awards to work this way? Does this reflect honest beliefs by a certain subculture, or is it, technically, bullshit? My suspicion is that it’s the latter, and that the culture it comes out of is heavily focused on marketing (“signaling”) and hustle, not so much on, ya know, writing and reading.
In the US, this kind of culture strongly overlaps with Republican conservatism, but I don’t really know why. Or rather, there are too many possibilities, I can’t pick.
@Doctor Science
Did you mean to link something to your bovine excrement? If so, it didn’t come through.
Bonnie:
Bother bother bother. Yes. Wikipedia about “On Bullshit”, by philosopher Harry Frankfurt.
@Chris S
I’m going to 2nd some of Bonnie McDaniel suggestions
I really like Jennifer Estep’s Elemental Assassin series she has great primary secondary characters. Some people are born with Elemental powers. The main protagonist is an assassin who runs a BBQ joint. You’ve got dwarves, giants, criminals, crooked cops, lots of grey areas, friendships, family loyalty, lots of humor. This is beach, sick day, or I need a cheer me up book reading.
Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles (if you like laugh-out-loud humor) – my issues may not bother you and the early books were fun. 3,000 year-old Druid, looks and acts like a guy in his 20s most of the time, you name a world religion or myth and at some point the g-ds(esses) will show up, vampires, shifters, witches. My favorite character is his dog. Lots of beer featured in the books.
Faith Hunter – The worldbuilding, primary and secondary characters, magic, unique take on a number of supernatural creatures, alternative history, and humor make her one of my favorites. She has a Cherokee skinwalker which she has done research and talks to people in the indigenous community to get right. She learned of her heritage and wanted to incorporate it in a series. She bases the series in New Orleans and appears to have done her research. My only complaint is the blood/vampire/rape trope shows up too frequently for my taste but she is equal gender which is refreshing. I don’t recommend binge reading as that’s how some of her overusing of tropes became obvious.
My Goodreads profile you’ll find other 4 star books/series on my urban fantasy shelf. 😉
@Mike Glyer
Sorry. I should have stayed out of the discussion as I can’t be calm and collected about it.
ETA: Religion and public spaces
Nobody asked for my opinion, but for urban fantasy I’d highly recommend Kelley Armstrong, particularly her Cainsville series. Her Otherworld books were hit and miss, but there’s something really interesting going on in Cainsville, at least for me. I also really like Charlaine Harris’s Midnight Texas and Harper Connelly books.
@Doctor Science – Does this reflect honest beliefs by a certain subculture, or is it, technically, bullshit?
First, thank you so much for your artist roundup. I used it extensively for my Hugo nominations.
I think it does reflect honest beliefs, derived from not understanding that popular is not the same thing as excellent, because how else would you measure award worthiness if not by popularity? I don’t agree, but I can see how someone could arrive there if they didn’t think too deeply about it or read widely.
Doctor Science: Thank you for the info about “Zero World”. Alas, that’s what I feared was going on, which is chemically/biologically Impossible-with-a-capital-I. Water doesn’t work that way
If and when you have the surfeit of time and energy to explicate, I would very much enjoy learning why.
Doctor Science: This is a line of argument that we’ve seen before from the Puppies (or Puppy-adjacent), that failure to nominate novels with high sales (and good reviews on Amazon/Goodreads) is evidence of bias… Who actually expects awards to work this way?…In the US, this kind of culture strongly overlaps with Republican conservatism, but I don’t really know why.
I think it’s something something successful capitalism should be awarded something.
What JJ said.
If something is succesful it must be good and if it’s good it must be succesful.
Like most Austrian school economic stuff it’s not heavy on empirical data.
They still quote Hayek, and others even when it’s demonstrably been shown to be wrong.
@Bonnie McDaniel: I definitely recommended The Sandman: Overture several times. I’m glad you liked it. You should definitely go and read the regular Sandman series now. I find myself curious how that experience will go for you, actually…and if you do read it, and then come back and re-read Overture, I bet you’ll have a whole bunch of moments where you sort of slap yourself on the head, saying, “So that’s what that meant!”
@Doctor Science: There may be a name for the category of beliefs that are held honestly as far as the subject is aware, but that don’t at all integrate with other things the subject also believes. They’re held but not tested. That’s what we’re seeing here, I think.
“The Aeronaut’s Windlass” by Butcher is my current audiobook, and it’s – well, OK, sorta, but suffers from a bad case of getonwithitalready-itis. It’s something to listen to while weeding or doing similar grunt work, but it’s not a book to savor. Somebody needs to hide his Big Book of Cliches, and tell him that there’s more to the novel than repetition.
@Vasha: Paranormal Romance is a big genre these days. There’s even at least one imprint. See the logo on spine, you know you’re getting PR. Even MilSF can’t say that. (No, Baen doesn’t count; they publish quite a bit that’s not MilSF.) And, as a big genre, it varies quite a bit in quality. Don’t judge it by a handful of authors.
I’m not particularly a fan of genre. I’m not the target audience. Nevertheless, I’ve found several that were quite entertaining. When you’re a bookaholic, and live with other people, you can find yourself reading some surprising things. I personally find the humorous ones more entertaining than the dark-and-dangerous ones, but there’s a lot of variety out there. I can’t offer any particular names, because I confess I wasn’t paying that close attention, but really, if you think you might be interested in the genre, I wouldn’t give up. I didn’t even think that, and I’ve found myself pleasantly entertained on multiple occasions.
@ Tasha Turner
re: Patricia Briggs
I’d never read much urban fantasy before (except for some of it written for the Romance sub-genre) when I ran across the Alpha and Omega novella. Fell in love with her writing. Besides the Mercy Thompson series I’ve collected all her earlier books, too. (The Hob’s Bargain, Raven’s Shadow, Dragon Bones, et al.) They’re all second world fantasies and not as polished as her current books, but you can see the talent and potential.
Have you read any of those earlier works? A couple have become comfort reads for me. Not that I’ve had a lot of time for that this last year! :^>
@airboy: The Hugo nominations are still open. If you want to sell me on “The Cinder Spires,” now’s your chance. But be advised, in order to make my final five, it’s going to have to knock out one of my current five, astonishingly good novels, and it’s going to have to be better than David Wong’s Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, Jason Hough’s Zero World, Welcome to Night Vale, Gene Wolfe’s A Borrowed Man, Jo Walton’s The Just City, and Chuck Wendig’s Zer0es, all of which are very good, none of which made my final cut. I don’t care what made the Locus list, because I have no control over it. I’m interested in very good books. (likewise, you might really enjoy “Zero Hour”–fast-paced ride about an assassin who gets his memory wiped for each kill he makes.)
Of course, that’s the question, ain’t it: do you want to persuade me to read Cinder Spires by talking about how awesome it is? Or do you just want to complain about an imagined persecution because Jim Butcher writes good books but not amazing ones, and it’s very hard for a book that’s just *good* to make a list that someone is putting only books they consider *amazing* on.
Also, your claim that the Hugos don’t go to popular authors is… inaccurate. J.K. Rowling won for Harry Potter IV, George R. R. Martin’s been nominated for every single Game of Thrones book, Neil Gaiman won twice, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Yiddish Policeman’s Union were both bestsellers… etc.
re (2)
I don’t think I emphasized this enough in the rundown I put up early, but it’s important to remember what a new thing public religious displays in the United States are. This may be counter-inuititve, but more than forty years ago, the idea that displays that implicitly were endorsements of the majority confession would be made in government buildings would be considered ridiculous. While adherence to that majority confession was assumed, secular institutions marking that at any time other than Christmas would be considered bizarre and vaguely fascistic.
The drive to change that is largely a new thing, and ultimately, a display of desperation. When your reaction to people wondering whether or not a state institution should have a creche is to think you have to put the Ten Commandments everywhere, you are not looking at a confident kind of fundamentalism. Hence my view of (2) as a kind of civil disobedience.
Also, I should be clear: these are things that often have the effects of civil disobedience. I would be utterly unshocked if some of the people in the groups who put these things up have the motivation of “THIS will SHOW them how they’re ALL STUPID and IRRATIONAL and WRONG and FOOLISH…” etc. – human nature at its usual pitch.
“It sold well” doesn’t even necessarily mean that it is liked. According to some stats a while back from Kobo, the highest read books had barely over 60 percent of readers finishing them.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/shopping-and-consumer-news/11284934/Fewer-than-half-of-readers-finished-bestselling-novels.html
On urban fantasy, another recommendation: The Laundry Files books by Charles Stross. To be honest I’m not totally sure they are urban fantasy. They don’t approach the tropes the way most urban fantasy does. Chthulu Mythos meets spy novel is the summary. I’ve heard them called urban fantasy and compared a lot to the Dresden novels though. A couple samples:
Equoid (a 2014 Hugo novella winner):
http://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/equoid/
A Colder War ( technically an unrelated but similar universe to The Laundry Files. Novellette length):
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
A Colder War particularly has one of the darkest endings I’ve ever read and it’s all by implication.
@stoic. I’ve heard Charlie say that different kinds of spy novels and writers inspired the various books in the Laundry series. I’m not so well versed in spy novels to really pick up on that, but I believe him.
(Seconding recommendation, Charlie’s books are excellent. And yeah, A Colder War is definitely not shiny happy.)
Mike Carey writes rings around Jim Butcher but to the best of my knowledge none of the Felix Castor novels got anywhere close to the Hugo shortlist.
something something successful capitalism should be awarded something
“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
If you’re so rich, why aren’t you getting awards?
Reminds me of Sean Kelly’s putdown of P.J. O’Rourke, where he says that O’Rourke now mostly just rephrases the one standard Republican joke, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich/physically able/white?”
@Tasha–
I would say that the phenomenon you noted is more “majority belief mistreating minority beliefs” in a way that is visible across many cultures and times (and notably milder–but still present, I agree–in the US right now) than ascribable to characteristics of one belief in particular. But it is very real and I understand why it would upset you, and I’m sorry if I contributed to that by bringing it up again.
@Mike Glyer
This doesn’t sound like a freedom of speech issue to me. Freedom of speech would be transgressed if the government punished people for professing a religion. This is about government promoting some religious views over others versus treating all of them equally, and if it is going to live up to the standard of treating them all equally, whether they all get promoted to an equal degree in government spaces, or whether none of them do.
Regarding UF / PR.
Patricia Briggs is one of my favorite authors and I think I’ve read everything she has written (I wish there had been more Hob’s Bargain books, and I loved the Hurog pair.) I don’t think the Mercy Thompson books involve the “fated mate” trope as far as the main character is concerned; in a couple of cases of secondary characters it might be borderline though. Also, trigger warning for _Iron Kissed_, the third book in the series; if you have a problem with the backstory for Alpha and Omega, this book won’t be for you either. Which is a pity, because I really enjoy Mercy as a character and I thought it was a great book, but even the best marzipan is going to be a problem for someone who is allergic to nuts.
Also I would recommend the Discount Armageddon books by Seanan McGuire. The main characters (they change from book to book) are members of a family that study and protect legendary beings (referred to as “cryptids”) that live secretly among ordinary humans. I would put these on the UF side of the UF / PR divide. I don’t want to give too much away so I’ll just say I am particularly fond of the mice.
The Laundry books have morphed from being inspired by spy fiction to UF themed (and Charlie has been quite explicit about it on his blog). The last book but one takes on the vampire trope and the next one will be about elves (the most recent one was superheroes + The King in Yellow); “Equoid” was on unicorns and HPL (not just Lovecraftian themes, but Lovecraft himself).
Relatively few UF novels get nominated for the Hugos, but one of the grandparents of the genre (and only not urban because it is rural) was a nominee way back in 1982: John Crowley’s Little, Big. IMHO it should have won over Downbelow Station. Of course, if we divide between “literary” and “non-literary” SF, it’s way on the literary side of the line.
Actually, quite a large part of LB is set in a city.
If ‘urban’ just means ‘this-worldly and contemporary’ then American Gods, The Graveyard Book and Among Others are all UF. It seems, however, to have come to mean something more specific, which generally involves crime-fighting or the like; I’ve even heard that some publishers so define it that it has to have a female protagonist, in which case even Stross and Butcher aren’t examples.
@all – thanks for the recommendations, I will get me to the library (website) and do some rummaging.
UF used to have Charles deLint as one of its poster children. Restricting it to something which is manadtorily next door to hard-boiled detective fiction, even if you don’t stick in a requirement for female protagonists, impoverishes the field. My UF shelves at home include, for example The Last Hot Time, Little Big, Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces novels, the Folly books, Kate Griffin’s books, and Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age books. Some of these are closer than others to the hard-boiled detective model, but none really match it. (There’s also the argument that the WJW’s Metropolitan is “urban fantasy”, but I shelve it elsewhere on the basis that secondary world trumps urban setting.)
@junego: @Tasha Turner re: Patricia Briggs: The Hob’s Bargain, Raven’s Shadow, Dragon Bones, et al.) They’re all second world fantasies and not as polished as her current books, but you can see the talent and potential. Have you read any of those earlier works? A couple have become comfort reads for me. Not that I’ve had a lot of time for that this last year! :^>
Oh yes I love her more traditional fantasies. I haven’t read as many as I’d like. So many books so little time and money. Due to the hit by truck in 3/2012 reading hardcovers is painful so I don’t read as many library books as I used to. Downloading books to Overdrive doesn’t help as I forget I have them (cognitive problems from same accident). I’m still learning how to use Overdrive library borrows with my kindle.
@Cat
How did I forget to mention the Discount Armageddon books by Seanan McGuire? These are an auto buy for me. I was just talking about the latest one here last week. Great reads.
Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid series lost me with … Gur jubyr yrgf xvyy Gube orpnhfr ur vf n onfgneq rira vs vg pbhyq pnhfr gur raq bs gur jbeyq naq jbhyq trg n ybg bs bgure crbcyr xvyyrq rira vs vg qbrf abg. I lasted one book after that and then dropped them.
I’d be wary of any attempts to shift the definition of UF to “must have kick-ass female protagonist” on the basis that it smells like “let’s set up another literary ghetto for female-centered books so that male-centered books can continue to be simply ‘unmarked fantasy'”.
Because, think about it: if UF is defined to require a female protagonist, than what are books that would be UF except they have male protagonists? And what hidden messages would be given by that distinction?
One of the founding works of UF that no one’s mentioned yet is Emma Bull’s The War For the Oaks.
More recent stuff… hmmm. I don’t think I’ve read any UF in a long time that doesn’t fall into one or both of my current least favorite UF tropes: Still Refusing the Call Even Though It’s Effing Book Four By Now, and Super-Magic Rich Husband. The latter is where the heroine is married to someone who’s a Big Deal in the magical world, so she can live in comfortable stasis while waiting for the next plot to arise from her husband’s connections rather than from anything she does of her own initiative.
…Come to think of it, I guess they’re both aspects of the same problem: stuff happens to a heroine who has no agency despite her ability to kick magical butt.
If you’ll take non-prose recommendations, I did love The Eccentric Family, which is UF in present-day Osaka and does not feature a butt-kicking heroine. Though the hero does spend a lot of the first couple episodes masquerading as a human girl. (He’s actually a tanuki.) It’s based on a novel, but AFAIK the novel’s never been translated.
Adding The Eccentric Family to Queue 770. Thanks!
Hey does Natsume Yujin-cho count as UF? Takashi-kun kicks some butt though he’s not a heroine. Natsume Reiko kicked a lot of butt though she wasn’t exactly a heroine. (Then there’s a spirit that takes the form of a cat and likes to drink a lot…)
(Also it’s more small-town fantasy than urban. I like it anyway.)
Just back from the national Popular Culture Conference (one of my favorites, and I didn’t come back with the flu!).
Mike, thought you might like to know that Diana Pavlic Glyer’s work was cited by Janet Brennan Croft in an excellent presentation in Tolkien’s forewords, and in the Q&A afterwards, several people talked about the strength of her work in Inkling Studies.
oooh, UF vs PN.
I SHOULD be catching up on work, but this is one of my favorite topics ever.
I was in a specific sub-group of women sf fans (I don’t know it’s still a major thing given all the cultural changes, so it may have been generational to some degree) who swore adherence to SF/F EARLY in our lives (about age 10 for me) and resisted the cultural PUSH to read ROMANCE. Seriously: there was a whole shitload of “girls don’t read sf” morphing into “no REAL girl should read that trashy SF stuff.”
In fact, just like the color pink, I was vocally against romance (for one thing, I didn’t want to get married–seemed like too much work in my observations of the gender expectations in a small Idaho rural neighborhood during late 50s-early 60s). And I just plain love sff (due primarily to worldbuilding/other worlds–I also read a lot of British literature because, heck, it wasn’t in IDAHO–it was another world).
I was a huge de Lint fan (was lucky enough to get to write the entry on his work for the “Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers” reference book–a 35 page manuscript essay if I recall aright)* and thus urban fantasy fan as well (and I didn’t associate the genre only with men since I loved Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, Tanya Huff’s BLOOD and SMOKE series (I liked Huff’s alt world fantasies and sf as well but not as much)–in fact the first Huff I read that hooked me forever on her work was her early Circle of Light, Circle of Darkness. Also: the Summoner Series. And even more recently Enchantment Emporium (though I was a BIT disappointed with the ending of the most recent one, which I’ll be happy to discuss in ROT13 with anybody).
I only discovered the whole paranormal romance debate a few years ago–I had read Charlaine Harris’ early suspense/mysteries (no fantasy elements at all), loved them, mourned the fact that the author had disappeared than BAM, Sookie walked into my life. (I LIKED the ending/choice she made–apparently some fans so hated it, Harris got death threats.)
Since then I’ve fallen in love with a whole bunch of authors (and quite enjoy some others who are shelved on the library instead of in my bedroom) that apparently fit this new genre category which is all debatable around gendered lines (the way I heard/saw it was UF without icky romance was DUDEs, and the women writing women with happy marriage ending was PN which was selling like hotcakes–darn those wimminez). Apparently, according to one of my alums who is a major active blogger and fan in romance and sf, there is major policing done in the romance online fandom as well since they prefer their romance (this is my paraphrase of something she and I discussed a few years back) to be dominant–i.e. the main point of the book had better be the HAPPY (heterosexual) ENDING!
I was learning as I read that the books I liked best were not in fact single/stand-alone happy het weddings, but with a bit more emphasis on the fantastic elements — PLUS female protagonists (would like more lesbian, bisexual and queer female protagonists of course) who do have emotional relationships (not purely sexual/romantic–but connections to people rather than the Isolated Dude in Trench Coat Looming Darkly in Shadows and Trying for Noirish Machoness).
So, jumping in to agree with the people who like some of my favorite authors as well:
Illona Andrews (series more than some of the stand-alones, but great world-building throughout).
Patricia Briggs (I loved her earlier stuff, but OMG the Mercy Thompson series–and lovely that it’s in a part of the country I know and am familiar with–it doesn’t always have to be in Big City).
Seanann McGuire. Anything and everything she writes under any name.
Marjorie Liu (more her Hunter Kiss series than the Dirk and Gentley ones though I read a bunch of those in my first wave of enthusiasm).
Ones I like a good deal: Rachel Caine, Mercedes Lackey (I know, I know, the prototypical Elves in Shopping Mall–and I haven’t bought a lot of her most recent work, but fell in love with her Arrows of the Queen in the 1980s when really, it leaped off the bookstore shelf as DIFFERENT DIFFERENT DIFFERENT than a lot of the sf around it).
And you know, I’d put Jim Hines’ Libriomancer series in the PARANORMAL ROMANCE (that skews more heavily toward world-building than romance as the overall plot but in which both are important)–even more so given the way the relationship has worked out. I actually DISLIKE the hero/protagonist in the series to some extent–but the premise of the magic, and the two major female characters kept me coming back for more.
Also, one I don’t think I’ve seen a mention of: Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series (Spoilers at the link–and goodness, I see I’ve fallen a bit behind in that series~: http://katrichardson.com/?page_id=5)
@Heather Rose Jones: I have suspect darkly over the years that “paranormal romance” was a way to separate out the girly stuff from the unmarked/real fantasy (urban fantasy was fine as a term for a sub-genre of the fantastic that was set in a realistic setting–which I don’t always see as having to be 19-20-21st century). So it was interesting to hear that in some corners of the internet, “urban fantasy” is being associated with women. And it was also interesting to gather that there is some pushback against the genre from the romance readers as well as from “sff” readers (in the sense of trying to exclude it from their genre which has to be kept pure).
I remember reading one frustrated reviewer or commenter at, I think, _Smart Bitches, Trashy Books_, complaining about all the books coming out with vampires and lamenting for the good old days when the male characters in romance novels were lawyers—I don’t think her intended audience was supposed to chortle as loudly as I was doing, especially since I had a student in a creative writing class once who was determined to write a vampire novel where the protagonist was….waitforit…..a LAWYER!
*”Charles de Lint” entry. Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 251: Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers. Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2002. 49-60.
Um, and if we’re making distinctions between UF and PN, would The Dresden Files become the latter if Those Two Characters get married at the end?
Dawn Incognito asked:
I’d probably count it as UF. Depends on how urban you require your UF to be, I guess.
Stross’ last Laundry novel, The Annihilation Score, did have a female protagonist, whom I didn’t like as a supporting character in previous books but came into her own when she got center stage. Come to think of it, her main sidekick is also female.
PR vs. UF… It seems like an extremely murky line, especially considering how theres often as huge an emotional pay-off for the reader of UF as their is for PR. Yes, I think UF is as much as an emotional payoff for the reader as PR. Not the usually high-grade erotica that PR can have, but in other ways.
A lot of UF overlaps or draws on noir themes, and I think I’m not being entirely crazy if I say part of the pay off for that is the hardboiled hero turning out to be Right. Right about the Big Scheme, Right in a cynical world of grays, able to at least do some good in that cynical world of grays and Right that the love interest, deep down, was a decent person. If a certain kind of person thinks their Sam Spade, the end of Maltese Falcon shows how he’s really the knight.
UF for the moment is more market towards men (rightly or wrongly, I think wrongly) and PR is viewed (quite wrongly) as strictly for women – but there’s such a crap loud of overlap. The noir themes are usually just as present in PR, the settings and abilities seem quite similar, etc. Each will have the hero get an emotional relationship the reader is likely to consider fulfilling.
Sorry, I missed something. What was PN short for? And does no one use the term Contemporary Fantasy any more?
I used to like Urban Fantasy when it was more Urban Horror. Tanya Huff, Laureen K. Hamilton and the wonderful Sonya Blue-books by Nancy A. Collins. Then came Kim Harrison where vampires were still dangerous and then Charlaine Harrison that was good at first, but where the romance part turned me off.
And after that alla the others and it was just the deja vu all over again. Same strong female woman who was never faced by what happened. The horror was totally gone. Nothing was scary anymore, just part of the everyday.
So I stopped reading. There is too much UF now for me to labour through the work to find the stuff I like. It is not my genre anymore.
PR = Paranormal Romance
PN = is that Pennsylvania? Brain fart on my part, sorry.
I really liked the Anita Blake series up to Obsidian Butterfly. Then I was advised by a friend to stop. I regret nothing.
@ Dawn Incognito:
PR = Paranormal Romance
PN = is that Pennsylvania? Brain fart on my part, sorry.
Erm, brain fart is all on this side of the screen!
Anita Blake was one of the earliest authors I read–I really LIKED her work at the start. Then I read the Butterfly one (no one to warn me alas), and STOPPED.
Then donated all Blake books to the graduate student book sale in my department (if I’d stopped BEFORE OB, I might have been able to enjoy the earlier ones and ignore the later ones–but alas it was too late).
@ Hampus: What was PN short for?
My error: should have been PR!
My only excuse is that PR is so tied to marketing/branding that my fingers avoid it even though my brain is telling them to use it.
I have never heard the term “Contemporary Fantasy.”
High fantasy or epic fantasy, check. Low fantasy or comic fantasy, check. Dark fantasy (overlapping with horror at times), check. Urban fantasy–yup. Alternate world fantasy, which can overlap with high/epic fantasy OR low/comic fantasy, yep.
Contemporary fantasy not to my memory–and cannot remember ever using it.
Eh, anytime a ‘new’ sub-genre becomes popular and more gets written, Sturgeon’s law comes into effect. Might be interesting to see if I could track down when “paranormal romance” became a marketing/PR term (and got its own publishing house/publishers–is it Roc? Am sneaking on before I talk doggies for walk, so will have to google later).
@TheYoungPretender: Yes, I think UF is as much as an emotional payoff for the reader as PR.
Nods enthusiastically–heck, emotional payoff is a feature not a bug of any work of art in any genre/medium (specific emotions may vary of course), but I think that the cultural stereotypes have long assigned “emotional” responses to women readers, and “aesthetic/elite” responses (as if those have no emotional component) to men readers.
I disagree of course, but I think a lot of people still default to that stereotype.
I think a good argument can be made that some PR (I’m thinking of Liu’s Hunter Kiss series especially) has strong noir elements.
I like some UF. The Greywalker series, for example. That has a very nice romance thread in it too. It just seems like Paranormal Romance is a home for extreme sexual dynamics more than other romance subgenres. The others can have super-dangerous men, overwhelming insta-lust, “claiming”, etc.; but it is hard to find PR without that — even when the characters are decent people, they’re often shown struggling with an uncontrollable sexual attraction for example.
@Dawn Incognito: would The Dresden Files become the latter if Those Two Characters get married at the end?
In order to maintain my Evil Commie Pervert Queer SJW cred, I haven’t read Butcher (actually, somebody was recommending it to me, and somebody else came in and said, HAH, no, read the Matthew Swift / A Madness of Angels which does have one of the most fantastic trench coat characters EVAH, by Kate Griffin. So I did, and fell in mad passionate love–ok, yeah, i do that a lot–with her work and never had any desire to look at Butcher’s work).
http://www.amazon.com/Kate-Griffin/e/B0034N3J0I/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
But more seriously: I do resist the idea that PR must end in marriage, either as the end to a series, or a stand-alone (though there are a number of marriages in some of my favorite author’s works, the protagonist is often very conflicted about marriage for multiple reasons). (Not saying you were saying that PR=marriage, just that the convention is out there for many–and that’s why I disliked romance as a child/YA/etc. That seemed the ONLY narrative ending for a woman.)
@Robinreid
Exactly what I was driving at: there’s just as much of surge of emotional gratification for a reader of the Monster Hunter International books as there is for anyone reading Anita Blake (or really, for me after I’d read Quantum Theif or House of Suns.) Some people get the surge from guns, others from intricate sex scenes. Or noir, or the puzzle being solved, etc.
I actually consider Natsume Yujin-Cho to be rural/pastoral fantasy, in the Japanese style of dealing with the old spirits of the wild and farm, and how they are dealing with encroaching modernity. The subgenre has similarities to Tonari no Totoro, in that nostalgia and appreciation of the countryside is important.
And scenery porn. You can’t have I’ve I’d those series without the scenery porn.
The latest kinda urban fantasy I read also illustrates the limitations of popular reviews- All Our Pretty Songs had a 3.4 at Goodreads, since a bunch of people didn’t understand the writing, thought the characters were unrealistic, and ermagad, teen sex and drugs.
@Robin Reid: I hear you on the problem with the only possible romantic outcome assumed to be marriage (and children of course, especially in the more conservative parts of the genre). But there are more and more contemporary romances breaking with that trend, though they’re not common still. Ones with college-age characters very rarely have them getting married. I do think one assumption that romance is carrying around that has not been adequately questioned is that a successful relationship has to be forever.
robinareid:
I think Amazon used to have a category for Contemporary under Fantasy. Yes, still there. And the term exists on Wikipedia. Not sure how used it’s been, I mostly remember it from the 90s.
I didn’t give up on Anita Blake until Cerulean Sins. My mistake.
Robin Reid:
I’ve only read two of the Libriomancer series. There’s that moment in the first book where Lena mentions that she and Nidhi are lovers, and Isaac thinks, I’d like to watch that — wait a minute, these are women I know, I don’t want to watch. I really think the author is aware of the implication of confusing women’s sexuality with porn but the character doesn’t think through the implications, not then anyway. This is an ongoing theme in the series given Lena’s origins in a Gor-inspired book; a difficult theme to address through a male narrator!