Pixel Scroll 3/26/16 Who Killed Morlock Holmes?

(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?

 

Takei Aldrin COMP

(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.]

325 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 3/26/16 Who Killed Morlock Holmes?

  1. Has anyone mentioned Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty and the Midnight Hour and subsequent novels? With the werewolf radio DJ? The series just finished up, too, and very well I thought.

    It’s one of those rare(?) UFs that is female-centered but isn’t primarily PR. (There are relationships. There is at least one marriage. These are not the point of the long story arc, however–and I can’t think of a single point where “will they/won’t they?” or “Can their relationship survive?” became the source of the tension in the story. Maybe for a hot two seconds in one book. Maybe.) It’s mainly werewolves, secondarily vampires, and sprinkled with a few other things along the way. And the author has really thought about the implications of being a werewolf, and all the alpha/pack cliches, and does mindful things with them.

    Anyway, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

  2. Well, if we’re discussing UF in the context of awards…does The City & The City count as Urban Fantasy? It’s definitely urban (as the name suggests), and probably falls at least slightly on the fantasy side of the SF v Fantasy divide.

    I know the meaning of the term has changed over the years, but it still makes me think of The War for the Oaks and early Charles de Lint. If it lacks elves, I have a hard time thinking of it as “proper” UF, but that doesn’t seem to match what people mean these days.

    I tend to think of urban horror as a separate category which got merged retroactively. Which is why statement’s like Hampus Eckerman’s, “I used to like Urban Fantasy when it was more Urban Horror” seem really strange to me. I mean, urban horror is hardly a new thing. It dates back to at least E. A. Poe, no? Death in the streets of Paris?

  3. @TheYoungPretender: Some people get the surge from guns, others from intricate sex scenes. Or noir, or the puzzle being solved, etc.

    And when a work manages to hit the SURGE button in multiple areas of enjoyment, then WOW.

  4. Xtifr:

    “Which is why statement’s like Hampus Eckerman’s, “I used to like Urban Fantasy when it was more Urban Horror” seem really strange to me. I mean, urban horror is hardly a new thing. It dates back to at least E. A. Poe, no? Death in the streets of Paris?”

    Yes, I can understand why my expression sounded strange. Let me try again.

    In traditional horror books, everything is extremely scary from the beginning to the end. People die in horrible ways, most likely the also the hero. Or his/her house burns down. Or the hero realized he’s a demon/corrupt/the murderer. All friends die during the story.

    If we take Tanya Huff’s Blood-series as being in the beginning of the UF-wave, we can see that there really aren’t any fantasy elements there. There are vampires. Or mummies. Or Werewolves. No elves. No fairies. Everything is from the horror genre. The feeling of the books are also closer to, say Quinn Yarbros Vampire books than to ordinary fantasy. Same with Anita Blake. They have fantasy elements, but the feeling reminds me more of Brian Lumleys Necroscope books.

    There was more horror in UF then. Or maybe I only read the UF that had more horror in them. Or maybe it was horror books that were more close to UF. I don’t know. I just feel that most UF that I find today is not what I’m searching for.

    I’m not sure if that rambling comment was more understandable. :/

  5. @Vasha: 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!

    Definitely agreed–that may be one reason why I don’t like Isaac (not sure I dislike him or just don’t like him–or care very much about him). The later books deal a bit more with the issues, and Isaac does change, I think, but I’d have to re-read carefully to make up my mind how successful I find his narrative arc.

  6. @Hampus: here really aren’t any fantasy elements there. There are vampires. Or mummies. Or Werewolves. No elves. No fairies. Everything is from the horror genre.

    Aha, I see your point, and agree that the novels are not “fantasy” although I’d argue that UF and PR and the various other types of fantasy are part of the numerous sub-genres of the fantastic, a term I find more useful as an umbrella/broad generic than “fantasy.” I wrote a paper on the shift in constructions of the vampire in works by Huff, Yarbro, Lackey and (Jewelle) Gomez (author of first and perhaps only as far as I know Black lesbian vampire).*

    Elves do appear in some of my favorite authors works–Briggs’ UF/PR has vampires, werewolves, the Fae of all sorts, and she even brings in the tibicena (a mythical creature from the Canary Islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibicena), and (somewhat unusually given the more European focus of UF/PR), also indigenous mythic figures (Coyote being the most prominent–I love how he changes Lugh’s walking stick (spear?).

    That was one of the aspects of de Lint’s work I most loved–that his novels showed the Celtic and other European fae/mythologies as coming to the Americas with European immigrants and not immediately displacing the mythic beings and worlds of the indigenous cultures–which Briggs’ also does.

    I read but did not really like Gainman’s _American Gods_.

    *The title was: “Single White Female Wants to Meet Vampire: Object, Contemporary Feminist Sex; Or, Whatever Happened to Vlad the Impaler in the 90s?”

    One of the best attended paper sessions I was ever on, snicker.

  7. Personally, I can’t stand Briggs at all. I found Moon Called ridiculous, plot holes large as train tunnels. It was as if she made it up on the fly. Which has said she did. And it had all the standard cliches, mostly because the publisher ordered her to put them in. And I hate all the nonsense of alpha werewolves authors feel obliged to put in to their books. Briggs, Illona Andrews and Sean McGuire are those who convinced me to mostly stay away from everything marketed as UF.

    But American Gods I liked. 😉

  8. If we take Tanya Huff’s Blood-series as being in the beginning of the UF-wave

    According to WikiP, those started in 1991. War for the Oaks (which is what I think of as starting the UF thing) was published in 1987. I think elves trump vampires! 😀

  9. Xtifr: Ah, two years after “The Vampire Lestat”. 😛

    Edited: Bah, I shouldn’t start with this stuff. Just ridiculous and not even logical off me.

  10. Heh, fair enough, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call that Urban Fantasy. In fact, for a long time, things like Bull and de Lint were the only things I heard people refer to as Urban Fantasy.

  11. @Xtifr:
    does The City & The City count as Urban Fantasy? It’s definitely urban (as the name suggests), and probably falls at least slightly on the fantasy side of the SF v Fantasy divide.

    I’m not certain it does fall on the fantasy side of the divide. What it’s proposing is grounded entirely in cognitive science. There’s nothing supernatural in it. You could argue there’s a Ruritanian fantasy element, but the story is pure scientific speculation.

  12. @Xtifer

    I think the problem is: what is UF?

    The first time I remember hearing the phrase was in association with the ShadowRun RPG. That would suggest a sub-genre with fantasy elements (elves, dwarves, dragons) moved into contemporary or future setting. War for the Oaks absolutely fits there; as does American Gods, Metropolitan, Charles de Lint, etc.

    What I see marketed as UF now though is more loosely hard boiled noir mixed with normalized (i.e. they are no longer fantastic in the context of their world) horror elements (vampires, werewolves, Christian model demons, etc.) and frequently with romance elements thrown in (where it crosses the line to paranormal romance? It’s blurry to me.)

    Then again, using that definition, say Vampire$ by John Steakley ought to qualify as UF but I don’t think it does.

    Absent a coherent definition we’re almost at a Potter Stewart definition of ‘I know it when I see it’ with everyone’s knowing it line being a little different.

    Ugh! Sorry! A lot of text with no real conclusions, only questions.

  13. Stoic Cynic on March 28, 2016 at 5:36 am said:
    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/

    Unless you’re a horror fan too, I wouldn’t recommend “Equoid” as an introduction to the Laundry series. The series includes elements of horror & “Equoid” has more horror & squick than pretty much any other Laundry story to date. “The Atrocity Archives” is the first book of the series & is a better introduction.

  14. @Amoxtli

    I agree; I think the The City and the City is a bit too cerebral for UF; that’s not a knock on UF, it’s just that it tends to be an adventure-y genre, with things that go bump or slither in the night, and raw emotion or passion sometimes fueling the protagonists desire to get thumped.

    @robinareid

    Goddamn bingo.

    @all

    Do we count the Gentlemen Bastards as urban fantasy? It’s got the noir, but its far too firmly 1710 with magic for the modern element.

  15. @Amoxtli: Fair point about The City & The City. I had sort of assumed a more magical explanation for the things that were going on, but you’re right, it’s all plausible enough, really.

    @Stoic Cynic: Yeah, the definition of UF is really key, and I freely confess I’m not entirely sure what the standard definition is these days. Which is sorta why I’m asking questions. 🙂

    When I first heard the term, it was being applied to Bull and de Lint and the like (e.g. Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin). I gather it doesn’t mean quite the same thing these days, but I haven’t really got a bead on current usage.

  16. Xtifr: Fair point about The City & The City. I had sort of assumed a more magical explanation for the things that were going on, but you’re right, it’s all plausible enough, really.

    If a city’s citizens are all gullible and/or stupid enough to go along with those sorts of municipal edicts, yes.

    I found the book interesting, but remember thinking when I read it that it had a plot hole a mile wide. I’d have to read it again to explain what, exactly — and I really didn’t like it well enough to do that.

  17. Apparently, Miéville himself has stated that he considers The City & the City to be fantasy. It’s slipstreamy. There’s things like those unexplained ancient artifacts. You can’t really read it literally.

  18. I think reading The City & the City literally is likely to lead to disappointment. For me what clicked about it was metaphorical (and this is, I recognized, informed by my reading of Suzette Haden Elgin): What topics/issues/themes/narratives/otherwise are, by the terms of the society one lives in, not just not worthy of discussion, but discouraged from notice? What happens when somebody starts to notice such things?

  19. I’ve become more and more convinced that subgenre in sci fi and fantasy are not very useful for classifications. They seeme to be very tightly defined and then used loosely.
    I am sure that may in part be my own personal craziness.

    One more case to add to our quandaries. A Murder of Mages, simply put a pair of detectives in a city with magic on a non-earth world during Elizabethan time frame.

    I want to call that book urban fantasy. I am wrong, but I can’t find a better sub-genre and plain fantasy sounds horribly nondescript. Anyone have a genre suggestion?

  20. I’ve always understood that urban fantasy is a sub genre of contemporary fiction. Requiring the story to be in the modern era.

    I can see where this helps classify a story, whereas, stories in a city is very wide.

    However I’ve found some sources that say urban fantasy can be in the past present or future.

    I’ll admit to being confused.

  21. My own personal definition of “urban fantasy” is that it has to be contemporary or near-contemporary. (If it’s set in the 1960s, that’s close enough. The 1860s, not so much….) And it strongly intersects “magical realism”.

    For what that’s worth.

  22. Hampus Eckerman said:

    And I hate all the nonsense of alpha werewolves authors feel obliged to put in to their books.

    Amen! That makes up a major subset of the aforementioned Super-Magic Rich Husband trope that’s turning me off of modern UF.

    But American Gods I liked.

    There we part ways, I’m afraid. 🙂

  23. PNR if you please not PR/PN = Paranormal Romance

    Urban Fantasy (UF) has gone through a number of iterations since the genre label came into being I believe around the mid-1980s. Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Ellen Datlow, and a number of others wrote stories where the city was an actual character. While Bordertown was YA I always think of it as a good example of 1980s style UF although if has fantasy of manners also so it’s not the best example. Women were pretty big in my understanding of this time period.

    In the late 1990s and 2000s you have the new UF which while city is still important I feel it’s less character. You see more of the difficulty in where the line is drawn between UF/PNR as female authors are pushed to include more romance and you can feel a distinct difference from the earlier UF. Male UF is superior as it doesn’t have that romance stuff.

    A fun way to get a feel for the differences is read UF anthologies put together by Ellen Datlow in the last 5-10 years where she includes authors from old style and new style UF. Then go read the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. You can tell the ages and/or familiarity with the different styles of UF and also who the Butcher fans are. This was one of the fun and really educational parts of the target market research I did on UF. Phenomenal stories, breadth of the field, then people’s reactions based on knowledge. Seriously its just plain fun to do this. And your likely to find new authors and series to read. Look for ones which have Butcher or Briggs or Harris and de Lint to know your getting the right anthologies.

    I’m not as familiar with the older UF writers. Not because I don’t enjoy what they write but for they keep falling off my radar as they are out of print/not in ebook yet. So many books. So little time.

  24. Catching up – forgive the long set of comments-on-comments:

    @Stoic Cynic: My brother & his daughter (in town from outside the country; obligatory bookstore visit) picked up the latest Stross “Laundry Files” book and recommended the series to me. My niece, bless her, picked up all SFF stuff; most of my brothers purchases were lit fic that sounds dull to me, but he picks up the occasional literary SFF novel or something unusual like Stross’s “Laundry Files.”

    @Cat & @robinareid: I was amused that my niece likes Mira Grant, but didn’t know she’s also Seanan McGuire! I told her Grant writes twice as much as she thought, and described Every Heart a Doorway. She agreed it sounded cool, and started looking up what else McGuire had written. 😉

    In other news, I was able to pawn a few books off on my niece. 🙂 I really like how her taste in books is developing, and I’m glad she’s reading some adult SFF now, so we’ll have more book love in common.

    @Andrew M: I’ve never heard an Urban Fantasy definition that included the protagonist’s gender; Butcher is normally described as UF. Stross’s “Laundry Files” sounds more quasi-horror to me, but I haven’t read it (yet). Or maybe @Hampus Eckerman’s “Urban Horror” tag fits?

    @junego: My other half enjoyed Briggs’s “Dragon Bones” duology (?), as I recall.

    @Petréa Mitchell: Bull’s The War For the Oaks has come up in past discussions, though. It generally seems to come up when UF comes up and people talk about how UF has changed from that the Bull, de Lint, etc. sort of UF to the current model. (I feel like some of this conversation retreads past File 770 discussions, but there’s always something new that comes up!) BTWI love your name for this trope: “Still Refusing the Call Even Though It’s Effing Book Four By Now” – LOL, thanks.

    @robinareid: I love Circle of Light, Circle of Darkness and recommend the audiobook, if you like audiobook rereads.

    @TheYoungPretender: Interesting, IMHO UF is marketed more towards women (though not exclusively) than towards men.

    @TheYoungPretencer, @Snodberry Fields, & @Cassy B.: I think of Urban Fantasy as being sent in a modernish-day version of our world(ish), so IMHO Gentlemen Bastards is not UF. Despite “Urban,” IMHO it doesn’t just mean “fantasy in a city.” So closer to Cassy B.’s take on it.

    @Hampus Eckerman: I like the term Contemporary Fantasy (or Modern Fantasy) for some stuff, sure. But Urban Fantasy definitely seems to be a thing – a subset of CF, if you will. Er, I know it when I see it (seriously, the covers all look alike). BTW I like that term “Urban Horror” – I haven’t heard that before. We can slice and dice these sub-genres and sub-sub-genres quite finely! 😉

    @All: An Urban Fantasy that’s not like the usual (IMHO) that I recommend is T.A. Pratt’s Marla Mason series. Although maybe it’s more Contemporary Fantasy, since it doesn’t really have Elves, Vampires, etc.

  25. Kendall: An Urban Fantasy that’s not like the usual (IMHO) that I recommend is T.A. Pratt’s Marla Mason series. Although maybe it’s more Contemporary Fantasy, since it doesn’t really have Elves, Vampires, etc.

    Oh thank the gods. I’ll have to give it a try. I have had it up to –> here <– with vampires, zombies, and werewolves. Gah.

  26. @JJ: No werewolves either, though in a later book, a sorta weredog makes an appearance, technically, but yeah this is not that sort of UF. Not really much? any? romance, either, IIRC (I don’t know how you feel about romance, which seems big in UF these days).

    ETA: Essentially, Marla’s too busy not taking crap from anyone dammit to have romance, or sparkles, or to do the right thing all the time, or … etc. 😉 I love these books. 🙂 I have no idea if people big into UF like them or not

  27. These are my fantasy subgenre definitions, which are mine and belong to me.* Ahem:

    Horror: Stories about scary stuff and scary critters, written to induce feelings of terror, horror, dread, or (as Stephen King cites as last resort) the gross-out. See Stoker’s Dracula, King’s ‘Salem’s Lot or Christine.

    Dark fantasy: See above, but not written primarily to scare. Should have a decidedly dark/pessimistic tone, but can get by with merely gruesome events being A Fact Of Life So Deal With It. Classic examples: Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape and sequels, Simon R. Green’s Nightside books. Notice that Stoker and Saberhagen relate the same basic events; the spin is what changes the category.

    Urban fantasy: Even “friendlier” in tone than dark fantasy, but lots of similarities. Usually features supernatural beings as main/key characters. If horrific things happen, they are Bad Things and not Facts Of Life To Be Accepted. Is set in a distinctive (even if fictional) city, which is at least advanced enough to have recognizable technology (but is most typically modern-day). Yes, this includes steampunk-with-magic, clockpunk-with-magic, and so forth. P.N. Elrod’s The Vampire Files comes to mind, as do numerous already-cited examples like Dresden, Elemental Assassin, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

    PNR: Urban fantasy where the focus of the tale is a love story starring at least one supernatural being. UF can (usually does) have romance as a side dish, but with PNR it’s the entree.

    Comic/comedic fantasy: Exists to make ya laugh. Tom Holt, Bob Asprin, Christopher Moore. I used to tease Dakota Cassidy on Twitter by insisting that her Accidentals series had to be CF, because Everybody Knows that Manly Men like myself don’t read PNR. (Side note: In my headcanon, Bob the Skull in the Dresden books reads each new Accidentals book as soon as it comes out.)

    Contemporary fantasy: That smutty novel I mention every so often is labeled a contemporary fantasy romance because it’s a love story that happens Now, has supernatural elements (magic and gods), lacks supernatural critters (zombies, werewolves, elves), takes place in a college town that is neither unique nor special in any genre-significant way, and isn’t about some apocalyptic save-the-city/planet/multiverse threat. It therefore excludes itself from pretty much every fantasy subgenre that’s been mentioned in the thread so far; contemporary fantasy is all that’s left.

    Did I miss anything? 😉

    * No experts, elks, Elks, or Brontosaurs were harmed in the creation of this theory, which is mine and belongs to me.

  28. I’ve argued Urban Fantasy has to take place in a cognate or obvious connection to our world to people who think otherwise.

    Under some people’s lights, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and the aforementioned A Murder of Mages, being city-focused, are Urban Fantasy too. I think of them as something on my old “Weimer Stakes scale” of secondary world fantasy.

  29. @Paul: (secondary-world UF)

    I don’t see why secondary-world fantasy can’t be UF. In fact, I think I’d put Alex Bledsoe’s The Sword-Edged Blonde and sequels in that nexus. (There’s a strong “noir Western meets court politics” sense to the setting that I quite enjoy. Need to get caught up one of these years.) Come to think of it, how about Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality, which I believe is a “magic as tech” version of a modern setting?

    Basically, if it’s got some level of industrialization that sets it apart from “medieval with a town blacksmith,” I don’t take issue with calling it “urban.” That’s a rule of thumb so basic that I’m sure it frays at the edges, but I’m pretty comfortable with it anyway.

  30. @Bob. Well, my thinking is that part of the juice of UF is the interaction, the underlay with the mundane world. The Vampire the Masquerade aspect of Urban fantasy that people like Bull and De Lint pioneered, Laurell K Hamilton perfected, and that Butcher is one of the shining lights of.

    Admittedly, out of the various subgenres of F/SF, I’ve read core UF the least. So talking through my hat, I may be.

  31. I would say that Nancy A Collins was the pioneer for the Vampire the Masquerade aspect of Urban Fantasy. She wrote her first Sonja Blue-book in 1989 and even moved a later one to The Masquerade-world. She wrote scenarios for White Wolf also if I remember correctly.

  32. I’ve never liked the term Dark Fantasy when used on Horror Books. For me, it is like calling Jim Butchers books “Happy Horror”. >.<

  33. Incidentally, I want to thank everyone who made author/book suggestions. I’ve got a lot of stuff to add to my “I’m reading this for reference” pile

  34. @Paul: “The Vampire the Masquerade aspect of Urban fantasy that […] Laurell K Hamilton perfected,”

    Urp.

    Uhm.

    Please excuse that ungentlemanly sound you just heard. Happens every time I think about LKH these days. Has something to do with the way she turned the Anita Blake books into bad semi-autobiographical wish-fulfillment porn and insulted her fans (of the original installments) for “not getting it.” At least the Merry Gentry books were honest about the content from the outset, but I still have a hard time with the idea that LKH “perfected” much of anything.

    And no, the pioneer for VtM-style (or, as I call it, “nooks and crannies”) UF wasn’t LKH or Nancy Collins. Anne Rice gets the popular nod for Interview with the Vampire, but Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape was published a year earlier… in 1975. The field was well-established by the time Sonja Blue came along a decade and a half later.

    @Hampus: “I’ve never liked the term Dark Fantasy when used on Horror Books.”

    Same here… which is why your objection puzzles me.

    Fright Night is Horror. There’s a vampire, it’s an evil creature of the night, and the good guys are there to kill it dead. See also ‘Salem’s Lot and Dracula.

    The Kitty Norville series, starting with Kitty and the Midnight Hour, is UF. There are vampires and werewolves and all sorts of other things, and our heroine is a good werewolf named Kitty who has her own radio show. Yeah, there’s a bad vampire that needs killin’, but he chose to be that way. It’s not like becoming a vampire ripped out his soul and turned him into a demon or anything…

    …which leads us to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That’s some dark fantasy right there. Sure, there’s comedy, but a lot of it’s gallows humor. Nothing ever goes right for very long. Vampires are soulless demons who kill without remorse – with two notable exceptions, and man, does it suck to be them. Magic is a drug that twists you and makes you evil if you’re not careful. Werewolves, demons, pretty much any other supernatural critter you can name… evil killers, the lot of ’em, with a handful of exceptions. You know, just enough good eggs that you can’t go on an indiscriminate Kill ‘Em All rampage without going evil yourself. Oh, and the Slayer Force is a demon leashed against its will to the cause of good, so even the hero’s tainted.

    It ain’t horror, but it sure as fuck ain’t “Happy.”

  35. I’ve never liked the term Dark Fantasy when used on Horror Books. For me, it is like calling Jim Butchers books “Happy Horror”.

    It distinguishes fantastic horror (e.g. Dracula) from non-fantastic (e.g. Psycho). Which is sort of important, since the former counts as SFF, and is qualified for SFF awards, while the latter doesn’t and isn’t. And, to me, at least, it kinda makes sense, where as neither the word “happy” nor the word “horror” really seems to apply to Butcher.

    The relationship between fantasy and horror is an odd one, I mean other genres can overlap with fantasy (Paranormal Romance, Fantastic Noir, etc.), but only horror has the overlap in its bones, dating back to its earliest days and many of its best known and most famous examples. Yet it remains, stubbornly and resolutely, only a partial overlap.

    As for the distinction between UF and PR* (or UF and Fantastic Noir, for that matter), well, I prefer to keep my genre boundaries fuzzy. If you make them too rigid, then great works by authors who love to play with the boundaries of things can fall through the cracks, and end up ignored as neither fish nor fowl. See also our various discussions on the distinctions between science fiction and fantasy.

    * Sorry, Tasha, but “PNR” as an abbreviation for “Paranormal Romance” just sets my teeth on edge. If it becomes common enough that people start using it automatically, then I’ll consider using it myself, but as things stand now, I cannot bring myself to do so.

  36. Rev. Bob:

    And sure not Fantasy. If all elements are tied to horror, then that is what category it should be placed in. For me to place books like Interview with the Vampire in the Fantasy-category is like cultural appropriation.

  37. Xtifr:

    “It distinguishes fantastic horror (e.g. Dracula) from non-fantastic (e.g. Psycho). Which is sort of important, since the former counts as SFF, and is qualified for SFF awards, while the latter doesn’t and isn’t.”

    We already have the term “supernatural horror” for that. And for me, the Bram Stoker award is a better fit for books like Interview With The Vampire.

  38. Urbane Fantasy – Elves in dinner jackets and evening gowns discussing the latest from Noël Coward.

  39. If elements come out if the horror tradition, that doesn’t automatically make it horror.

    The example that always irritates me is Kadrey’s Sandman Slim books. They have about the same relation to standard UF as grimdark does to heroic fantasy. They get marketed as horror. But the central characters is more badass than the demons and monsters, which makes it impossible to parse as horror – you know not only that the viewpoint character is going to win, but that the whole point of the book us to show how he does, not to provide a frisson of fear.

  40. I do prefer Gothic Fantasy. While not strictly true, it at least acknowledges the roots.

  41. @Hampus: “If all elements are tied to horror, then that is what category it should be placed in.”

    Find me an “element” that is “tied to horror” which is not also “tied to fantasy.” Witches? Demons? Vampires? Werewolves? Ghosts? Don’t think so.

    All Supernatural Horror (which, as Xtifr properly notes, is distinct from Mundane Horror like cannibal serial killers) is part of Fantasy. It’s Fantasy ’cause it’s got supernatural stuff in it, which is the sole defining characteristic of Fantasy. All that remains is to consider what variety of Fantasy we’re talking about.

    For me, when it comes to the (PNR/)UF/DF/SH spectrum, all of which is contained in Fantasy, we’re talking about tone and intent. UF is generally hopeful: there are bad things, but there are Forces Of Good to overcome them, and these are there stories. SH is the polar opposite, as epitomized by The Omen or the Cthulhu Mythos: there are Forces of Evil (or Corruption, because they don’t even regard us highly enough to actively dislike us) that will kill us all no matter what we do. In the small scale, such as Dracula, the good guys might eke out a win over a particular baddie, but there’s always more evil and it never stops coming.

    DF is in the middle, but a bit closer to SH. Opposing Forces, usually more victory for good than bad, but lots of suffering and pessimism. Nobody gets away clean, and too many don’t get away at all. If UF uplifts and SH horrifies, then DF depresses.

    Again, BtVS – sacrifice is the order of the day. Maybe you can save the swim team from becoming fish-men, but you can’t save ’em all and their victims are still dead. Hey, you can save the world and your friends and your family, but only by committing suicide… and even then, even when you go to your eternal rest, they’ll yank you back because they didn’t know any better, and you get to keep fighting and hope that the next time you die, it’ll stick and you’re still clean enough to go to The Good Place. It sucks, but it’s not horrific – so it ain’t Horror. (Horror would be waking up to find that the “horde of demons” you just slaughtered were the guests at your wedding, because you were hallucinating. See the difference?) It’s dark fantasy.

    ETA, @James: “[Sandman Slim] is more badass than the demons and monsters, which makes it impossible to parse as horror – you know not only that the viewpoint character is going to win, but that the whole point of the book us to show how he does, not to provide a frisson of fear.”

    Yes. THIS. It’s not written to scare or horrify, so it ain’t Horror of any stripe.

  42. Rev. Bob:

    Lets just agree to totally disagree. It is in the same way as when I saw Dracula in the fantasy-bracket. I just do not agree that this is the correct category. Even if I can understand that others do.

  43. @Xtifr: * Sorry, Tasha, but “PNR” as an abbreviation for “Paranormal Romance” just sets my teeth on edge. If it becomes common enough that people start using it automatically, then I’ll consider using it myself, but as things stand now, I cannot bring myself to do so.

    I must either spend too much time with romance readers and/or marketing people as I’ve only ever seen it called PNR when not spelled out… pfft

  44. @Hampus Eckerman:

    Rev. Bob:

    Lets just agree to totally disagree. It is in the same way as when I saw Dracula in the fantasy-bracket. I just do not agree that this is the correct category. Even if I can understand that others do.

    Ruin a good argument by behaving like adults why dontcha. Geez someone might think filers are capable of having discussions and recognizing there can be more than one correct opinion. This might make heads explode.

    #MultipleOpinionsAreOkay

  45. @Hampus: “Lets just agree to totally disagree. It is in the same way as when I saw Dracula in the fantasy-bracket. I just do not agree that this is the correct category. Even if I can understand that others do.”

    Oh, I completely agree that Horror is a better description than Fantasy for that example. I just disagree with what I’m reading as a statement that (Supernatural) Horror is a separate thing from Fantasy, rather than a subset of it.

    In Venn diagram terms, my Horror circle has massive overlap with the Fantasy circle, and that overlap is called Supernatural Horror. Thing is, there’s another circle completely contained within Fantasy called Urban Fantasy, and the UF circle also overlaps with the Supernatural Horror zone. That overlap is what I call Dark Fantasy. It’s horror and fantasy and urban* all at once, but it’s most correctly described by its most specific genre. Lumping it in with any of the other three just doesn’t seem to do it justice, and it runs the risk of erasure.

    Is that the problem, erasure? Are you perhaps under the impression that I’m trying to get erase Horror as a genre by relabeling it as a type of Fantasy? If so… not the case. In no way is that true. Yes, I classify SH under Fantasy, but in the same way that I classify Homo sapiens under “mammals.” Neither label invalidates the other.

    * Hm. Technically, I guess it’s possible to have Dark Not-Urban Fantasy. Not sure offhand what that would look like, but…

  46. @ Rev Bob. A Dark not-Urban Fantasy? Maybe Feist’s early novel Faerie Tale?

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