Urban fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy, placing supernatural elements in a contemporary urban setting. The combination provides the writer with a platform for classic fantasy tropes, quixotic plot-elements, and unusual characters without demanding the creation of an entire imaginary world.
Precursors of urban fantasy are found in popular fiction of the 19th century and the present use of the term dates back to the 1970s. Much of its audience was established in the 1930s–50s with the success of light supernatural fare in film and, later, television. The genre's current publishing popularity began in 1980s North America, as writers and publishers were encouraged by the success of Stephen King and Anne Rice.
Characteristics Urban fantasy combines imaginary/unrealistic elements of plot, character, theme, or setting with a largely-familiar world—combining the familiar and the strange. The world does not have to imitate the real world, but can instead be set in a different world or time.> Such elements may exist secretly in the world or may occur openly.> Fantastic components may be magic, paranormal beings, recognizable mythic or folk-tale plots, or thematic tropes (such as a quest, or a battle of good and evil). Authors may use current urban myths, borrow fictional technologies, or even invent occult practices, as well as using established supernatural characters and events from folklore, literature, film, or comics.
The urban component is usually found in the setting—typically a large or small city—or even a suburban community in a metropolitan area. Use of contemporary technology (such as automotive vehicles or communications) and everyday community and social institutions (such as libraries, schools/universities, or markets) establish a familiar context. The period in which the action occurs may be the fairly recent past or the near future, but will typically require only casual historical or other special knowledge from the reader. The city-setting is a tool; used to establish a tone, to help move the plot, and may even be acknowledged as a character itself.
Urban fantasy is most often a sub-genre of low fantasy (where magical events intrude on an otherwise-normal world) and/or hard fantasy (treating magic as something understandable and explainable), and works may be found mixing with sub-genres of, for example, horror, occult detective fiction, or the various "punk"CyberpunkSteampunkCyberpunk derivatives genres.> Common themes include coexistence or conflict between humans and other beings, and the changes such characters and events bring to local life. Many authors, publishers, and readers particularly distinguish urban fantasy from works of paranormal romance, which use similar characters and settings, but focus on the romantic relationships between characters.
The YA author Scott Westerfeld distinguished between urban fantasy and a subgenre called elfpunk on the basis that "Elfpunk is pretty much full of elves and fairies and traditional shit [...] Urban fantasy, though, can have some totally made-up fucked-up creatures."
History Predecessors During the late Romantic era, writers of sensational fiction (including Mary Shelley, Dickens, Hoffmann, Le Fanu, Hugo, Poe, Wilkie Collins, Stoker, &c.) wrote supernatural-tinged melodramas to explore social anxieties due to population shifts from farms into industrial centers, novel technologies, and fear of 'foreign' immigrants. Re-imagining the contemporary universe by manipulating one or more social/technical realities gave us popular works by Jules Verne, as well as Doyle's Professor Challenger stories. Jack London's 1908 dystopian novel The Iron Heel preceded H. G. Wells' novel The Sleeper Awakes. Karel Čapek, Aldous Huxley, and even Sinclair Lewis (in his novel It Can't Happen Here) all wrote adventure stories that were post-apocalyptic, and dystopian.
Around the same time, popular mail-delivered periodicals appeared in Europe and the Americas (The Saturday Evening Post (1821), Godey's Lady's Book (1830), and Harper's Weekly (1857)). The success of these magazines led to ones that targeted specific readerships: Boys' Own Magazine (1855), and Argosy (1882) among them. All of these magazines published short and serialized fiction features, as well as reportage, instructional articles, illustration, and opinion. Before WW1, fantasy vied for magazine space with westerns, romance, mysteries, military adventure, comedies, and horror. Writers often published stories in multiple genres - among them Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert E. Howard, Isaac Asimov, and Elmore Leonard. A sought-after hallmark for many of these writers was "realism" - although the stories were outrageously fantastic.Lutes, Jean. (2010). Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (review). The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies. 1. 113-117. 10.1353/jmp.0.0009.
Dime novels also arrived before the Civil War, some of the earliest re-printing serials from magazines. Commonly associated with Western adventure, they also encompassed romance and crime-fiction. Robert deGraff founded Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books in 1939, he distributed not only to the 2,800 US bookstores, but also in more than a hundred thousand drugstores, news-stands, 5-&-10s, cigar stores, groceries, and diners. By doing this, he established a market - not for copies of Shakespeare or Jane Austen - but for collections and book-length versions of popular magazine fiction.
Early urban fantasy In 1899, Harper's Weekly editor John Kendrick Bangs altered fantasy parameters with The Enchanted Type-Writer (a series of humorous short-stories supposedly typed by the ghost of 18th century writer James Boswell) - introducing a benign revenant in a contemporary setting. Thorne Smith was successful in 1920s-30s, especially his two "Topper" farces about a middle-aged banker's adventures with a couple of ghosts (subsequently made into films, radio plays, and a 1950s television series); Smith's posthumously released novel The Passionate Witch was made into the 1942 comic cinema romance I Married a Witch by Rene Clair.
Writer Charles G. Finney's celebrated 1935 experimental novel The Circus of Dr. Lao placed mythical creatures in a contemporary setting to examine the society in a small Arizona town. Gruesome cartoons by Charles Addams began exploring the humorous side of horror in the New Yorker magazine around the same time.
Occult detective stories, such as Manly Wade Wellman's John Thunstone stories - written originally during the 1940s -are credited by many current authors for bringing contemporary characters and American settings into the fantasy and horror genres. These early tales, however, differ from current urban fantasy - they present supernatural beings and acts as unnatural, aberrant, and a possible danger to ordinary citizens.
Unknown magazine (1939–1943) was conceived by its editor John W. Campbell as a fantasy equivalent of Campbell's successful Astounding science fiction magazine; its stories often took place in the present and many had a thoughtful "science-fictional" approach. Writers such as Fritz Leiber ("Smoke Ghost", published in 1941), Jack Williamson with "Darker Than You Think" (originally published 1940), H. L. Gold (with his "Trouble with Water", published in 1939) and L. Sprague de Camp's "Nothing in the Rules" (1939) presented ghosts, lycanthropes, gnomes, mermaids, demons and more, in a modern setting, with horrific and/or humorous results. The prolific de Camp and his writing partner, war game inventor Fletcher Pratt, also explored urban material with their stories of Harold Shea in the 1940s and Gavagan's Bar stories in the 1950s.
The 1940s saw a number of comic ghost-movies; some of the best-known today include The Canterville Ghost (re-telling the 1887 story by Oscar Wilde), Blithe Spirit (based on Noël Coward's hit London and Broadway play), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (based on an R.A. Dick novel), series-fare Topper Returns, Gildersleeve's Ghost, The Smiling Ghost, plus cartoons and short features from The Three Stooges, Olsen and Johnson, Walt Disney Productions and Looney Tunes.
1950s-60s Bell, Book and Candle opened on Broadway in 1950, playing 233 performances before it went on a US tour, then played in London for several years. It was released as a film of the same name in 1958. The 1954 best-selling novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant details a Faustian deal with the devil in major-league professional baseball; it was made into the successful 1957 Broadway musical Damn Yankees" Damn Yankees Awards" ibdb.com, retrieved August 16, 2018 (subsequently revived several times), and then into a 1958 Hollywood film. That same year, Irish-American Leonard Wibberley published Mrs Searwood's Secret Weapon, about an elderly British widow haunted by the ghost of a Powhatan warrior during the London Blitz. British spy-novel writers Adelaide Manning and Cyril Coles (under the pseudonym Francis Gaites, but published in the United States as by Manning Coles) produced a series of humorous novels from 1954 to 1958 placing ghostly revenants of Franco-Prussian War era into 1950s Paris and Como. Herman Cohen's teen-horror films for American International Pictures commenced in 1957 with I Was a Teenage Werewolf, combining supernatural characters with the mundane popular post WW2 teen-culture. In 1959, the fantasy/sci-fi TV anthology The Twilight Zone began, after the success of its pilot "The Time Element" appeared as a 1958 episode of Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse.
In 1962, Ray Bradbury published the dark novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, which has been cited as a particular influence by writers Stephen King,Bloom, Harold (1998). Stephen King. Chelsea House, pp. 20. R. L. Stine, and Neil Gaiman. The highly successful TV fantasy series Bewitched began its 8-year run in 1964, with its rival I Dream of Jeannie and a less-successful fantasy show My Mother the Car appearing a year later; The Addams Family based on Charles Addams New Yorker cartoons also debuted in 1964. Ira Levin's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby was a best-seller and critical hit; made into a movie directed by Roman Polanski the following year. Chester Anderson's psychedelic adventure The Butterfly Kid was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1968. Also in 1968, the English translation of Italo Calvino's short-story collection "Le cosmicomiche" made his fantastic tales built around minor scientific details available to the Anglo-American appetite for the new urban fantasy.
1970s–early 1980s After the success of Stephen King's contemporary horror-story Carrie in 1973, the author introduced supernatural characters (vampires) into his next book, 'Salem's Lot (1976), which he has claimed is his own favorite. Retrospective reviews of King's work note that he "brought reality to genre novels",A Century of Great Suspense Stories, edited by Jeffrey Deaver [Pg. 290]/Publisher: Berkley Hardcover (2001) and have remarked that "Jerusalem's Lot is the main character here, a warm-up for what King would later do with his beloved fictional towns of Derry and Castle Rock. We're given a vivid description, details and foibles, before the town is populated with a cast of characters..."
Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire (a re-working of her own late-60s short story) in 1976 to strikingly mixed critical reviews. Incorporating many genres (horror, eroticism, fantasy, romance, historical fiction), it and its sequels established a new audience for fantasy characters in a real world. Recognizing its potential Alfred A. Knopf editor Victoria Wilson recommended a very substantial advance; later, the paperback rights cost Ballantine Books $700,000.