City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where a grocers’ warehouse might become a palace, and an antique bank is hidden beneath a department store.
The aptness of this satire in 2025—in which the law is even presuming to rule on biological “reality”—draws attention to the similarities between the 2020s and the 1920s, which seem much closer to the present now than, say, the 1940s or 1950s. Like our current government, the good burghers of Lud-in-the-Mist can’t counter, or even account for, the ongoing collapse of the dominant symbolic order around their ears because they are unable to recognise on ideological grounds the very forces that are opposing them.
Certainly there is no future for the genre except as a metaphor within some other work. By now the whole complex of ideas has passed so into the general culture that it is conceivable in art only as lyric imagery or as affectionate reminiscence. In fact, the vampire tradition has hardly been used in lyric verse—I can only remember one poem in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I always thought Italian directors would do very well with vampires as cultural symbols for the rotten rich—many of the traditions about the vampire are close to the atmosphere of films like La Notte or La Dolce Vita.
Well, sort of: even as the season out there wanes, and pumpkin spices ever so slightly begin to waft, we’re on the verge of launching the third season of the epic: Summer. —The first draft of no. 46 should be done this month, which means revisions and finalizations of no. 45 might begin this month, as well; I am confident if not certain that it will be released in October: the first novelette in vol. 5, The Greene Chapel; the beginning of, well, Summer.
In the September 1978 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, there is a review column written by the science fiction author, editor, and critic Algirdas Jonas “Algis” Budrys. Budrys offers a brief summary of the “tried and true elements” of urban fantasy:
the desuetudinous old rooming house and its counterculturish residents, the bit of old wilderness rising atop its mysterious hill in the midst of the city, and the strangely haunted, bookish protagonist who gradually realizes the horrible history of the place where he lives.
Sunlight shining so bright from the corner that they lift their hands to shade their eyes in the otherwise darkness, turn away as they sink to their knees, and the Chariot lowers her gleaming head, and the Axle ducks behind his grimy collar, and Luys, the Mason, stares at the swords in his hands as their blades grow much too bright, and Sweetloaf up on the stoop isn’t looking away, he’s blinking rapidly as all that sunlight swells and leaps a sudden soundless shout so bright it burns away the shadows in the foyer behind him, and the Mooncalfe knocks her forehead against tiny gleaming tiles, and the Trident empty-handed sags against the muralled wall, so bright it washes out the neon colors through the arch behind him, revealing the glass tubes held in place along the floor by uneven strips of grubby tape, and the Shield kneels over his useless fauchon beside them, and the Stirrup blinks gormlessly in the doorway to the cavernous room beyond, so bright it banishes any dimness that might’ve lingered in the stalls to either side, and swallows cold fluorescents in a prismatic flare that sheens the lazuli lapels of knights stood over clenched and squinting coveralled domestics, and all those bright swords drooping, those lowering clubbed-up fists, and the brilliance zeniths as it lights on a wooden tub in the middle of them all, still overflown with mounds of golden dust that shine a dawnlight yearning up to blazing downcast noon, and the Bullbeggar turns from it shoulders draped with fur, and Anna blinks behind her narrow black-rimmed glasses, and Gloria Monday in her black high-waisted gown lifts hands against this absent sun, and the Dagger in his pearly suit squared off against the Sapper in his navy, they straighten from their crouches, lift away their hands, and more domestics dun and olive, khaki and umber past them, and more knights in denim and slate, midnight and cerulean, all recoil, prostrate, gawp, the Anvil on one knee, Biscuit beside him, and Miriam black tie unclipped, the Guerdon behind her, under the big main overhead door rolled all the way up, the sword in his hand a-shine with the light that shines over all of them, through them, past them all –
“Our reviewers loved the world-building and well-drawn characters.”
“—people who like urban fantasy written in a rather jumpy unusual style will like this book—”
