City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where aspirants are knighted in Forest Park, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store.
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.
Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes. The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa. The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection.
Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence. Hence we see men in arms behaving harshly and madly. We see their sword bury itself in the breast of a disarmed enemy who is in the very act of pleading at their knees. We see them triumph over a dying man by describing to him the outrages his corpse will endure. We see Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.
White lines gleaming, burnished by candlelight, angles that frame her belly, her breasts, her throat and face, her eyes closed below severely straight bangs, long yellow hair gathered by wide white ribbons in hanks over either shoulder. She’s laid back, settled against curves of golden brown, shadowed leg along the pale length of her atop the pillowy comforter, hip and belly, shoulder, dark arm curled about her, laid over that white paint, a brown hand tucked there, just between her thighs. She sighs, tilts up her head. “She’ll come around,” she says.
“Your sister?” says Ysabel, above, behind her. “She seemed fairly adamant.”
“You didn’t even ask the question.”
“It,” says Ysabel, “it isn’t that important, really.”
“How can you say that?” Twisting, squirming about, “No, I meant,” says Ysabel, and then, “careful, you’ll smear,” but “All our life,” she’s saying, “all our life!”
“And yet.”
“No!” Chrissie’s sitting up on an elbow, glaring down at her. “No! Even,” she says, “when we used to,” but she blinks, “swim,” she says. “When I.” She looks away. “When she.”
“Used to swim,” says Ysabel. A smudge of white paint there on her breast, and flecked with gold. “But you don’t, anymore? Did you forget?”
“Racing,” says Chrissie, still looking away. “Competitively. We did, we used to, we were, a scholarship. Couldn’t afford college, otherwise.”
After a moment, Ysabel says, “What happened, when you used to swim?”
“…a flicker of sharp impressionistic scenes skittering atop a deeply imagined alternate present.”
“I think it’s the only time I’ve fallen in love with a city through a novel.”
