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.
Budrys’s view of urban fantasy appears to be consistent with what I call proto-urban fantasy, supernatural stories that draw on the Gothic and are set in a city, but the “counterculturish residents” and “bookish protagonist” recall the artists, musicians, and scholars that have become common among the genre’s cast members. The old house and the old wilderness in the midst of a city suggest the resurfacing of suppressed history that Helen Young connects with the strain of urban fantasy she calls the “sub-urban.” The book Budrys reviewed was Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness (1977), and the fact that it fit so neatly with Budrys’s urban fantasy description suggests that he may have adapted his description to Leiber’s novel. It is clear that “urban fantasy” was a label that Budrys expected his readers to be familiar with, however. “When we speak so glibly now of ‘urban fantasy’, we pay passing homage to the man who invented it… in a 1941 story called ‘Smoke Ghost’ by Fritz Leiber,” Budrys asserts, and “Smoke Ghost” certainly could be read as an urban fantasy even by today’s understanding.
Personally, the earliest text that fits my cognitive model of urban fantasy is Leiber’s Conjure Wife (1943), in which a university professor discovers that his wife has defended him from magical attacks. That does not make it the first urban fantasy story or even an urban fantasy story (although it can certainly be read as such). Judging from Budrys’s remark, the label formed and spread during the 1970s, and I have found no earlier indication that it was widely used. The strands that make up the genre today had begun to come together, and by 1978, the label was established, even though it signified something somewhat different from its later incarnations.
Posted 20 hours ago.
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.
These men, wielding power, have no suspicion of the fact that the consequences of their deeds will at length come home to them—they too will bow the neck in their turn. If you can make an old man fall silent, tremble, obey, with a single word of your own, why should it occur to you that the curses of this old man, who is after all a priest, will have their own importance in the gods’ eyes? Why should you refrain from taking Achilles’ girl away from him if you know that neither he nor she can do anything but obey you? Achilles rejoices over the sight of the Greeks fleeing in misery and confusion.
What could possibly suggest to him that this rout, which will last exactly as long as he wants it to and end when his mood indicates it, that this very rout will be the cause of his friend’s death, and, for that matter, of his own? Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.
But at the time their own destruction seems impossible to them. For they do not see that the force in their possession is only a limited quantity; nor do they see their relations with other human beings as a kind of balance between unequal amounts of force. Since other people do not impose on their movements that halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity, they conclude that destiny has given complete license to them, and none at all to their inferiors. And at this point they exceed the measure of the force that is actually at their disposal. Inevitably they exceed it, since they are not aware that it is limited. And now we see them committed irretrievably to chance; suddenly things cease to obey them. Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel. But in any case there they are, exposed, open to misfortune; gone is the armor of power that formerly protected their naked souls; nothing, no shield, stands between them and tears.
Posted 15 days ago.
Work proceeds apace: I have reached the part of the draft of the 46th novelette where I can loop back to finish the unfinished draft of the 45th novelette, and when that’s done I can skip ahead to what of the 46th novelette follows immediately thereafter to write that down and then, finally, settle back to finish what’s left of them both. And then? Revision, and polish, and cut to fit, and to press; and then, the third season will finally have begun.
Meanwhile: might I draw your attention to an avenue of support, for the city? There’s Patreon, for those who favor the tried and true, more commercial end of the market, but also Comradery, for the scrappy upstart end—but also, cooperatively owned and democratically run. —The tiers and the benefits from the city are the same for either, so join as you are moved; patreons and comrades receive regular updates, added extras, previews, and of course electronic and paper copies of the novelettes as they’re completed, before their public publication.
In June, for instance, there was a trip to Newport, to re-fix some perspectives and some qualities of light for the fifth volume, as well as to shoot some potential covers for upcoming zines—so, in July’s update, patreons and comrades got a preview of some possibles:
And then, coming up, in August’s update, patreons and comrades will get the cover reveal for the 45th novelette! And the title reveal, as well. Season three, step by step, begins to take shape. —And of course there’s the fact that the new novelettes won’t be appearing here until the re-runs catch up: patreons and comrades should be seeing no. 45 in about September, I’m thinking; it’ll be over a year after that before it shows up here.
So: Patreon, and Comradery. Sign up if and as you like to support the city—but of course, it’s the reading that is all. My thanks to each and every one of you, however you’ve come by.
Posted 25 days ago.
This is a good place to discuss point of view in The Emperor of Gladness. Perhaps it is dry, technical, and petty, but point of view matters a great deal to me as a reader. Point of view describes the organizing intelligence of a story. It controls the time signature, the outlay of information, the mode of telling, the mediation of backstory, the integration of event and description into experience, which itself compounds into meaning. Point of view isn’t just first, second, or third person. It’s also verb tense. It’s whether something is experiential or summarized. It’s whether or not a story is retrospective. Whether it’s told focalized through this character or that other character. It controls what feels right in a story versus what feels extraneous or improper.
The point of view in The Emperor of Gladness is unstable in a way that, pardon me, feels inappropriate. Take the first chapter, which I’ve just praised. Why does the narrator switch to an I? Or the novel in general: Why are some passages in the past tense and others the present tense? Are the present tense passages meant to be memories or dreams or both? Is the story retrospective? Is it the boy on the bridge telling us the story from many years later? Is this a story focalized through the boy? Certainly at times, we hang close to Hai, funneling observations and insights through the tight scrim of his voice. At other times, the novel sheds this limitation and attains a lyric intensity that sounds more like the Vuong of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in its sonorous profundity. Which loops us back around to the question of the narrator and who is telling us this story. Does it flow from an I and is that I Ocean Vuong or is that I Hai, the boy on the bridge at the start of the novel?
Naturally, some will say that the Western tradition of the realist novel as it descends from Henry James with its single, controlling point of view is an outmoded and outdated notion that is itself a refutation of the novel’s early profligacy with respect to style of narration. And that a looser, messier, even seemingly incoherent set of choices with respect to point of view comes closer to the experience of consciousness, etc., something, something, non-Western narrative traditions, whatever, okay. But the questions I always return to are: Does the technique make the book better? Does it add something? In this case, I would say the violations in point of view just felt random and distracting and underattended to. But let us return to the plot.
Posted 33 days ago.
Many readers of The Night Land, and more still who give up on the book, gag on its prose; The Night Land is a famously “difficult read.” For The Night Land, Hodgson devised an eccentric, faux seventeenth- or eighteenth-century style, convoluted and orotund, which even Lovecraft found “grotesque and absurd.” A few critics have supported Hodgson’s stylistic choice (Greer Gilman in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Nigel Brown in “An Apology for the Linguistic Architecture of The Night Land”), but Murphy mounts an innovative defense. He asks us to see the difficulty of reading as an intrinsic element of weird fiction, a twinning of the reader’s efforts with those of the characters’:
... the labor of the weird and the resistance to it often (but not always) transform the human subject who undergoes them, and those transformations are materially reflected in the language of Hodgson’s tales, imposing a labor of the weird on the reader as well as on the characters.
In Hodgson, the weird is inseparable from its expression and its reception—the reader must be estranged from current reality in all ways. As Murphy stresses, Hodgson’s “stylistic and formal strategies [are] centered on the problem of how to refer to or represent the non-/un-/abhuman.” In so doing, Hodgson reminds me of Christian mystics such as Jakob Böhme, Hildegard of Bingen, and Teresa of Ávila, and of alchemists such as “Basil Valentine” and Michael Maier, who each in idiosyncratic ways contorted syntax and made strange their vocabulary in attempts to represent the interaction of the human with that which is not human and with that which is cosmic. Equally, Hodgson points forward to the varied linguistic permutations of the twentieth century. As Murphy asserts: “weird fiction constitutes an explicitly self-reflexive and experimental genre that is, in its own unique ways, comparable to the broader formal experiments of high modernist and postmodernist fiction that developed alongside and after it.” I agree fully with that assessment, and would love to see studies putting The Night Land in conversation with The Waste Land, Finnegans Wake, Dadaist and Surrealist plays and manifestos, Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and so on.
Posted 41 days ago.
It’s July, which means it’s International Zine Month! Hooray!
I’ve written before, about my, well, I wouldn’t say discomfort with the zine scene, no, I mean, maybe I’d go as high as out-of-placeness, but you put it like that, I mean, I tend to feel out of place just about anywhere I go, so. City of Roses is a number of things, a website, some books, an epic, an oddity, what I do with what time I can spare, but it has always been a zine. So, thinking locally, here’s to the IPRC and the Portland Zine Symposium! And you should go fold and staple some paper of your own.
Posted 46 days ago.
France commissioned the original statue in 1870 after losing the Franco-Prussian War, a glittering likeness of its patron saint to boost morale. It sits outside the luxe Hotel Regina in Paris’s first arrondissement, framed by the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre. Nancy, France; Melbourne, Australia; and New Orleans and Philadelphia all have their own copies made from sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet’s original molds. Though Portland’s souvenir may have the quirk of being the trickiest to access, protected on its humble, grassy loop de loop by an unrelenting swirl of traffic.
Coe commissioned the statue as tribute to veterans of the Great War. The other three monuments he donated to the city—of Lincoln, Washington, and his old hunting buddy Teddy Roosevelt—are in storage after being toppled during protests in 2020. But Joan of Arc remains on her horse despite bouts with vandalism. As the O reported, an “informal and altogether illegal unveiling” a week before the official dedication set a tone. Her laurels and pennant have been stolen and replaced more than a few times. Teens soaked the statue in black paint after a re-gilding in 2002. (She’d gotten a little green.) And in 2012, someone taped a giant drill bit to the horse’s head, turning it into a unicorn and somehow causing $1,800 of damage. Still, Portland generally seems to like its Joan of Arc. Coe’s patriotic motives aside, perhaps the legend of a spiritually inclined teenager subverting gender roles through radical political action serves a different inspiration today.
Posted 60 days ago.
August Clarke
I think, as we’ve discussed before, that uh, there is a startling lack of depictions of lesbian sex in the wonderful moment we’re having where there’s lots of really great Sapphic–writ large–stories and genre fiction. And when there is sex between women, um yeah, they’re never wearing a dick. And I think that this is a pretty critical problem of world building and a lack of ingenuity and interest in the fact that sexuality makes culture, too. If we are world building, a society, a culture, sex and sexuality is part of that culture.
Every culture has sex as a business at some point, every culture has sex at some point, probably. We have neolithic dildos, in fact, right? Like it is a sort of transcultural phenomena that we make prosthesis as a part of our experiencing each other and being with each other, and I think to a certain extent this might be a discomfort with depicting women’s sexuality period. Or women’s sexuality as active.
I think that there is a much greater representation of protagonists, or at least point of view characters who are sexually inexperienced and who need their love interest to guide them into sexuality and show them all of the ropes and do unto them. I really struggle to think of point of view top characters in genre fiction, period.
C.L. Clark
Period. Regardless of genres, genders, or gender pairings or anything.
Clarke
Yeah, it is almost always the perspective of the bottom or—I think assigning top and bottom to men, women couples is weird and doesn’t work, in fact–but it is either the bottom’s perspective or the woman’s perspective, usually. Or occasionally you might get a man’s perspective and drawn her as well and indeed men in genre do have sex here and there.
But I think that with that lack of world building interest, we also have a loss of the technologies we produce as queer people to be with each other. A thing that I was really concerned with in writing this book was making sure that there was a subcultural aspect to the queerness here. Which necessarily pairs with there being queerphobia in this world. If you have a queer normative world, which—that’s a huge thing in itself. But if you have a world where at the very least same gender attraction is not policed, and is sort of normative in this space, and there’s no pushback at all, then you have no reason to make a subculture. And then you, by extension, have no reason to make sex toys that are appropriate for the kind of sex you wanna be having, right?
Clark
I feel like you could still have it, it just becomes a mainstream item like any that you buy–you buy your cups, you buy your crockery, your silverware, you buy your dicks.
Clarke
And indeed, why don’t the couples in fantasy also have dicks that they wear? Get into it.
Posted 74 days ago.
Since the renovations hereabouts, we’ve been re-running the novelettes from the start on the usual Monday–Wednesday–Friday schedule, and as we speak the tenth novelette, “Surveilling,” is just about done; the eleventh, “Rounds,” will begin appearing next week, and—well. There are eleven novelettes per volume.
So let’s celebrate! Commercially. —For the next week (through Friday, 30th May), any paperback copies of “Wake up…” bought through me are available for the deeply discounted price of twelve dollars US (ten pounds sterling), plus shipping, and any ebook copies of “Wake up…” are available for three dollars US from myself, and the outlets where I can reach the pricing: itch.io, Payhip, Smashwords, and Google Play. So go! Treat yourself! Put the start of the epic on your shelves!
Posted 92 days ago.
To my mind, it’s how you do the world-building which is really significant; in other words, it’s in the execution of world-building, just as in the execution of every other aspect of storytelling, where the other strategies come in. Fan-service–oriented world-building will tend to create material which feels like a comfortable fit for the setting and a logical outgrowth of stuff we already know; Lower Decks is fantastic at this, coming up with novelties like the idea that the Daystrom Institute has an entire wing where they keep all the megalomaniac computers that Starfleet captures. World-building oriented towards creative freedom will offer surprises and novelty, showing us something we never expected to encounter in the Star Trek galaxy which at its best can shake up our assumptions and open up fresh possibilities, at worst simply looks incongruous and silly and gets ignored and glossed over by later writers. (To take an example from the golden age, remember when The Next Generation established that fast warp travel was unravelling the universe and all Starfleet ships had a speed limit imposed on them they could only break with special permission? No shade on you if you don’t, I keep forgetting it too and I didn’t watch the relevant episode that long ago, and no subsequent Trek show has seen fit to yes-and that particular bit of world-building.)
Even if you could come up with a world-building approach which perfectly split the difference between fan service and creative freedom, all you’re doing is kicking the can down the road, playing for time without addressing the core dilemma any new Trek thing must address—where is it going to lie in that spectrum between honouring the franchise’s past and trying to establish its own legacy?
Posted 93 days ago.
