foxfirefey: Feet placed sole to sole and colored like green moss. (moss feet)
[personal profile] foxfirefey posting in [community profile] fantasy
So, John Scalzi has a feature on his blog called "The Big Idea". It's a great way to get really tantalizing previews of books you might want to read--and is heavily skewed toward SF/F genre books, too, although it isn't exclusive. A whole site dedicated to the concept is in the works, too.

The latest Big Idea by Nicole Peter has a lot of interesting things to say about urban fantasy, to wit:
In a time of chaos and uncertainty, is it any wonder that urban fantasy, the genre of the contemporary fairy tale, is on the rise? After all, urban fantasy offers a vision of the world in which traditional evils...are often times merely misunderstood. Meanwhile, traditional heroes...are often revealed to be sanctimonious, narrow-minded, and murderous zealots. The binaries neatly dividing good and evil are blurred in this genre, and the underlying message in many urban fantasies seems to be that the individual must make his or her own choices: that we must rely on our own experiences and intellect in a world that wants to brand outsiders as evil, to force ideological dichotomies on reality, and to make soldiers of us all.


Are you an urban fantasy fan (disregarding urban fantasy that you don't like and mainly considering that which you do, if any)? If so, what draws you to the genre? If not, what repels you?

Date: 2009-10-27 04:01 pm (UTC)
corinthian: (Default)
From: [personal profile] corinthian
I'm a huge Urban Fantasy fan. One of the things I enjoy most about the genre as that it tends not to feel as bogged down as some more traditional fantasy. In a fantastical world there is often a lot of world building activities and details that need to be inserted, sometimes at the cost of flow or other enjoyable things. It's more "real" in the aspect that most Urban Fantasy I read tends to be like fictional only a step to the side. (I read a lot of Newford novels and such).

While traditional or high fantasy doesn't exclude the gray in between it often seems like it falls prey to that. Urban fantasy, for some reason, seems to more innately fall in between the high morality and dark evil.

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