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Originally Posted by Jay If you have more specific criteria, do tell! |
Well actually I do have a more specific defintion, otherwise I would have included several of your recommednations including Vandermeer, Harrison and Mieville.
From my research into these things Urban fantasy essentially describes stories in our supposed real world rather than Urban settings per se that are obviously imagined like Mieville's New Crobuzon or Harrison's Viriconium. The criitcal thing here is that the main action needs to take place within our contemporary world or the world at the time the books were written in order for it to be classified as Urban fantasy. Therefore a story like Guy Gavriel Kay's excellent Fionavar Tapestry where the main characters are tansported from our modern world to another realm is not classified as Urban fantasy set within a contemporary setting. A series like that by China Mieville is ostensibly viewed as being "New Weird" which does not necessarily need to be set in contemporary times and basically involves a "melding" of different Genres including Horror, SF and Fantasy.
Hope I'm making sense.....
