THE WOUNDED ONES by G.D. Penman Tour

The Thing I Hate About Urban Fantasy

So here’s the thing I hate about urban fantasy: Everything is the same. 

I don’t mean that the genre is flooded with derivative copies of whatever happens to be selling best at any given moment although, this is publishing, so that is a given; I mean that despite there being dragons, wizards, vampires, ghost, ghouls, goblins and inexplicably shirtless men who clearly work out a lot all over the place the actual worlds where these stories take place are almost invariable our world with a little bit of supernatural window dressing.

I get it. I’ve written enough secondary world fantasy where you have to puzzle over whether you can use the word “bull-headed” because cows don’t technically exist in your setting to know that writing in a familiar world is infinitely easier than cobbling one together yourself. Plus, the reader is instantly comfortable. Readers can fill in the blanks on anything that you don’t describe because there is an assumption that if you don’t hear that werewolves now run every bodega in town then things are the same as our world. Urban fantasy is like putting on an old comfortable pair of shoes that you know fit well. 

Which I guess makes epic fantasy winkle-pickers or something? This analogy is getting away from me. 

I completely understand it, I get the appeal, you should be ashamed of yourselves, it is lazy.

Alternate history stories, at their most basic, are “for want of a nail.” You change one minor facet of historical events and the ripple effects spread out and change everything. A messenger does not arrive on time. A chef fails to fully debone a fish. Franz Ferdinand doesn’t decide to go for a drive around town after an assassination attempt. Gavrilo Princip doesn’t go to his favourite sandwich shop after failing to assassinate Franz Ferdinand with bombs. You get the picture. Butterfly effect, ripples, etc.

Of course, small scale change gets a bit boring, so Alternate History writers nowadays tend to hew away from missing nails and more towards “what if aliens showed up” or “what if ducks could shoot lasers” – you know, standard speculative fiction questions – and then extrapolate their changes from there.

But Urban Fantasy doesn’t have a branching point where history is changed. The alternate world of gremlins who are attractive men without shirts has always had attractive gremlin men without shirts. They are not a new development, about to derail history, they are history.

If wanting for a nail can completely change the world into a completely new configuration, I’m fairly confident that sexy shirtless chupacabra running around since our caveman days would have a more significant impact. The fact that the worlds of urban fantasy even vaguely resemble ours is remarkable. Unless every major and minor historical figure has been inexplicably immune to chupacabra bites, you have something worse than a plot hole; you’ve got a setting hole. A black hole that can swallow up the entirety of my suspension of disbelief.

Can I read a book about sexy were-badgers and accept the existence of sexy were-badgers? Absolutely. 

Can I believe that they don’t need to get planning permission to dig a burrow under their house? Hell no.

So when I sat down to write my very own urban fantasy, with witches, demons and other things that go bump in the night, I knew that things were going to be different, but familiar. The dirt beneath our feet would be the same, but the nations built on top of that dirt were going to be shaped by history, and that history had to account for magic.

THE WOUNDED ONES, Witch of Empire Book 2 is out June 23rd from Meerkat Press
https://www.meerkatpress.com/series/witch-of-empire/