SHORT TAKE: Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic by Stefan Ekman: Review by Gary K. Wolfe
Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, Stefan Ekman (Lever Press 978-1643150642, $26.99, 351pp, tp) August 2024.
Stefan Ekman opens his engrossing new study Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic by admitting that ‘‘I began reading urban fantasy in the 1990s, not quite knowing that I did so.’’ He’s not the only one. Over the past few decades, the term seems to have evolved into a sort of catchall, defined only by whatever the speaker was pointing to (much like Damon Knight’s famous definition of SF). Was it an actual genre, or a subgenre of the even more amorphous ‘‘fantasy,’’ or a mode or style of writing, or simply a marketing cudgel? Ekman, whose earlier Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings was an equally wide-ranging study of fantasy cartography, probably won’t settle the debate (and might even start a few new ones), but he makes a compelling argument that there’s something there, that it’s definable, and that it represents, in Ekman’s terms, the intersection of traditional fantasy narratives with what he calls modernity. ‘‘Urban fantasy is not a subgenre to fantasy (or any other genre)’’ he argues. ‘‘It is its own genre, like fantasy or science fiction or romance, that can be understood in terms of a particular cognitive model and that can combine traits from several other genres.’’ Furthermore, it doesn’t need a LOTR-style lynchpin text, an urban setting, or even a setting in our own world. In one of his more intriguing chapters, he finds connections between urban fantasy and the police procedural, citing not only Paul Cornell’s London Falling but Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay, set in his Ankh-Morpork.
Ekman is far more widely read in urban fantasy than I would even want to be, and while he touches upon some classics that were familiar to me, like Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons, and some overlooked earlier examples, like Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife, his most extended discussions tend to focus on series such as Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London, Charles de Lint’s Newford stories and novels, Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid chronicles, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, and Max Gladstone’s Craft sequence. While this seems to lean a bit toward Anglo-American-Canadian males – or perhaps just reflects their penchant for staking out franchise territory – a good deal more diversity shows up in his discussions of recent works like N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became duology, Alette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City, and P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn. On the other hand, a number of writers whose works might have bolstered his arguments – Tim Powers, Charles Stross, Cadwell Turnbull, and Elizabeth Hand, to name a few almost at random – are absent entirely, as is Charles Williams, who seemed to me to be trying to address modernity in a way that his fellow Inklings were not. But that’s what I meant about starting new arguments; playing the omissions game is easy, and the real test of a critical text is whether we can profitably bring its insights to other works, which in this case we can. Ekman writes with a clarity and directness that remains too uncommon in academic studies, and while he cites an impressive array of scholarship going back decades, he rather wisely segregates his more theoretical arguments into separate chapters explaining with admirable precision exactly what he means by modernity, or how specific protocols like focalization are informing his discussions of fiction. Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic may not be the last word on urban fantasy, and it doesn’t try to be, but it gives us a very useful framework for the arguments we were going to have anyway.
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Gary K. Wolfe is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and a reviewer for Locus magazine since 1991. His reviews have been collected in Soundings (BSFA Award 2006; Hugo nominee), Bearings (Hugo nominee 2011), and Sightings (2011), and his Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature (Wesleyan) received the Locus Award in 2012. Earlier books include The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Eaton Award, 1981), Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever (with Ellen Weil, 2002), and David Lindsay (1982). For the Library of America, he edited American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s in 2012, and a similar set for the 1960s. He has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a Special World Fantasy Award for criticism. His 24-lecture series How Great Science Fiction Works appeared from The Great Courses in 2016. He has received six Hugo nominations, two for his reviews collections and four for The Coode Street Podcast, which he has co-hosted with Jonathan Strahan for more than 300 episodes. He lives in Chicago.
This review and more like it in the January 2025 issue of Locus.
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