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Thursday, March 02, 2006

CHICKS IN LEATHER AND HEAVY WEAPONRY: THE RISE OF FEMALE URBAN FANTASY By Liz Scheier

Way back in the mists of time (alright, maybe ten or fifteen years back) the fantasy shelves had a fairly recognizable look to them. With some notable exceptions, Tolkien-esque covers ruled the airspace, featuring slightly misty scenes replete with dragons, wizards, men in armor and women with improbable flowing hair. Mountain ranges were a plus; roads winding wistfully into the distance doubly so.

And then... things started to change. Covers turned semi-photorealistic, dark, and moody. Some part of a woman's body was often prominently displayed, frequently with her face obscured. The body in question was usually clothed in some sort of leather, and if terrifyingly high-heeled boots could be involved, so much the better.

What happened?

The short answer, to my mind, is that Buffy happened. In one of those unusual confluences between the screen (large or small) and the shelves, Buffy went on the air and introduced a new genre just as the first authors writing what later came to be called urban fantasy were breaking out.

I was a rabid Buffy fan when it first went on the air. I was roughly the characters' age, and I responded strongly not only to the excellent writing or to the snappy humor which I repeated ad nauseum with my friends, but to Buffy herself. She was the perfect metaphor for a high school malcontent: she had difficulty fitting in at school, got into trouble, struggled with parental discipline, and fell for the wrong guy entirely. All more or less familiar events from my own teenage life - except I didn't have the excuse of a nighttime gig slaying vampires (or dating them) to back it up. The mythology of Buffy was complex enough to spur endless books on the subject, and the characters - flawed, often angry, darkly funny - were three-dimensional enough to keep anyone watching. But as a book lover, I wanted to find those same sensibilities in books. Luckily for me, the publishing industry - and some now-much-beloved authors - had the same idea.

What is urban fantasy? Although it's often discussed interchangeably with dark fantasy and noir fantasy (think Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, Caitlin R. Kiernan), it has some tendencies that separate it, to my mind. It usually has a contemporary setting, frequently, as the name implies, an urban one; and it tends to be somewhat hard-edged. Some form of supernatural beings are involved - vampires and werewolves being the most common - and the heroine is frequently either herself one of those beings, or a guardian or warrior sworn to battle them. To some extent, it's the fantasy genre’s answer to chick lit - it usually has a female protagonist, and the dialogue runs to the snarky and the sarcastic. Laurell Hamilton was one of the first to break into the field, and extremely popular series from the likes of Kelley Armstrong and Kim Harrison weren't far behind.

Why the popularity? For one thing, new readers are coming in from all sides. Urban fantasy is a crossover-friendly genre. Readers of other genres have latched on, YA readers who are looking for smarter and edgier fare than they usually get have embraced it, and TV and movie audiences have glommed on as well. It's somewhat of a gateway drug for those who have never read fantasy before. When I look at our upcoming catalogues, the romance and mystery titles are starting to look more and more like the fantasy titles; certain elements, vampires and werewolves among them, are hot right across the board. Urban fantasy authors who I work with are regularly hitting both the Locus and the Romantic Times lists.

Why?

There's a certain appeal to the familiarity of many of these settings. We may love Middle-Earth, or Avalon, or Winterfell, but there's something immensely intriguing about imagining a mysterious underworld to a place we already know. It taps into a belief many of us have carried over from fairy tales, that below the mundane, familiar skins of our own lives, lurks a mysterious, magical underworld that only the privileged (i.e. the reader) can see; as if we had magical night-vision goggles. What could be better?

And they're fun. A lot of the time, urban fantasy has all the elements we love out of Sunday-afternoon popcorn movies. There are car chases. There are explosions. There's flirtation, sex, snarky humor, snappy dialogue and quick pacing. The women are strong, they’re funny, they’re true to life, and they're frequently getting action from vampires and other charmingly kinky sources. They are leading the lives many of us would like to - and doing it with style.

So lay it at Joss Whedon's feet. Or call it escapism. Just bring on the chicks in leather.

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Liz Scheier spent four years at the Bantam Dell Publishing group, and left in early 2004 to join the New American Library, a division of the Penguin Group USA. She acquires mainly science fiction, fantasy, and horror for the Roc imprint, but is also interested in biography, humor, popular culture, and works of GLBT interest. She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, where she studied English literature and therefore rendered herself blissfully unemployable in any other field.

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