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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

Reactor

If ten people are talking about urban fantasy, they’ll actually be talking 
about six different things.  When I first started paying attention to things 
like sub-genre definitions (early 1990’s), the term urban fantasy usually 
labeled stories in a contemporary setting with traditionally fantastical 
elements—the modern folktale works of Charles de Lint, Emma Bull’s punk 
elf stories, the Bordertown series, and so on.

But the term is older than 
that, and I’ve also heard it used to describe traditional other-world 
fantasy set in a city, such as Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories. Vampire 
fiction (the books of Anne Rice, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and P.N. Elrod for 
example) was its own separate thing.

Lately I’ve been wondering—when did “urban fantasy” come to be used 
almost exclusively to describe anything remotely following in the footsteps 
of Buffy and Anita?  Stories with a main character who kicks ass, and with 
supernatural beings, usually but not exclusively vampires and werewolves 
(with liberal sprinklings of zombies, angels, djinn, ghosts, merfolk, and so 
on) who are sometimes bad guys but often good guys.  Those ubiquitous covers 
of leather-clad women with lots of tattoos.

I’m using my own career to set up 
guideposts here, since the books in the Kitty series have nicely mirrored 
the rise in popularity of the current urban fantasy wave.  For example, when 
the first book came out in 2005, no one was calling this kind of thing urban 
fantasy. That all changed within a couple of years. Another disclaimer: 
This is all my observation, and if anyone has other data points or 
observations to share, which will expand or debunk my little hypothesis, I’d 
love to hear them.

December 2002: I started writing Kitty and The Midnight Hour.  (The first 
short story featuring the character appeared in Weird Tales in 2001. You 
can read that story, “Doctor Kitty Solves All Your Love Problems,” on my 
website.)

November 2003: I started shopping around the novel in earnest, calling it 
“supernatural/dark fantasy.” It didn’t occur to me to call it urban 
fantasy, because that was something different, or so I thought. 
One agent told me that while he liked the book, he was going to pass on it 
because he didn’t know how he would sell it. (This is important. In 
December 2003, the whole vampire/werewolves/mystery/kick-ass heroine thing 
wasn’t enough of a trend for at least this literary agent to notice it.)

July 2004: Kitty and The Midnight Hour sold to then Warner Books.

August 2004: I had an embarrassing conversation with my new editor in which 
she compared my book to those of Kim Harrison and Kelley Armstrong. I had 
not heard of them.

A couple of weeks later, I went to the dealer’s room at Worldcon in Boston with 
the mission of checking out these titles and others, and I found a ton—L.A. Banks, Charlaine Harris as well as Harrison and Armstrong. I thought, 
“Holy crap, the market is oversaturated, my book will sink like a stone out 
of sight.” I was wrong.

November 2005: Kitty and The Midnight Hour was released. Reviews often 
referred to the growing popularity of the genre, but didn’t use the term 
“urban fantasy.”  (This 2005 review
 called the book “supernatural 
fantasy.” Another common label was “the werewolf/vampire genre.”)

2005-2006: RT Book Reviews
 categorized the first 
two Kitty books as “Paranormal, Mystery/Suspense/Thriller.” (The link goes 
to a list of all my books on the site, showing the evolution of the genre 
label.)

2007: The third book, Kitty Takes a Holiday, was listed in RT Book Reviews 
as “Werewolf, Paranormal/Urban Fantasy.” All the subsequent books were 
listed as “Urban Fantasy, Paranormal/Urban Fantasy.” 
I sat on Urban Fantasy panels at DragonCon and ComicCon.  RT Book Reviews 
Reviewer Choice Awards included a category for “best urban fantasy 
protagonist.” (Kitty Takes a Holiday, was nominated; Kim Harrison’s For a 
Few Demons More won.)

2007-2008: It’s around this point that urban fantasy as a sub genre became 
totally ubiquitous and people started noticing just how many covers with 
tramp stamps there were. People 
started asking me, “So, when do you think the bubble is going to burst?” As 
I mentioned above, I thought it was going to burst in 2005. As it turned 
out, instead of the market being saturated then, I got on the bandwagon exactly at the moment as it turned into a nuclear-powered 
locomotive.

It’s also around this time I started asking on convention participant 
questionnaires if I could please be put on other panels besides “What’s up 
with all this urban fantasy/kick-ass heroine stuff?”

May 2009: The Urban Fantasy issue of Locus. 
Rather than any bubble bursting, the True Blood TV series based on Charlaine 
Harris’s novels and the Stephenie Meyers Twilight phenomenon seem be to 
supercharging an already supercharged genre. (I do wish werewolves would 
get a little more attention amidst this vampire love-fest.)

2010 and beyond: All my predictions have been wrong so far, so I’m not 
going to make any.

And there you have it. Before 2007, the term urban fantasy had not yet 
morphed into its current usage. By 2007, the term was everywhere. Why? 
That, I don’t know, though in a recent conversation a fellow writer 
suggested that this particular usage came from the romance community as a 
way to distinguish hard-edged stories from paranormal romance which feature 
a specific couple’s relationship and ends with “happily ever after.” I 
think there may be something to this.

I’d speculate that the term didn’t come from any one person or publication. 
These books definitely have their roots in the same tradition as what I call 
“old-school” urban fantasy that came before. It’s all asking the same 
questions about what would magic and the supernatural look like butted up 
against the modern world? The term has become useful as a label for this 
particular kind of book, which is why, I think, it’s become so ubiquitous in 
such a short amount of time.

Story pic via Jeff VanderMeer’s blog.


Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty, as well as numerous short stories in various anthologies and magazines. She’s also a contributor to the Wild Cards series edited by George R. R. Martin.

About the Author

About Author Mobile

Carrie Vaughn

Author

Carrie Vaughn's work includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Bannerless, the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, over twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent novel, Questland, is about a high-tech LARP that goes horribly wrong and the literature professor who has to save the day. She's a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado.
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