panel, take two

[swan_tower]

This past weekend I was on the following panel at WFC:

Urban Fantasy—Beyond the Usual Suspects
It seems as if most urban fantasy uses the familiar European myths. What other possibilities are there? Which authors have successfully exploited them?

A number of us had grievances with the direction the panel ended up going in, so I'm officially hosting Take Two right here. We hammered the "cultural appropriation" angle to death -- again -- so I'm not looking to hash that one out. Instead, here are some of the things I wanted to talk about and didn't really get to. I'll put my questions up front, then my personal views behind a cut (for length); feel free to respond to the questions and/or pose your own in the comments.

1) What are the benefits of going outside "the familiar European myths"? What do we gain, as writers or readers, by looking to other parts of the world?

2) What are the downsides? Aside from the issue of appropriation, what drawbacks or challenges result from going further afield?

3) I posited briefly in the panel that you can imagine a spectrum, ranging from American Gods-style globalized, multicultural cross-over, to setting-specific approaches that firmly ground the supernatural and mundane elements in a locality. Benefits and drawbacks? Preferences, and if so, why?

4) Who has done this well? What other cultures do they draw on, and why do you say they're done well?

5) Who's done it badly? Even if you don't want to name names, what kinds of mistakes bug you?

6) If we're moving away from European sources, where are we moving to? (We touched on this briefly at the end of the panel, but I'd like to discuss it in more detail.)



1) It's hard to find a way to phrase this that doesn't sound like I'm fetishizing the exotic, but I want something different, dammit. There are other modes of belief, other ways of viewing the world, other ways of creating symbolic meaning, than just those originating in Western Europe. I think it's good for me to seek out that kind of mental flexibility, rather than resting comfortably in my defaults.

2) You may not get your readers to follow you. The names and terms will be unfamiliar; the concepts may be hard to grasp, or even repugnant. I'm working on some Mesoamerican-styled fantasy in short stories right now because it's alien enough that I'm not sure I could get a reader to stick with me the length of a novel. (I don't think Marella Sands' books sold terribly well.) But if I push the envelope a bit on a shorter scale, hopefully I'll make some headway toward it.

Also, the more unfamiliar something is, the harder it will probably be to research it. I can get my hands on a book about British faerie lore by sticking my hand blindly on a shelf at a bookstore; if I want to talk about sub-Saharan Africa, my task will be harder.

3) As much as I like the globalizing approach, I would dearly love to see more localized urban fantasies set in other parts of the world. Of course, the difficulty there is that you probably need to live in a city, or at least give it an intensive visit, to represent it fairly and plausibly. But I'd gladly shell out money for an Indian urban fantasy set in Mumbai, or a Japanese one in Kyoto, or a Kenyan one in Nairobi. Don't just rip the interesting concept out and stick it in America; leave it there and show me what role it could play in modern life at home.

4) and 5) Honestly, I'll leave these for other people to answer. I haven't read a broad enough range of urban fantasy to have a list at hand. The most I can really say is that I was disappointed Lukyanenko's Night Watch et al used such generic supernatural creatures, and that I really need to find the time to read fellow panelist Ekaterina Sedia's A Secret History of Moscow, which I have suspected for months now is exactly the antidote I'm looking for.

6) China and Japan. I don't think these trends operate independently of what's going on more broadly in our lives; as those countries continue to grow in importance to American pop culture (as I think they will), I expect we'll see more Asian-based urban fantasy, specifically those countries. After that? I don't know, but my money and hope would be India. Especially since it's got such a high percentage of English speakers. A good urban fantasy based on Indian materials could, I imagine, sell like hotcakes, and I'd buy one in a heartbeat.

I'd love to see more African/Caribbean material, but I fear the political tensions surrounding such books here in America mean I won't really see it happen any time soon.

Pitch in. We don't have a time limit here; we can go as long as we like.

Comments

[jenncatt.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting thought - I hadn't considered that there might be historical urban fantasies. I just started working at the Houses of Parliament, and it's still a huge novelty being in these buildings that have seen so much history, not to mention the fantastic architecture - there's a huge amount of the mythical past still present in the city and it seems strange to me that no-one over here has utilised that yet.

I think your London trip entries just sold me on Midnight Never Comes actually - I spend a lot of time being frustrated with London and it made a nice change to see it through a fresh pair of eyes :)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It depends on how you use the term "urban fantasy." I'd love to see us shift our definitions so "urban" literally points at city-centric fantasies (whether in modern times, the past, or other worlds), and "contemporary" points at modern settings of any kind (including suburban and rural). Then you could have a contemporary urban fantasy, a historical urban fantasy, a contemporary rural fantasy, etc.

But it's swimming against the tide, to try and introduce that usage.

I'm glad you like my trip posts! A part of me is extremely nervous about writing so intensely about London, being a childhood Texan educated in Massachusetts and now living in Indiana. I've spent, cumulatively, a little more than three months in the UK, but most of that in places other than London. I really hope what I've written rings true to the locals.

It's truly a fascinating city, though. Any time you get a place like that, where people have been living without interruption for more than a thousand years, you build up a depth of history that's just fascinating to someone like me. (Dallas, where I grew up, has a tendency to rip out things after twenty years and replace them, so it ends up feeling even newer than it should.)

[jenncatt.livejournal.com]

As they say, the past is a foreign country--so I wouldn't worry about historical London ringing true to the locals of today. We tend to build over and around things, and the city's been burned down and bombed more than a few times. Besides, I get the feeling you're far more au fait with Elizabethan London than the average Brit :o)

Most people working in London seem weirdly cut off from all the historical stuff around and about. Personally, I still get a kick out of seeing a chunk of the original London Wall tucked behind the hotel next to my train station, and the little dragons at the end of London Bridge, but I seem to be the only commuter gawking most of the time, lol!

Funnily enough, three months is about the length of time I've spent travelling in the States over the past few years, and I'm always fascinated by how much closer to the surface the past is in some places over there: there's the space for things like Mesa Verde to remain relatively undisturbed, perhaps?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Which chunk of wall is that? (If it's one I didn't find last trip, I'm totally hunting it down next time.) Didn't notice the dragons; I'll have to look for them.

I know most people won't spot historical details, but there's a very tangible connection between the past and present city in terms of how stuff fits together spatially. And, of course, with this Victorian book, and if I do one set during the Blitz, I'll be coming a lot closer to things people will recognize (and nit-pick).

I find it interesting that you view history in the U.S. that way. It strikes me as very much an outsider's perspective; for starters, to many people here, Mesa Verde isn't our past (because it's Native American), so they wouldn't even really think about it. Also, it seems to me that history survives here mostly when it's in out-of-the-way places. I mean, I grew up in Dallas, where our idea of history is the Sixth Floor Museum, a whopping forty-four years ago. Good luck finding any buildings even so much as a century old. Whereas in central London, even when it all burnt down and got built over by the Victorians and then bombed in the Blitz, I can still find things like a building labeled "John Stow House." Not the actual building, of course, but there's an element of continuity that I feel is often lacking over here, where we knock stuff down on a regular basis and then forget it was ever there.

Or, to put it more succinctly, Mesa Verde probably survives because it's in the side of a cliff, and not worth knocking down. <sigh>

[jenncatt.livejournal.com]

That particular chunk of London wall is tucked behind the Grange City Hotel on Coopers Row, just between Tower Hill tube station and the side entrance to Fenchurch Street train station... Have a feeling you might have found it last time, it's quite near Crosswall and has a fairly big metal plaque on the wall outside?
Another example I like is the Zeppelin Building on Farringdon Road, as the original on that site was destroyed by a zeppelin air raid bomb during the First World War... they have the name drilled in to look like it's made out of bullet holes. It's not like many people remember that air raids happened that early, or that they did so much damage.
Talking about the past/present connection, I just saw in the paper that this map (http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/map.php) has been put online of Early Modern London. It's tagged and zoom-able and, I think, the earliest example of a printed map of the area. But Google-ized..!
It's getting more fashionable to hark back in London now though: in the past few years, I've seen them re-instate the medieval Frost Fairs they used to hold when the Thames froze over, and even hold a commemorative sheep drive over the Millenium Bridge (the sheep were not impressed).

Well, yep, I'm looking at US history from an outsider's viewpoint, but I find it hard not to view history anywhere as being more geographical than cultural... Mesa Verde may not be considered your history, but it is American history. Also, I wanted to see it because I'd read Willa Cather's 'The Professor's House' for my degree, and Mesa Verde/rediscovering Mesa Verde later all felt tied up in my head as one long history after I read that. It's an odd example, I'll admit, just one that stayed with me.
I was in New England on my latest trip though, and most everything there seems preserved as long as possible, so I'm probably not best placed to comment on continuity of history right now! I like the extreme contrasts of history you can see in the States though: that you can see what the glaciers did to the landscape at Yosemite on one hand, and then find a retro diner on Route 66 on another. History usually survives if there's a tourist trade for it :o)