Reply With QuoteSergey Lukyanenko's Night Watch series is great, and all 4 are available in translation.
Somebody will probably mention China Mieville too, although I'm personally not particularly fond of him.
No, I'm not talking about love triangles, sparkling vampires and garbage written for people who want to fantasize about being special.
I'm talking about well written fantasy set in (preferably, real-world) modern urban settings. I'm looking above all for a solid and mature story, fleshed out characters and believable dialog. Moral ambiguity for bonus points. Clarification: I have no issue with romantic elements, provided that the story, characters and dialog are all put first.
Stand alone books or series: both are welcome.
Any suggestions?
Sergey Lukyanenko's Night Watch series is great, and all 4 are available in translation.
Somebody will probably mention China Mieville too, although I'm personally not particularly fond of him.
The Etched City, KJ Bishop. Not a contemporary real world setting, but very good fantasy in an urban environment.
Tim Powers' Last Call and its sequels.
King Rat is my favorite of Mieville's stuff.
Pretty much all of Tim Powers is at least excellent. A few of Charles De Lint's Newford books are worth checking out. I also really enjoyed Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series...the prose isn't always the best, but they're compulsively readable.
Oh, and China Mieville!
You might also want to consider the Wild Cards series. Technically they're science fiction books deconstructing superhero comics, but they still might scratch the itch for you.
Well, except that after the first two books they're awful. The series really jumps the shark with the underwater mind-controlled pedophile colony.Originally Posted by Hugin
I'm not sure what to say to that... How... How would you go up from that??
F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack series is urban fantasy and a lot of fun. Jim Butcher's Dresden novels are increasingly good so you should check them out. Round it all out with Charlie Huston's vampire books and you're primed to stop worrying about the supernatural and just enjoy a good story, a la Ken Bruen.
I actually have no idea what you're referring to. I skipped around in the series, it sounds like I didn't read that one.
Mark Frost's The List of 7 was really fun.
I expect that the Dresden files may qualify, but I've never read them
.
Gaiman's Neverwhere.
Barker's Weaveworld maybe?
Anansi Boys was great.
Probably not what you mean, but I'd describe quite a few of Italo Calvino's books, particularly Marcovaldo and Invisible Cities, as urban fantasy, and they're utterly fantastic.
Another vote here for the Dresden books. They start off fun and a bit campy but they have evolved into some terrific story telling, in my opinion.
You were lucky. I fullly endorse Miramon's opinion here, and share it. It was hard to read some of the later stories, though I think that was like book 8 or later that all went down. The first half dozen books are interesting. My biggest problem with the series is they can be a little dry/boring more often than not.
Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente. Lots of sexual elements, I don't know if you'd call it romantic.
My judgment is somewhat suspect as I'm a fairly omnivorous fan of the subgenre, but I would recommend most of the above and add:
C.E. Murphy: Her most successful series is called the Walker Papers, about a half-Irish-half-Native-American police mechanic named Joanne Walker, who discovers that she's a powerful shaman and healer (and is none too pleased about this upending of her rationalist worldview). Walker's a snarky, fun character and although there are light lacings of romance (and it's actually published by Harlequin, under their Luna urban fantasy label), they've really been very light as of the current point in the series. (Honestly, I've been pretty happy with most of the Luna imprint books, or anyway the ones shelved in the SF section rather than the romance section, but I particularly recommend Murphy.)
Kate Griffin: Start with A Madness of Angels. Very imaginative British urban fantasy with lots of cool magic and unusual threats. You will probably find the way the first person narrative routinely drifts between singular and plural pronouns to be somewhat disconcerting. (Also, especially early on, it can be somewhat stream of consciousness.) Be assured there is a narrative reason for it.
Ben Aaronovitch: Start with Midnight Riot. Also British. Funny and scary and heartfelt. Lots of good stuff about London trivia and policing.
Mike Carey: In addition to plenty of excellent comics (many of which fall into the urban fantasy genre, like Lucifer, Crossing Midnight, and his run on Hellblazer), he has an ongoing series about Felix Castor, itinerant exorcist and bad luck charm for his friends. It at first appears to be a straightforward London setting (yes, I read a lot of Brits), but unlike quite a few urban fantasy series, the wider world is aware of the supernatural presence - in this case, ghosts, lycanthropes, and demons. (Which, in this setting, aren't as distinct as you might think.) Brilliant stuff. Also, quite brutal. And things are definitely coming to a boil as of the last book I read.
Kim Harrison: The Hollows series. Set in an alternate Cincinnati, OH. A genetically engineered virus has killed a great many humans (spread through tomatoes, so now humans freak out about pizza), ending only when the supernatural community (or "Inderlanders) step out of the shadows and work to end it. The main character is a witch, who starts out working for the government agency that polices the Inderland community from inside, but she's out on her ass with a price on her head almost immediately and goes into business for herself with a living vampire and a pixie as her partners (in the series fiction, pureblood vampires are born naturally and live a relatively normal existence - with a few vampire powers and peccadilloes - until they die the first death, whereupon they gain considerable power along with certain weaknesses and lose their soul and most of their humanity).
Greg Stolze: I've enjoyed his independently published novels Godwalker (like an urban fantasy Coen Brothers movie), and Switchflipped. If you're willing to descend into the morass of licensed fiction, his trilogy of Demon: The Fallen novels are also pretty decent, as are the two Vampire: The Requiem books he wrote (alas, the middle book of that trilogy is a different author).
I'm sure I'll think of more.
Stretching, but Fritz Leiber's classic Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pulp fiction short stories frequently take place in and around decidedly non-modern metropolis Lankhmar.
I nearly never read game-licenced fiction (my exception is the first couple Vampire Genevieve WFRP books), but Stolze has some stuff out for Unknown Armies? Crap, I've gotta pick that up.
I can't miss an opportunity to pimp the Greywalker series by my dear friend Kat Richardson. They definitely fit your requirements.
Anyone who hasn't read this series should, and anyone who doesn't like it has something wrong with them, but it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "urban fantasy". I mean, nothing at all. Not even close.
Well, Godwalker, and one or two short stories. Switchflipped has some of that feel but it's not Unknown Armies's cosmology or mechanics.
...and now that I'm on a real computer and not my phone, I'll put up a proper reply to the question, and a counterpoint to a bunch of the replies. I hope this isn't too antagonistic or tl;dr for everyone here.
I'm a huge fan of the genre- I love a good supernatural twist on the classic tropes. I associate it more with actual modern, urban settings (as opposed to fantasy cities like in Mieville's Bas-Lag books, Leiber's Fafherd & Grey Mouser stories, Lynch's (abortive, it seems) Gentlemen Bastard books or Brust's Vlad Taltos books).
The Dresden Files books are crap. I read the first four? five? I don't know, they're all a blur of mediocrity. Everyone told me they got better, but they just didn't. And if I have to read up to book eight or something to get to that point... no. Just no.
I really liked Charles deLint way back when. His work, along with the Bordertown books (which I see are now being reprinted and expanded), were pretty great. But somewhere along the line he got kind of insufferable and preachy- too earnest or something.
Tim Powers is usually pretty good, but his endings tend to be kind of crappy. I think he mistakes repetition for foreshadowng, and by the time the end hits it's just painfully obvious what's going to happen. Also, I wouldn't describe most of his stuff as urban fantasy- more historical fiction/fantasy. He takes real-world events and history and weaves supernatural occurrences and motives through it. The only modern-day ones were Last Call (excellent, and probably his best work), Expiration Date (pretty OK), and Earthquake Weather (possibly the worst thing by him I've read). Other good, more historical ones were On Stranger Tides and The Anubis Gates. If you're going for the same style of historical-fiction with fantasy layered over the top, though, Susanna Clarke's Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was pretty great (if a little over-long and rambling, and subject to the the same need to insert Lord Byron and Shelly into the story that Powers fell prey to in The Stress of Her Regard. Christ I hate that crap, but I digress).
Gaiman's Neverwhere is soooo bad- it read like the novelization of a shitty 90's BBC tv series that it was. A much better take on the same subject (even including all the awful London puns) was Mieville's Un Lun Dun. Good stuff there. The latter's The City and The City was ok, but the conceit got old quickly. Haven't read Kracken or Railsea yet, so I can't judge them.
Cavino? Completely different class of author. Invisible Cities (while perhaps my favorite book ever) is fantastic (in every sense of the word) and very, very urban, but Urban Fantasy it isn't. Truly a beautiful book.
Do I have anything to actually add to this list? John M. Ford's The Last Hot Time is great, and very much in the style of the aforementioned Bordertown books (though in it's own world). Kind of like if Shadowrun was set in the 1920's. Elves and mobsters and tommyguns and whatnot. Great, adult themes (without being pandering), and stupidly well-written to boot.
Falling Angel, by William Hjortsberg- The book that the movie Angel Heart was based on. Combines really well-written hardboiled detective noir with a (at least until the end) subtle supernatural tinge. If the Dresden books could be a tenth of what this slim volume is, they wouldn't be such shite.
Jack O'Connell writes what are ostensibly crime novels in a fictional New England rundown factory town called Quinsagamond. His books are strange, unreal and have a very media-obsessed theme running through them. Only the last two (Word Made Flesh and The Ressurectionist) have any supernatural elements, and even those are pretty background and subtle- I think I read once in an interview with him that it was pretty much the town he lives in, with his waking nightmares layered over the top. The best I can describe it is like the movie Jacob's Ladder- mostly the real world, but something else is going on and it ain't quite right. Anyway, they're all pretty independent of one another, and Word Made Flesh is the best (and most supernatural of the lot). The previous entry, The Skin Palace, is excellent as well.
I really enjoyed Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. Guy gets sent to hell, comes back and kicks asses of the people who messed his life up.
Kadrey has a couple of other books that follow but I haven't made it to them yet.
I liked Anansi Boys a lot, also American Gods. Angelmaker was great and I think sort of qualifies but it's a bit of a stretch.
I don't know if they actually got better but... I switched to the audio versions around book 4 or 5 and enjoyed them ever since. I too felt the first few were offensively mediocre.
Not sure how much was the writing and much is James Marsters ability to crush the most banal of lines.
It was my go to driving/gym series because of the solid performance and the simple 1st person narrative means it's easy to follow if you miss a few beats here and there.
Last edited by Quaro; 06-22-2012 at 01:41 PM.
Do Shadowrun novels count? There's a few by Nigel Findley and Tom Dowd I'd actually recommend (and manage to rise above the fact that they are licensed fiction), but I can understand trepidation with that...
2XS and Burning Bright are two that stand out for me, but if you have no interest in the setting I can see them being less interesting.
I would call Shadowrun fantasy-laced cyberpunk, personally.
Well, it is definitely that.
Mieville has been mentioned above, but I'd recommend his "The City and The City", in particular. Double the urban!
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