Charles Stross, (Again!)<br><i>Over the past few years I've found myself ...

Julian Bond - 2014-10-08 07:23:30+0000 - Updated: 2014-10-08 07:23:30+0000

Charles Stross, (Again!)
Over the past few years I've found myself reading less and less far-future SF and more and more urban fantasy.
it's still very rare to find a fantasy that's set in the cities of the near future
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/10/not-a-manifesto.html

It's mostly a statement on why he finds near future SciFi fascinating. And I tend to agree. Can we please have more SciFi set between 5 mins and 100 years in the future.

Not a Manifesto - Charlie's Diary

Julian Bond - 2014-10-08 07:48:33+0000

Lots of talk in the comments about the magic, fantasy, technology, near vs far future aspects of this. Not so much about the "Urban" in Urban Fantasy. I'm finding cities increasingly weird and incomprehensible despite spending most of my life living close to London and sometimes working in it daily. So I'd welcome more near future SciFi that explores that. Not just to a backdrop of technology enabled hipster-gentrification spreading through intensely cosmopolitan areas like some kind of meme virus. But also the way places like Sao Paolo or Mumbai or Astana, Kazakhstan are mutating as they absorb near-future tech.

Come on Ian McDonald, Ken Macleod, Charles Stross, pick another city and write another one, dammit! Ah, the essential vampirism of the fan-consumer, "Please make me feel again like I did when I first consumed some of your output"!

Julian Bond - 2014-10-08 09:03:05+0000

Favorite near future Urban Fantasy?

Ian McDonald - Brasyl, Dervish, Cyberiad
Paolo Bacigalupi - Windup Girl
Ken Macleod - Execution Channel, etc etc.
Charles Stross - Halting State series
Gibson - Bigend series

Others?

I also wonder if there's a companion "Suburban Fantasy" genre.

Julian Bond - 2014-10-08 09:16:05+0000

I'm wondering about "Urban" now. Why not Suburban Fantasy, Small Town Fantasy, Backwoods Fantasy?

So that's Buffy, Twin Peaks/Fargo, True Blood/Justified respectively. Maybe not, then.

And of course also the use of "Urban" by the mainstream music industry to mean "African-American". There's not a whole lot of SciFi for and about inner city African-Americans[1].

[1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087004/
The Brother From Another Planet

Julian Bond - 2014-10-08 14:14:57+0000

Lovely comment from Charlie @77
I tend to think that the "we need visions of a better future" rationale for SF makes about as much sense as the "we can't keep all our eggs in one basket" rationale for colonizing Mars; it's superficially plausible because it provides emotional validation for a desired objective, but it's actually horseshit.