The roots of fantasy are rural. This is true whether one considers the original medieval romances, or the nineteenth century ‘lost race’ type fantasies of Haggard, pulp fiction like Howard or the fantasy resurgence following Tolkien. The landscapes are wild, populated by villages, castles and evil towers. The plots tend to be travelogues (1) with the heroes covering a great deal of hostile ground. There are cities, but they are either a departure point or something to be defended against the hordes. One does not get a sense that anyone really lives in them – their inhabitants live a round of cheering the heroes and being threatened by the encroaching tides of darkness, and nobody takes out the rubbish. They are like the film sets of old westerns, nothing but fronts. There is little sense that the inhabitants actually do anything with themselves when the heroes’ backs are turned.

Science fiction is much the same. It is a frontier genre (2) where the emphasis is in pushing back the borders of the known. Space exploration, alien worlds, the cold vacuum of the void substituting for the wilderness of Middle Earth, but it’s still a rural setting. As far as fantasy cities go, the standard line is either that they are too banal to find adventure in, or so idealised and fantastic (usually utopic) that they have nothing of the functioning city left in them..

This is still, in fact, mostly the case, but there is a distinct counter-culture within the genre. It’s difficult to pinpoint a precise starting point for it, but Ftirz Lieber started writing his ‘Lankhmar’ stories around 1940, which is probably a good springboard. Lieber’s heroes, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, go on many of the usual pulp expeditions, but the city of Lankhmar (3) is more than just their home between adventures. Many of the stories take place within the city entirely, and are concerned specifically with Lankhmar’s urban politics and society and the power struggles between cults, wizards and thieves.

I am drawing a distinction here, certainly, between fantasy stories set in a fictional world, and those set in the contemporary modern world. These last are often citified, but the cities are generally real cities, and the fantasy element is in contrast to the familiarity of the surroundings. There is certainly a considerable grey area here, as always, but there is a distinct difference between a contemporary fantasy and an urban fantasy set in an entirely fantastic world.

In SF, the urbanisation budded off with the subgenre of cyberpunk, courtesy of writers such as Gibson and Sterling, and films like Blade Runner have meant that science fiction, like a fox, has taken very naturally to its built-up environment. From the early SF where a “futuristic” setting was basically a contemporary one with a single speculative change, the changes to the setting itself, to the minutiae of how the world is changed by the technology, are now frequently the point of SF.

A kindred revolution happened with fantasy, although less dramatically. After Lankhmar, which was still very much rooted in the pulp-style heroic fantasy style of Howard, the next stop that the intercity express pulls into is surely Viriconium.

 

   M.John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence is difficult to categorise satisfactorily at the best of times. The substance and reality of the stories and novels are fleeting, and as the sequence progresses, the reader’s concrete information about the setting and characters is gradually eroded, rather than built on, until the final A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium deposits us beyond the setting entirely, leaving us, like the protagonist, outside and trying to find a way back in. The earliest stories, The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings seem on the surface to rise from the established tropes of heroic fantasy, and the melancholy swordsman hero tegeus-Cromis could be on nodding terms with Elric, but this resemblance is illusory and fleeting. The stories do not progress in any conventional way, instead each is a jumbled echo of the others, with familiar themes, characters and images looming, as if from a fog. Viriconium is also a ‘Dying Earth’ setting, a fantasy of the far future in the footsteps of Jack Vance, but where Vance is pastoral, Viriconium swiftly becomes almost entirely urban. The city becomes a character, the main character, that links the series. The fate of the human protagonists is inextricably linked with, and shadowed by, the contortions, perhaps even the death-throes, of the city in which they dwell.

 

   As stated, most fantasy authors have not gone to far as to abandon the green rolling fields for the concrete jungle, but what was started by Lieber and Harrison has had a steady stream of followers thereafter, with the urban fantasy undergoing perpetual redevelopment and regeneration. Many authors take the opportunity of a magical world to present a city that is in itself fantastic – Mary Gentle’s occult Rats and Gargoyles presents a city of incarnate demon-rulers and alarming geometry (4), and Scar Night by Alan Campbell gives us a city suspended over an abyss, at the heart of which, it is believed, dwells God. Other writers have used the urban setting to modernise the archetypes of fantasy, taking the genre from the medieval into something steam-age and Victorian without losing the element of the strange. The city of Mieville’s Perdido Street Station is a grimy industrial melting pot of species ruled by an infinitely corrupt government, and the fantastic elements serve to highlight the very familiar injustices and venality that the reader will know both from the history books and the newspapers. Even when the action in the sequels takes the reader away from the urban, the city remains as a character, as a villain, tangibly influencing the course of all the lives it has ever touched. In the city of Ambergris, in Jeff Vandermeer’s Shriek and City of Saints and Madmen, whilst human evils are rife, the true brooding menace, and the meaning behind so much that transpires in the place, lurks in the presence of the original inhabitants, the mushroom-dwellers known as Greycaps who were ousted by the (more conventionally) human city-builders.

 

   The challenge, and the attraction, of this kind of writing is that the plot and the obstacles are not simply those of distance, rugged terrain, hostile natives and inclement weather. Everything is within arm’s reach. The hostile natives are your neighbours. The rugged terrain is the work of human hands, or the ruin of that work. What would be desolate wilderness is densely populated – people buy and sell, live and bicker, they are governed, they commit and submit to crime. A far more complex set of precepts goes into a working city than a mere landscape, and the stories that arise from that system are correspondingly altered from the expected fantasy stereotypes.

 

(1)   Hence a popular criticism of Lord of the Rings voiced in the film Clerks 2

(2)   Indeed you don’t have to look far to find the worlds of SF and the western in bed with one another – Firefly, books like Resnick’s Santiago, even Corman’s hoary old Magnificent-Seven-In-Space, the inaccurately-named Battle Beyond the Stars

(3)   The inspiration, of course, for Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork. In The Colour of Magic there are even a couple of characters sending up Lieber’s heroes.

(4)   The city has five quarters, each organised on the same plane and at 90 degree from each other