That's true.

I think what you're seeing may be a combination of high fantasy's "shepherd with Special Powers and/or Secret Birthright" and hard-boiled mystery's acknowledgment that street people exist in the first place. Mind you, I haven't really noticed such a trend myself; the only books I've read that dealt much with the homeless were Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons and Lindskold's Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls, and neither seemed the least bit romanticized.

Does anyone write about magic among the stockbrokers? Or ER, except with magic?

I can name two different werewolves who own security companies, and any vampire (who isn't recently undead) can be expected to have a wide and varied stock portfolio (if not an actual financial empire). Cops, PIs, and auto mechanics are also popular occupations for the supernatural.

Wizard of the Pigeons works so well, I think, because it sets up and then partly undercuts the romanticization. While the main character is a homeless vet, and leads something of a charmed existence as a street person--his particular power is a knack for eking out a living in the city without people noticing he's homeless--he loses his ability to blend in at one point, and life gets rapidly worse. Even early on though, it's clear that he has a very precarious existence.

I sometimes suspect that a lot of women's fiction and chicklit is urban fantasy. Less gritty and more females around, basically, with love interest.

Part of it, I think, is the attempt to assuage the guilt of the affluent when faced with the homeless -- if we imbue them with magical powers, cast them as protectors of our comfortable existence, then we don't have to feel bad for them or DO anything about it.

At the same time, from a writer's POV, it IS convenient to have a character who can operate on the fringes of the society, who doesn't have a job to go back to and can be portrayed as free from mundane concerns of mortgage and money.

Also, people without magical powers generally don't end up in fantasy novels.

Strictly as a generalization. ;-)

Thanks :) yes - interesting points! You might like to wander over and read sartorias's panel on the hero and how not to make him/her a Mary Sue or whatever the male equivalent is. You'll find all the panels in the bittercon community.

I agree, absolutely. I don't read a lot of urban fantasy these days, but the most recent place I've seen it is in Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which I remarked to curtana reads like what would happen if someone dared Doctorow to write a Charles de Lint novel.

I don't know whether Neverwhere constitutes that much of an exception, since, while the protagonist is middle-class, many of the 'others' he encounters are homeless or 'street' in their 'real-world' incarnations.

Are the authors riffing on folk-tales, whose heroes, if not princesses, tend to be clever thieves, disadvantaged or displaced innocents and so on?

I think you may be hitting the nail on the head here. The strong tradition of fairy tales is one that includes a lot of sympathy for society's rejects, whether the youngest child who might be disinherited on the death of a parent of moderate to high means, the only child of a poor widow, or the simpleton.

But, I also think that most, if not all, of the authors whose urban fantasy looks at this population have a genuine interest in the homeless and dispossessed. The homelessness is just one of several themes you'll frequently see in urban fantasy. Some characters are of middle class or higher means, but find their lives trite and limiting; the encounter with magic helps to engage them in the real world again. Another very common trope is that of the abused child. The story may center around the child at any age and, depending upon the age, the issue may be one of several different tropes. For infants or children, the focus may be rescue or punishment of abusers (typically by someone from outside, or possibly by another family member), or of the child's discovering his or her own ability to extricate themselves from an intolerable situation. For older teens or adults who are no longer trapped in the original abusive situation, the focus may be on learning how not to reengage with abusers, on forgiving the abuser, or of protecting someone left behind who is still in the relationship.

Okay, I guess I strayed rather far away from the main topic here. In this subgenre magic is often used as a metaphor for things in the real world. So, the magical outsider may be the thought or insight you've rejected, but they are also a homeless person you may have treated kindly or unkindly last week. There's a lot going on in these stories and they're not easy to categorize.

It is one of my absolute favourite novels, evah - hence the userpic :) And Robin McKinley is one of my fave authors.

Edited at 2008-08-10 01:52 am (UTC)

True in a lot of cases, though I think de Lint did get better about it (on the other hand a lot of his Newford books blend together, which makes it hard to give you a specific example).

But one good counterexample is Neverwhere - no one (unless entirely desperate) would want to run away to become a rat person! Ont the other hand the characters in London Beneath who are doing well are the ones who are not homeless, like Door.

I agree that there is some romanticisation of poverty and homelessness in many works of urban fantasy, but I'm not sure that they will lead anyone to embrace homelessness. In general, I dismiss arguments that reading or watching something will cause others to do it, in large part because I believe that those who act on such impulses generally have other issues going on. Young people who run away from home, for instance, are often running away from abusive situations. For them, the streets, no matter how awful, may seem the better option. But, hopefully, if they're reading stories like de Lint's, they'll also notice that there are other options than the streets, that there are people and organizations who, like the Grasso street angle, want to help them.

Another example of fantasy in an urban setting is Tim Powers' Fault Lines trilogy, which I've just finished reading. While his work is so unique as to practically defy categorization, I think his use of myth and magic in an urban setting justifies mention.

**spoiler alert**
In one of these books, when a young boy, Koot Hoomie Pargana, known unfortunately as Kootie, breaks a revered statue and runs away from home, he unintentionally sets off a chain of events that has him running for his life, with no home to return to; his parents have been gruesomely murdered, as Kootie discovered when he tried to return home after one night on his own, and now the murderer wants Kootie, too. During his adventures, he encounters a panhandler who lives out of his car and takes Kootie under his wing in large part because Kootie's presence means his panhandling will be more effective. He uses Kootie, but is not abusive of him. However, when he discovers that there is a reward out for Kootie's return, he immediately wants to cash in, even though Kootie has told him his life will be in danger if he is turned in.

Nothing about this scenario comes across to me as romanticization of the homeless setting. Kootie's erstwhile protector is not vicious, but he is a drug addict and his only real loyalty is to himself. Kootie is frightened, battered (beaten up by other kids, bleeding from a wond that won't heal), hungry, desperate, knows he's being used and willing to be used just to stay alive, traumatized by having seen his parents' dead bodies, and having strange experiences of a mystical nature that he doesn't understand.

Another interesting aspect of these novels is Powers' depiction of ghosts. In this world, ghosts that stay tied to this world can begin to become solid, by eating bits of trash, pebbles, and other things lying around. As they accrete substance, they grow to look like homeless people and are, by and large, the only depiction of the anonymous homeless one finds in these books. By depicting the homeless in this way, as pathetic and ineffectual ghosts who exist by eating trash, Powers makes, I think, a point about how we view the homeless in the Real World, as worthless nothings who are little more than trash. I should point out that I probably would never have made this connection without this discussion. I think the connection, while vivid, is actually done quite subtly.

Yes, my comment was anonymous and off-topic (in the same way that superfoo's was), and as it's your journal you have every right to delete anything you don't want here. But, I think it's a shame that you would leave superfoo's original, off-topic, and highly objectionable post, however much he or she might say they didn't really mean it, and delete a comment which was not slanderous in any way, but a heartfelt post intended to address his comment. I don't feel your decision was fair to me, or to those engaged in this discussion.

I'm sorry that my comment was so upsetting to you that you felt it needed to be removed. One of the aspects of urban fantasies such as de Lint's and the Bordertown series that I most respect is their advocacy of a group that is rarely heard and often maligned. I do understand the urge to do as you did and I very much suspected that your reason for your action was as you have stated. The difficulty is that you allowed a personal friendship to influence your decision to let one person be heard, while you censored another's comments, at least in part, because you didn't know them.

As I stated in the original post, my reason for being anonymous was to protect my husband's right to privacy. What I didn't say was that had the experiences been my own to relate, I would have posted openly. At this point, I'm very distressed and saddened by what's happened. I don't want to continue to post in this way; it feels very uncomfortable for me and probably for you as well. I wish you and your friend the best and am glad to see that the discussion is continuing.

Outsider characters can act as connectors to some other reality or world. I really, really need to read a bunch of the stuff I've seen referenced this Bittercon session, but given my scant reading, what popped into my head was the tramp character in The Dark is Rising.

Liminal characters can be messengers, and they move back and forth between worlds more or less with impunity, although they may have sacrificed their sanity (or some other thing) in the bargain.

Thank you--it's one of my favorites too!

I risk a lot by writing about something Intertext knows I have no knowledge of, as I can count on one hand the number of fantasy novels I've read. However, this fascinating discussion has got me thinking about romanticization of all sorts of marginality, not only street life but also drug culture, rural poverty, war trauma, and so forth. This makes me wonder if we have a doubled attitude to such experiences/arenas. On the one hand, we suspect that life at the margins or in extreme situations has more freedom, more intensity, and more authenticity or "magic," and even that those very margins exist because of our inability to honour those who don't fit into our world but perhaps see things more clearly. On the other hand, maybe it's partly an expression of a cultural pyschological trauma. I believe that most of "us" are extremely traumatized and terrified and sorrowful about the pain and loss that street people, among others, manifest in their very existence. Perhaps romanticizing this culture (or even "explaining" it) allows us to transform that pain into something that will not annhilate us spiritually. Not to relieve guilt, necessarily, but to cope with the horror of just how broken our civilization actually is.

Yes, that's true. And under the guilt we feel at turning away from one fellow human, perhaps we feel a great unease about the whole system. That's very threatening for people who are doing their best to get ahead in that system. So perhaps the fantasy that the world at the margins is one of excitement and deeper insight is actually an expression of desire: the desire to explore whether, in fact, we've got it all wrong, the desire to drop out and seek something that might lead to a kind of happiness/truth we have dreamed of but not yet achieved.

I've just come home from an excellent local production of Rent that my daughter was in; she commented on the similarity between Rent and the Charles de Lint books she's been reading. And of course Wild Swans could be the same people as Rent 15 years earlier. I'm wondering, how much difference does it make whether it's fantasy or not? Do many of these comments apply equally well to non-fantasy like Rent?

Yeah, you should check out aberwyn's comment in the link above - he/she mentions the novel of La Boheme and talks about a whole genre of French works of that ilk.

I noticed during the nineties that Elfpunk romanticized being runaways, but I think adults were reading those, not kids.

Certainly it seemed that as long as you were beautiful and had cool scruffy clothes with glitter, you'd come out just fine, and discover magic and a posse and everything.

Holly Black did a beautiful job with the grit of being on the streets in Valiant. Non romanticized, convincing.

I do think that city streets in genre can get romanticized...even aside from fantasy, the sf does it: everyone is a twenty or thirtysomething, cool, no inconvenient jobs or parents or kids, everyone has a mod bod, etc etc.

Oh yes, I remember that book. It was quite disburbing, yes.