Recent content by Paul Farquhar

I’ve read some of those, and the setting might as well be another world with regards to how strange it seems to me. But they fall outside what I would consider urban fantasy in any case. I would call them American Gothic.

That’s tiny! On the small size even for a town (Reigate, a mid sized town, has a population of 150,000). City status isn’t directly liked to size, but when we talk about urban we generally mean populations in at least 6 digits!

How is that pertinent to anything? Being potentially able to visit a place doesn’t make you familiar with it. You are showing a marked ignorance about places you could potentially visit by assuming things like McDonalds and Sneakers are part of general modern experience.

If you have never been to a place, all you know about it is what you have learned from reading books. If you have read more about Narnia than you have about Tokyo, then you clearly know more about Narnia than you do Tokyo. This is how come the internet is so good at spreading lies about places...

And those vampire stories set in the American Deep South? That’s more alien to me than Tokyo! I even feel like an alien in London sometimes, and I’ve been here for 25 years (you familiar with Wallace and Grommit or Last of the Summer Wine? That’s my “familiar”). Personally, I think that your...

You could certainly relocate a Dresden Files story to Coruscant and not notice the join. Chicago is not familiar to me. Just because the location is based on a real world location does not make it not alien to people from different places and cultures.

It has fast food chains, why would the specific brand matter? There are lots of of places in the real world that also don’t have McDonalds!🤯 It even has a specific house (AKA megacorp) dedicated to it, with an equivalent of the Golden Arches logo. It has banks and credit, it has mass...

And it’s twin city Tracy?

That comes from noir, specifically Raymond Chandler (a big influence on Dresden). But it’s certainly far from genre-defining.

Pretty sure Rivers of London isn’t noir! It’s a police procedural. Not all crime fiction is noir - that’s a specific subgenre. They absolutely do! Well Eberron is more 1920s than modern.

We have always been here.

They are both specific rules. There is no general rule for that situation.

The Dark Tower? That's a compulsive genre hopper like Doctor Who. They do urban fantasy - sometimes. But Dark Tower is most strongly a fantasy western (AKA Weird West).

My personal view is this show was great as a single season self-contained story. I think a second season will lessen it.

I would consider myself a fan of urban fantasy. I like the Dresden Files, I like Rivers of London. And what I look for is a combination of crime fiction and fantasy. There are no fantasy megacities in Middle Earth, because Tolkien looked to create a nostalgic past, and escape the modern world...