Sensawunda, or Lack Thereof

Fantasy Magazine ? How To Kill Off A Sense Of Wonder

Vera Nazarian is getting worked up over what she perceives as a matter-of-factness and jadedness in urban fantasy about the fantastic. She makes some veiled comments about what I am guessing is Holly Black's latest faerie book (Holly makes a good case for this not being true in the comments below), and then proceeds to make a lot of vague, general comments coupled with an over-judicious use of exclamation marks to convey "I! am! really! worked! up! over! this!" Most of the comments boil down to "I want to read x thing that I think is really cool!" I find these kinds of remarks from writers particularly baffling, because if you want something, why don't you, I dunno, write it?

This essay would have been a lot stronger if she would have provided specific examples that we could debate. But she didn't, and I'm guessing that's because she doesn't want to piss off any other writers. She's up for a major award, you know. So what we have here is a vague polemic that leaves me thinking, "Yeah, there could be something jaded about urban fantasy." Or it could just be you that is jaded.

Or perhaps it's a generational thing. Young adults these days don't want what Vera wants, and the authors writing these books understand that. Their books seem to be selling fairly well. Maybe there's a market in providing "books Vera Nazarian" would enjoy, but this article doesn't provide any solid evidence to that for me. This article should have been titled "How to Write Urban Fantasy That Vera Nazarian Enjoys."

I just cannot take genre criticism seriously unless it engages actual texts, and not just the author's perceptions of the text. Perhaps I'm being too harsh, as I note that this was a LiveJournal post before it was published in Fantasy, but in general, I think it was a misstep to publish this commentary/rant/article/whatever on Fantasy.

ETA: Okay, those of you who know me well have to go to the comments and see how I'm arguing for populist fiction and defending the use of well-worn tropes of faeries and elves and vampires and wolves. Apparently, today is opposite day!