Urban fantasy, the genre of fantastic literature in which magic and monsters meet modern society, is fairly young but has old roots. Stefan Ekman’s book, Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, examines the genre in depth, including its inherent social commentary, its historical development, and its interplay between modernity and the fantastic. The author draws on a wide range of urban fantasy texts from five decades, combining detailed analysis of dozens of novels and other media with broad discussions to provide a comprehensive understanding of the genre across three sections. The first section presents an overview of what the genre looks like today-both in terms of its common traits and its variety of settings-and how it has developed over time, including the history of urban fantasy scholarship. The second section examines urban fantasy’s core concern with the unseen, for example through a focus on unseen individuals overlooked by society or hiding within it, and on ignored urban spaces or labyrinthine undergrounds. The third section addresses how urban fantasy explores the relationship between the supernatural and modernity. Ekman offers readings of fiction by Ben Aaronovitch, Lauren Beukes, P. Djelí Clark, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Max Gladstone, Kim Harrison, N.K. Jemisin, and Megan Lindholm, among others. Urban Fantasy will appeal to teachers and students of the fantastic as well as to urban fantasy enthusiasts and literary scholars. Ekman illuminates the genre’s evolution and defining traits, inviting readers to rethink urban fantasy as a creative tool for using magic to explore modernity. 

In tabletop role-playing games, the game master and players in a group are encouraged to construct their own fictive world in which they can play. By using a critical world-building approach, we analyse the garments and accessories in the illustrations in Player’s Handbook (2014) for Dungeons & Dragons (5th edition) and find that clothes have four conspicuous functions in establishing a world of possibilities from which a group of players can build their game world. The four functions are: to convey that the world is one of action and magic, to provide a range of cultural and historical alternatives to the traditional pseudomedieval fantasy world, to communicate what is important about particular groups, and to maintain a difference between female wizards as physical and sexualised and male wizards as people of knowledge and military competence.

Den aktivitet som beskrivs i kapitlet bygger på uppgifter som flyttar fokus mellan enskilda exempel och jämförelse av exempel, vilket fördjupar och breddar förståelsen av det undersökta fenomenet. Vi illustrerar aktiviteten med hur kursdeltagarna i en uppdragsutbildning för yrkesverksamma arbetar med datatidskrifter, men den kan anpassas till olika situationer. Genom individuella förberedelser, klassrumsaktiviteter i tre grupperingar och ett skriftligt efterarbete undersöker och dokumenterar deltagarna tidskrifters likheter och särdrag.

The activity described in the chapter is based on exercises that shift focus between individual examples and comparison of examples, which provides a deeper and broader understanding of the phenomenon under examination. We illustrate the activity with work on data journals that was carried out by participants in a professional-development course, but it is adaptable to a range of situations. By individual preparations, classroom activities in three types of groups, and a written follow-up task, the participants explore and document the journals' differences and similarities.

Secondary worlds are constructed from a wide range of building blocks. In this article, epigraphs that refer to fictional sources in secondary worlds are analyzed in terms of their world-building characteristics. The analysis starts from the (implied) paratextual and intertextual properties of epigraphs that are part of and refer to a secondary world. Four functions of such world-intrinsic epigraphs are explored: the way in which they (1) set a mood that indicates the world’s dominant themes or ethos; (2) give details that extend, explain, and familiarize the fictional world; and (3) provide perspectives with complementary or conflicting worldviews. Finally, (4) how the double nature of fictional epigraphs, as fictional paratexts and as purported quotations from world-intrinsic sources, extends and solidifies the world is addressed. These four functions lead us to conclude that fictional epigraphs deserve thoughtful analysis in any critical world-building endeavor.

All works of fiction build imaginary worlds in which they set their stories. What makes genres such as science fiction and fantasy different is that their worlds are often created not as twins to our actual world but as cousins or even distant relatives to it. Some of these worlds are built to stage a particular narrative, others to house certain casts of characters, and yet others to offer exciting possibilities for exploration. They can be shaped by, for example, text, film, graphic novels, computer games, or combinations of these media. I find such worlds fascinating objects of study, not only as backdrops to particular stories but as aesthetic and cultural objects in themselves, and I am intrigued by how worlds can be built by elements that are not part of the narrative. Such non-narratival elements are often ignored in world-building analyses, while potentially being of great importance to the world to which they contribute. In this essay, I look exclusively at non-narratival world-building. My first example shows how a collection of “lore” in a computer game or (in my case) a graphic-novel app can offer material for a scholar who analyses the world of the story. Then I turn to a world without any explicit narrative, using the illustrations from a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook to demonstrate what they can say about the implied game world. Before that, however, I introduce the concept of critical world-building and outline my view of world-building as architecture. World-architecture provides the basis for my analysis of the examples.

This essay demonstrates how we can gain critcal insights into a fantasy world by reading its accompanying map, using Ben McSweeney’s map from Brandon Sanderson’s The Rithmatst as an example. An analysis of the map’s topography, linguistc signs, and surround elements is carried out in terms of Denis Wood’s propositon that all maps have authors, subjects, and themes. The results show that even without reference to the text, the map comments on the fantasy world’s technological level, its colonial history, and the central conflict of the story. Interpretng the map also invites a broader examinaton of the relatonship between the fantastcal and the actual. © 2018 Liverpool University Press. All rights reserved.

A discussion Literature of the Unseen—Visions and (Re)visions of Urban Fantasy collects theoretical reflections upon the subgenres of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, along with a brief commentary on the body of text representative for both conventions. Participants include „Creatio Fantasti­ca” editors—Sylwia Borowska-Szerszun, Krzysztof M. Maj, and Barbara Szymczak-Maciejczyk—as well as renowned experts in the field of fantasy studies: Stefan Ekman, author of the first monograph of fantasy map-making, Here Be Dragons. Exploring Fantasy Maps & Settings (2013), and Audrey Taylor, author of Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-building (2017).

London is one of the more popular settings for urban fantasy, standing out by offering both a great many famous locations and a history of two millennia. This essay argues that the city’s past is used to create a sense of “London-ness” by examining ten urban-fantasy versions of London. It identifies and analyzes the functions of four prominent aspects of history in these texts: the city’s origin and pre-origin, the Great Fire of 1666, the periods of building various subterranean tunnels, and the notion that London, at some point, has gone through an architectural Era of Uglification. Through these, London is portrayed as a literary place suitable to urban fantasy: it is a modern city but with a long history reaching back to a beginning where facts and legends mix. This long history gives rise to supernatural entities that hide in the underground tunnels constructed at various points in the city’s history.