Vendetta wrote:I shall elaborate, because everyone seems to have missed the point.
The problem with modern fantasy is that it's structure and setting is all the same. Every single fantasy work these days has it's own little world, completely divorced from our own, and completely unrecognisable. This is what people have stolen from Tolkien (and Lewis, lest we forget), this is the massive detrimental effect that Tolkien has had on Fantasy literature, his work has created "rules" for fantasy stories, the one genre that should be bound least by rule and convention. (oh, and Eleas, this is not my idea, it's Gaiman's, who wrote the Books of Magic....?).
Everyone writing in modern fantasy has their own little world to play in, every world has it's own rules, it's own society, it's own restrictions on the author. Modern fantasy is as bad a genre to follow as modern comics, because the perception of those who write it, read it, and publish it is that it can only "work" in this one prescribed fashion, so you only get one kind of story.
The Harry Potter stories are fantastical stories, but they <i>don't</i> follow those rules, they show one reality encroaching on, and living around, another, they show something that's happening just beyond the veil of reality, not somewhere deep in the backyard of your imagination, the story and the events are as fantastical as most 'fantasy' fiction, but the people they happen to are people with a grounding in the same world as the reader, people who, in fact, could be your next-door neigbour without you knowing it...
For modern 'mainstream' fantasy (as 'mainstream' as a sidelined genre can be) that's almost unheard of. It's really something more often found in horror fantasy.
Oh, you're talking urban fantasy. That's my favorite kind, too.
