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He is here today to talk about the "urban" settings in urban fantasy books and his decision on how to shape his own world in his urban fantasy books.

JES BATTIS:

I grew up reading Urban Fantasy before it was called Urban Fantasy.

First there was Mercedes Lackey's Burning Water (1989), focused on crime-solving wiccan Diana Tregarde, who used her powers as 'Guardian' to protect the innocent in her city. This was really where the 'butt-kicking paranormal heroine' began--specifically the magic-user whose powers are very much tied to a particuar city. Then came Tanya Huff's Blood Price (1991), set in Toronto and detailing the stormy partnership between Officer Viki Nelson and Henry Fitzroy, a vampire and the bastard son of Henry VIII. Here we have the beginning of the mortal cop/immortal being duo (and it started in Canada: take that!). If we count Barbara Hambley's Silicon Mage, an early UF/epic fantasy crossover, then the genre goes back to 1988. Laurell K Hamilton doesn't hit the scene with Guilty Pleasures until 1993, but the impact is like a thunderbolt.

The poet Dionne Brand once told me (while I was sawing through a loaf of French bread, but that's another story) that "you can only experience real betrayal in a city. The city betrays you like nothing else." And I think that's what energizes so much contemporary Urban Fantasy. We get to see a city unfold through the eyes of the protagonist, and then we watch as all her favorite places are tainted or destroyed, all her safe spaces become dangerous and unlivable, all her trusted contacts turn against her. The city itself turns against her. What I love so much about UF is that the city itself becomes a character, and as the genre expands, we get to see cities like Atlanta and Seattle and New Orleans and San Francisco through different sets of eyes. The protagonists are defined by the cities that they protect, and their desires and motivations become as tangled and nefarious as those labyrinthine streets--so familiar to the author, but so alien and fascinating to many of the readers.

What draws me to UF as a genre is that it provides these fascinating blueprints, these doorways into the daily civic lives of writers who've chosen to analyze and study the cities where they live (or where they used to live). Ilona Andrews' version of Atlanta, with rising and falling waves of magic and 'tech,' will probably override any real notion I have of Atlanta (once I visit). And of course, the many curious and magical simulacra of New York that UF writers have spun will haunt you once you actually visit the city. Where are the Clave that Cassandra Clare writes about? Where is the Lone One that haunts Central Park in Diane Duane's So You Want To Be A Wizard. These alternate cityscapes provide new and critically interesting ways for seeing the everyday magic that exists in every city--the dark and miraculous interactions between all kinds of people, spaces, and ideologies that forms the beating heart of what we actually call the 'Urban.'

I chose to write about Vancouver in Night Child because it's my city. I live in Brooklyn at the moment, and I'm about to move to Montreal, but Vancouver will always be my urban fantasy, just as Chilliwack, BC will always be the place where I grew up and started to dream in the first place. I wanted my protagonist, Tess, to think about the neighborhoods she was moving through, the streets she was driving down. My second novel, Hextacy, is set primarily in the Downtown Eastside, which is Vancouver's poorest neighborhood. But it's also a space where all sorts of communities collide, where drug-use and sex-work and race relations and industrialization and exploitation all explode, right in front of you. I wanted to write about this neighborhood because too many people are always talking about how to 'fix' it, as if nobody actually lives there. I was also so tired of seeing sex-workers being used in mystery and horror novels as props for serial killers. I wanted the sex-trade to actually exist for my characters, and sex-workers to actually have voices and demands and desires.

I'd like to see more LGBT characters, more characters of color, more disabled characters, more poor characters, and more HIV+ characters within the genre--not just as supporting cast, but as protagonists. I'm proud of the LGBT folks in my writing. They don't hover in the background--they're right there on the front lines. I think it's absolutely necessary and critical for queer writers to include queer characters in their novels. I mean, if Mercedes Lackey was ballsy enough to write about Vanyel Ashkevron--a gay teenage Harry Potter in a much darker universe--in 1989, then we should be seeing way more marginalized characters in urban fantasy by now. I can only hope.

What's my biggest urban fantasy? Aside from a working subway, safe-injection sites for IV drug-users, more shelters with more beds, a decriminalized sex-trade, and a school system without biased and ridiculous standardized tests?

Well, you'll just have to read Night Child to find that out.

You can contact Jes Battis at his website, www.authorjesbattis.com

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