panel, take two
This past weekend I was on the following panel at WFC:
Urban Fantasy—Beyond the Usual Suspects
It seems as if most urban fantasy uses the familiar European myths. What other possibilities are there? Which authors have successfully exploited them?
A number of us had grievances with the direction the panel ended up going in, so I’m officially hosting Take Two right here. We hammered the “cultural appropriation” angle to death — again — so I’m not looking to hash that one out. Instead, here are some of the things I wanted to talk about and didn’t really get to. I’ll put my questions up front, then my personal views behind a cut (for length); feel free to respond to the questions and/or pose your own in the comments.
1) What are the benefits of going outside “the familiar European myths”? What do we gain, as writers or readers, by looking to other parts of the world?
2) What are the downsides? Aside from the issue of appropriation, what drawbacks or challenges result from going further afield?
3) I posited briefly in the panel that you can imagine a spectrum, ranging from American Gods-style globalized, multicultural cross-over, to setting-specific approaches that firmly ground the supernatural and mundane elements in a locality. Benefits and drawbacks? Preferences, and if so, why?
4) Who has done this well? What other cultures do they draw on, and why do you say they’re done well?
5) Who’s done it badly? Even if you don’t want to name names, what kinds of mistakes bug you?
6) If we’re moving away from European sources, where are we moving to? (We touched on this briefly at the end of the panel, but I’d like to discuss it in more detail.)
