Paper Cities

Putting the adjective “urban” before “fantasy” in the subtitle for this anthology is perfectly apt, but it got this reviewer thinking: What is it, exactly, that makes the adjective necessary? Is most fantasy fiction not urban? It’s tempting to think of the genre as pastoral—definitionally nostalgic for some agrarian past—but the idea doesn’t get you too far beyond the shire. What could be more fantastic than Moore’s Whitechapel? Borges’s billboards? The ramparts of Minas Tirith? Cities are full of the stuff of fantasy—magic and wonder, of course, but also good and evil. What’s more, in his able foreword, Jess Nevins reminds us that literary cities were all these things before we started ghettoizing fiction into genres.

At their best, the stories in Paper Cities do what fantasy does well: plumb ideas and symbols. Take Vylar Kaftan’s “Godivy,” a half-story, half-poem in which workers copulate with their photocopiers in high-rise cubicle warrens, thereby breeding a race of support staff. Plot and character are almost beside the point in a story like this; just imagining it all is a pleasure unto itself. Then there’s “Ghost Market” by Greg van Eekhout—a tight, evocative noir in which souls are bottled and sold in a market beneath a bridge. Both exemplify the thrill of the genre, of peeking into another world.

But whatever the pleasures of stories like the above, Paper Cities isn’t likely to win converts to fantasy fiction. The less-distinguished contributions blur into a jumble of genre foibles: stiff and verbose style for one, but most strikingly, a burdensome quantity of exposition. There’s a reason, after all, fantasy novels usually run so thick—the writer has to fit an entire world in there. Exposition is a high art in fantasy fiction, and squeezing the form to story length is a real feat. Whatever the case, readers not so concerned with craft will find Paper Cities full of compelling worlds worth falling into for a while.