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Moon Called, by Patricia Briggs, Ace Books, 2006, $7.99.
Shadows in the Starlight, by Elaine Cunningham, Tor Books, 2006, $23.95.
PARDON ME if I sound like the old guy sitting down beside you at the bus stop who won't shut up about what it was like when he was a kid. But when I was a kid....
Seriously, having read fantasy since before it was a genre (it used to be marketed as part of sf), I've found it interesting to have watched fantasy as it split off from the sf ghetto into a whole little ghetto of its own.
In those early days, the new genre was either a riff on the Conanesque warrior, or some variation on the Tolkien books. And sometimes a combination of the two.
When fantasies with contemporary settings began to appear (such as Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons, or R. A. MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon], they were considered innovative and daring. And they did have that fresh feeling about them, even though authors such as James Branch Cabell had already done it long before. But for most contemporary readers, the early part of the twentieth century (Cabell's "contemporary setting," since he was writing of his own time) didn't feel as immediate as the latter part of the century in which they lived.
There weren't a lot of these books, but the few that came out took the real world and the fantasy elements seriously and were wellloved by the core audience reading them. Then, after a while, the innovations didn't feel quite so innovative anymore and the tropes of high fantasy seemed like they were simply grafted onto the contemporary settings.
As if to counteract that, we started to see a lot of humorous contemporary fantasies. Or books that combined the elements of the mystery genre with elves and dwarves, or more popularly, vampires and werewolves. Or, again, combinations of all of the above.
I was never much of a fan of any of that, although, like switching on the TV for some light entertainment, I'd browse them from time to time. Mostly they left me dissatisfied because they seemed to leave the best out of each genre. Humor stole the mythic underpinnings and sense of...