Wanted to let everyone know how much I'm enjoying the discussion following yesterday's post. Terri Windling turns out to have a strong thread about this going on her Facebook Wall, as well. She also told me that Mercedes Lackey wrote her series as a direct response to Bordertown, which I hadn't known.

As I keep saying to anyone who will listen: "This is not hard to research! It only happened 20 years ago! We're not dead! Just ASK!"

I'm now particularly interested, in an OED geeky way, in the first recorded use of the term "urban fantasy", which jongibbs asked about yesterday. From TW's Facebook thread comes this note from
Russell Blackford at 5:37am June 23
I co-edited an anthology called Urban Fantasies back in 1985. The expression "urban fantasy" was in use well before then. I picked it up from Lee Harding, and it was applied during the early 80s to books such as Harding's _Displaced Person_ (known as _Misplaced Persons_ in the US), which was published in 1979. I'd be confident that it goes back even further. Mind you, what is now known as "urban fantasy" may be rather different, but still ...