stories. Despite her small output, she retains her
position as an important figure in contemporary
fantasy primarily because of her first novel, War for
the Oaks,which established many of the standard
elements of urban fantasy and the idea that our
world and that of another realm of magic might
overlap at some point.
The protagonist is Eddi McCandry, who re-
cently broke up with her rock musician lover and is
now trying to found a new band in Minneapolis.
One night she encounters a “phouka,” a magical
being who can appear either as a human or as a
kind of dog, who informs her that she has been
chosen to serve as the fulcrum for the battle be-
tween the Seelie and Unseelie courts, light and
dark, good and evil, who are at war in the realm of
elves and fairies but whose battle has spilled over
into our world. Bull’s fairies and elves are not gen-
tle, meek creatures. They are, in fact, very much
like humans except that they do not seem to be ca-
pable of feeling much emotion, although Eddi at-
tempts to explain their significance among humans.
With misgivings and considerable skepticism,
Eddi eventually accepts the truth of the situation,
and, in fact, her new band develops into a source
of a powerful magic that helps turn the tide of bat-
tle. Although the plot has been reprised by many
authors since, few have equaled Bull’s simple, di-
rect approach, and even fewer have created a
character as believable as Eddi McCandry. Bull
went on to write other fantasy in a similar vein, in-
cluding Finder (1994), set in the Borderlands
shared universe series, which in itself owes at least
part of its original concept to War for the Oaks.The
SHADOWRUNrole-playing game system and an ex-
tensive series of tie-in novels published during the
1990s follow a similar pattern, mixing elves with
an urban environment and adding advanced tech-
nology. Other writers of urban fantasy include
Mercedes LACKEY, Tanya HUFF, Megan Lindholm.
Warhammer Series
The Warhammer role-playing game system, like
many of its rivals, has spun off a line of novels using
the basic setting and sometimes ongoing characters
for a series of original adventures, mostly novel-
length but also including occasional collections of
short stories. The Warhammer series has a particu-
larly wide range of settings because it is split into
two distinct branches. The first takes place on a
primitive, barbaric Earth where magic works and
good and evil are usually differentiated without dif-
ficulty. Heroes are quick with their wits as well as
their weapons, and villains are usually either mon-
sters or users of dark magic. Novels in this branch
are basically sword and sorcery, more in the tradi-
tion of Robert E. HOWARDthan J. R. R. TOLKIEN,
which thereby distinguishes them from the other-
wise similar tie-in novels in the FORGOTTEN
REALMSor DRAGONLANCEseries.
The other branch is set in the distant future,
when humanity has spread to the stars and inter-
mingles with alien races, although aliens are gen-
erally not a major plot device in the novels.
Although the setting seems to be science fiction,
this version of the future is dominated by a battle
between humans on the side of good and those
ranged with demons that exist among the stars,
genuinely supernatural beings rather than aliens.
Most of the novels closely approximate military
science fiction, spending a great deal of their time
describing battles in space or on distant worlds,
and thus are of less interest to fantasy readers.
Although there is some crossover, writers tend
to stay within their preferred branches. Most of the
authors of the Warhammer novels have not had
books published elsewhere, unless in another
shared universe series. There have been excep-
tions, however, and sometimes notable ones. The
most significant of these is Ian Watson, a well-re-
spected science fiction writer whose Warhammer
books Draco(1990), Harlequin(1994), and The
Chaos Child(1995) make up the Inquisition War
trilogy, which leans very clearly toward science fic-
tion. As Brian Craig, Brian STABLEFORDwrote four
Warhammer novels that are more clearly fantasy,
Plague Daemon(1990) and Storm Warriors(1991)
and later Wine of Dreams (2000) and Zaragoz
(2002). Although not approaching the stature of
Stableford’s novels under his own name, they are
all superior sword and sorcery tales, particularly
Wine of Dreams.
David Ferring, the pen name for the science
fiction writer Dav Garnett, has also wrote one of
the better titles in the series, Konrad(1990), alongWarhammer Series 369