Odd Angles

Abstract

Rjurik Davidson’s debut novel Unwrapped Sky is set in the fictional city of Caeli-Amur, a complex mixture of ancient Rome, steampunk industry, H. P. Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’lyeh, and Davidson’s native Melbourne. Unwrapped Sky is urban fantasy, which redeploys the pastoral and heroic conventions of traditional fantasy in a city context. The human and nonhuman characters that interact with this landscape either share or contend with its fantastic qualities. As such, urban fantasy is well positioned to address a contemporary moment that is more posthuman than pastoral: a moment when the human is increasingly inextricable from and decentered by nonhuman technologies and economies.