5 Great Urban Fantasy Book Series That Prove Wizards Have Street Smarts

Everyone knows the default archetype of wizards in fantasy novels – they’re brilliant but doddering old men with phenomenal cosmic powers who spend hours pouring over spellbooks in their dusty towers. Or just as often, they’re young Chosen Ones with names like Harry who really don’t need another film adaptation. Either way, wizards are mostly portrayed as people with a lot of book learning and very little practical life experience or common sense.

Some of the fault for this stereotype can also be laid at the feet of Dungeons & Dragons and all its infinite incarnations; D&D wizards have been weak little nerds since the game’s earliest editions. Yet the subgenre of urban fantasy serves as a fantastic counterexample, showing that the real power of a wizard isn’t in their fancy wand or their spellbook, but in how good they are at thinking on their feet.

5

The Iron Druid Chronicles (2011 – 2018)

By Kevin Hearne

Over the course of The Iron Druid Chronicles‘ nine novels, protagonist Atticus O’Sullivan goes from a contented isolationist to the one man who can prevent Ragnarok. With his trusty Irish wolfhound Oberon at his side, Atticus finds himself repeatedly drawn out of his comfortable life running his little magic shop in Tempe, Arizona. Considering his foes include vampires, Faeries, and multiple pantheons’ worth of angry gods, Atticus clearly has the street smarts to not only survive, but thrive in such an exciting and violent lifestyle.

Pedantically speaking, Atticus isn’t a traditional wizard, he’s a druid – his spellcasting comes from the earth itself as a part of his druidic bond with Gaia – but he certainly understands the ins and outs of magic, given that at the time of the first book, Hounded, he’s just about 2100 years old. He’s the only magic-user to figure out a workaround for why magic always fails in the presence of iron, which is what the series gets its name from.

4

​​​World of Watches (1998 – 2014)

By Sergei Lukyanenko

One of Russia’s most successful sci-fi and fantasy authors since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Sergei Lukyanenko was relatively unknown in the West until the 2004 film adaptation of his novel Night Watch, one of the 2000s’ best vampire movies, drew enough attention from its Russian box-office take to get an international release. The film’s success led to the Watch books getting an official English translation, introducing global audiences to Lukyanenko’s grimly fantastical world where supernatural Others hide among humanity in plain sight.

The Watches are the law enforcement apparatus of the Others, acting as a combination FBI, CIA, emergency first responders, and social workers; the books focus on Anton Gorodetsky, a Night Watch agent who time and again finds himself in the middle of the intrigue and power struggles between his agency and their Dark counterparts. Continually forced to choose between preserving the remnants of his humanity or gaining more power in order to help others, Anton demonstrates a deeply humanist perspective that is undeniably post-Soviet, and a very interesting change from similar characters written by Western authors.

3

InCryptid (2012 – Present)

By Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid series focuses on the saga of the Price-Healy family, a generational group of cryptozoologists who work tirelessly to study and understand the supernatural creatures of the world, as well as to defend them from the militant Covenant of St. George, who have committed multiple genocides over the years in their quest to exterminate any species that wasn’t on Noah’s Ark. McGuire was specifically inspired to write the series by her frustrations with Supernatural‘s horrible treatment of its female characters.

Most of the viewpoint characters throughout InCryptid are the women of the Price-Healy family, particularly the youngest generation’s daughters, Verity and Amity Price. The Price family even includes several sorcerers, like Amity and her grandfather Thomas; the Covenant of St. George sees the magic they do as a sign that they should be exterminated like the rest of the supernatural filth, forcing the magic-using Prices to constantly stay on their toes and keep one step ahead of them.

2

Shadowrun: The Kellan Colt Trilogy (2005 – 2006)

By Stephen Kenson

Shadowrun is a long-running urban fantasy tabletop game; its first edition was published back in 1989, and the most recent Sixth Edition was released in 2019. The timeline of Shadowrun diverges from our own around the year 2012, when cataclysmic events lead to magic returning to the world; the current edition is now set in the mid-2080s, and is a phenomenal cyberpunk dystopian playground, with more magic and metal than a troll could shake a streetlight at.

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The Kellan Colt Trilogy was published at the outset of the game’s fourth edition, and is a phenomenal entry point to the setting as a whole. Kellan Colt is an aspiring shadowrunner (a freelance criminal/covert operative) who has come to the independent city of Seattle to make a name for herself and, hopefully, find out about her long-absent mother. As Kellan learns magic at the hand of troll mage Lothan the Wise, she also learns the street smarts she needs to survive in an openly hostile world.

1

The Dresden Files (2000 – Present)

By Jim Butcher

As far as wizard protagonists go, Harry Dresden would happily tell you he’s a terrible one. He’s antisocial, an avowed chauvinist, only believes there were three Star Wars films, and has allegedly burned down multiple buildings. Unfortunately, he’s also the only Wizard of the White Council in the central United States – and the only wizard in the Yellow Pages – so while most days he’d rather curl up on his couch with his 30-pound cat Mister, he’s got work to do if he doesn’t want to wind up shorting his landlady on rent again.

The Dresden Files are still ongoing, with the series currently consisting of seventeen novels, two short story anthologies, and several short fiction pieces that have yet to be collected. Along the way, Harry’s tangled with fallen angels, faerie queens, horrors from outside reality, and even Santa Claus and Bigfoot; thanks to steadfast friends like Chicago P.D.’s Lieutenant Karrin Murphy and Michael Carpenter, Knight of the Cross, Harry always manages to find the upper hand in a fight, and isn’t afraid to use dirty tricks and his street smarts.