Wednesday, 31 October 2007

Halloween Winner!

Woooooh-Ooooooh-Ooooooh! That's my impression of a ghost.

It's the final day of October, and by the ancient laws set down by me three weeks ago, it is time to let the dice choose the first (extremely) lucky winner of a Signed, Lined, Dated proof of Last Argument of Kings.

Pray to whatever dark gods you worship that the dice favour you.

And the winner is:

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

The dice are rolling.

Wait for it.

The 72nd entry to the competition, which was from ...

Drum roll please ...

JOSH MEYER!!!!

Who, apparently, deserves a proof of Last Argument of Kings because ...

"...if I order any more of your books shipped overseas my wife will KILL ME. I will, no doubt, have some type of statement as to that being your fault on my headstone. While it might be good press, we don't want that, do we??"

No, Josh, we decidedly do not want that, even if it is good press. I am happy to have saved your life. A round of applause, Ladies and Gentlemen, for JOSH MEYER. Don't hate him, hate the dice.

(Josh, you should be in receipt of an e-mail from me requesting your postal address, and your choice of personalised inscription.)

I should point out that, in classic style, the proofs are not actually printed yet, so there may be a SLIGHT DELAY in receiving the forbidden bounty. However, I am assured that it will be ANY DAY NOW.

The dice have chosen the victor, but the unfortunate many should not despair, as the dice will choose a second (extremely) lucky winner on the last day of November. Then, on New Year's Eve, I shall pick the entry that tickles my funny bone/plays upon my heart-strings/flatters my bloated ego the most to win the final proof. The competition remains open, and anyone who wishes to enter should follow the instructions HERE.

Once again, I am TOO GOOD TO YOU.

Labels: competitions

Monday, 29 October 2007

The Blade Itself on Neth Space

Ken has run one of his 'Questions Five' interviews with me over on his long-established blog Neth Space. For those that don't know, it's an attempt to ask five questions an author will never have been asked before, and hence to illicit unexpected and hilarious responses.

He's also reviewed the book, as it goes, and he kinda liked it:

"The Blade Itself easily equals anything released in epic fantasy in the past few years, and just may rise to the top ... This book is about characters first, and Abercrombie skillfully portrays them with near-perfect internal and external dialogue set at an ideal pace ... he stops just short of spitting in the face of genre and set my heart racing through some the best written fight scenes of any genre. This one is not just for fans of epic fantasy."

Get in.

Labels: interviews, reviews

Friday, 26 October 2007

Hot New Authors (and me)

Jeff Vandermeer has run an interview in two parts (Part 1, Part 2 and some additional material including a truly mighty cover of the US Blade Itself) with some of the new wave of heroic fantasy authors: Karen Miller, Brandon Sanderson, Brian Ruckley, oh, and that Abercrombie bloke as well.

It's what you call a round-table interview. No, not an interview in which we wear shiny armour and quest for a grail, but one in which we are all responding to the same questions. What's kind of amusing (at least to my tiny mind) is how some of their responses are very similar to the sort of thing that I might say (except better written, of course). So, from Karen Miller:

"My work is predominantly character-driven. Most of the action derives from the internal landscape, desires and psychologies of the characters, rather than huge external set pieces and sweeping vistas, as it were. Those tend to form the backdrop of my novels--what really interests me is the impact of events on a cast of individuals. How the big picture looks through the eyes of the people involved."

Yes, yes! Me too! The whole character-driven thing with the backdrop and the impact of events, and the big picture through the little eyes and that! And from Brian Ruckley:

"I tried to make my imagined world pretty realistic, in everything from its landscapes to its politics, its characters to its battles. This is fantasy in which no character is safe once the world starts to slip towards chaos, and where even the bad guys think they have good reasons for most of what they do."

And me! And me! I'm like that as well! All gritty and realistic and bad guys with reasons and what have you! Talking about influences, Brandon Sanderson writes:

"During the 80s and 90s, quest epic was the big seller. A lot of the new writers like myself grew up reading Eddings and Jordan and Brooks. Some of us, when we sit down to write, then try to emulate their formula. A lot of us, though, react against those stories we love. Not because they were bad, but because they've been done–and done well ... I write mainstream fantasy epics - my primary goal is to produce books that people will enjoy. I'm a big believer in the sheer power of a well told story, and don't focus on intricate prose or ponderous messages. Story first, everything else second. However, I think that puts me in a harder position than if I were trying to write something completely revolutionary. I want to write books that all of the people who loved the old epics will love - books that have the same feel. However, I also want to write books which innovate and expand the genre."

That's what I'm trying to do as well! With the reading of the Eddings, and the reacting against stuff, fusing the new into the traditional framework, and the reinterpretation of the mainstream epic and whatever. It's a bit like what I was saying a few posts back about the need to combine the innovative with the familiar, except said in a mature manner by an adult.

Labels: interviews

Sunday, 21 October 2007

What THEY are saying NOW

Like a bit of romance in your life? Romantic Times has reviewed The Blade Itself, and awarded me four and a half stars out of five, would you believe:

"Abercrombie kicks off his series masterfully with a heroic fantasy without conventional heroes. Its clearly the characters that take center stage here. Their dialogue is full of cynicism and wit, their lives full of intrigue, battles and magic."

Masterfully, you say? You shouldn't have... Simon's Bookblog has likewise been examining this much-talked-about fantasy debut:

"While the nastiness of some scenes will put off many potential readers, The Blade Itself is a well written and interesting fantasy novel (more so for its characterisation than other features), the start to a series that I will want to read to its resolution."

Blue Gargantua has read both books, now, and I think it's fair to say he kinda likes them:

"I think this series is a winner. Here's the deal: It takes all the standard Tolkien-esque tropes and then completely peels back the shiny heroism to reveal the all-too petty, mean and dismal underside."

but not as much as SQT, who offers up this beauty at her fantasy and sci-fi lovin' blog:

"Sprinkled with political intrigue and short, messy battles, "The Blade Itself" is packed with action for sure, but it's also an amazing work of character development. Abercrombie's characters are blunt spoken, complex and never boring--which is exactly how I would describe the book."

But it's not all ice cream and roses in the world of genre criticism, you know. In the interests of maintaining the cosmic balance, I need to inform you that I've been roundly slagged off on the Song of Ice and Fire board:

"Abercrombie writes surface melange without any real depth. It was like the movie version where all the good parts were in the two minute trailer. And an amazing amount of pages where nothing ever really happens. Abercrombie is one of the rare authors that bores me even if he can write half-decent."

I guess you can't please all the people all the time, right? Say it with me now:

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm ... Melange.

In other news, applications for my competition (see below) are still flooding in. I was UTTERLY DISGUSTED to note that Ady Hall, one of The Manx Lads is urging the internet community to CHEAT on his behalf. However, he did describe my series as 'excellent', so I have decided, in my infinite generosity, to let him off.

To err is human, to forgive, divine...

Labels: reviews

Sunday, 14 October 2007

Competition Time

Are YOU, the AVERAGE READER, the PERSON IN THE STREET, the EVERYDAY FOLK, sick of seeing SMARMY INDUSTRY INSIDERS, ARTSY-FARTSY CRITICS, and even worse, SELF-CONGRATULATING BLOGGERS, boast about receiving advance reader copies of the latest, keenly awaited books of your favourite authors, when you know YOU WANT THEM MORE?

I offer you, JOE PUBLIC, the chance to strike a blow for the COMMON MAN (or woman) against the FACELESS MACHINE OF THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY.

Over the next 3 months, I shall be giving away THREE, yes THREE BOUND PROOFS of the forthcoming Last Argument of Kings, final gripping installment in The First Law Trilogy, days, weeks, and yes, months prior to publication in March 2008.

As if this were not enough of a stab in the eye for JOHNNY PROFESSIONAL CRITIC, these books shall also be SIGNED by me, the author, DATED on the first day they reach my sticky hand, and LINED in my own handwriting with an inscription of your own personal choice (within reason - nothing unseemly/legally compromising). All delivered to your front door, anywhere on Planet Earth (again within reason) at the expense of my dark masters at Gollancz.

You LUCKY B*STARDS.

The rules of this game are simple.

1. Send an e-mail to comp[at]joeabercrombie[dot]com (replacing the [at] and [dot] with the relevant symbols). This e-mail should contain your name (fake names are acceptable), your e-mail address (fake e-mail addresses are not acceptable), and, to deter spammers and the unworthy, a completion of this sentence. "I deserve a proof of Last Argument of Kings because ..."

2. That's it. That's all you have to do. At the end of October (if proofs are ready by then) I shall dig my old ten-sided dice from the cupboard and use them to randomly select the first winner. They shall receive an e-mail requesting a postal address and desired inscription, and, shortly thereafter (we hope) their proof will drop into their mailbox. At the end of November I shall again randomly select a winner. At the end of December, in celebration of my birthday, I shall select the answer to the sentence "I deserve a proof of Last Argument of Kings because ..." that makes me laugh/cry/otherwise pleases me the most. The author of that sentence shall receive the final proof.

*PLEASE NOTE THAT: All duplicate applications, spam, overlong nonsense and other frippery shall be consigned to the flames of Mount Doom. I, Joe Abercrombie, refuse to be held legally responsible for anything, and retain the right to blame any/everything on my editor, Gillian Redfearn and/or my webguy, Ariel.

Enjoy...

Labels: competitions

Wednesday, 10 October 2007

Covers, Uniqueness, and a Couple of Gags

For those few of you who have yet to hear too much of me talking, there is an HILARIOUS interview with yours truly over at Fantasy Book Critic. I actually really enjoyed doing this one, as Robert went to heroic efforts to come up with some questions that I hadn't been asked before.

Topics range as widely as Upcoming Releases, Fantasy Cover Art, Music and Video Games, Film Adaptations and Toilet Seats, as well as giving my favourite straw man of world-building versus character another battering. Take THAT, you straw b*stard!

Enjoy...

Labels: interviews

Sunday, 7 October 2007

Fantasy, RPGs, Innovation, and Bile

Ariel, the webmaster (which is what spiderman should really have called himself) of myself and several other authors, has drawn my attention to an interesting debate.

Mark Chadbourn a fellow Gollancz author and a very nice bloke has made a post about the impact of RPGs, particularly of the multiplayer on-line variety, on fantasy, and how the resulting leaking of fantasy concepts into the mainstream is making it more difficult for fantasy authors to be original, especially when these online worlds are more immersive, more detailed, beautifully realised down to every blade of grass.

"Fantasy authors - and all the thousands of would-be fantasy authors out there - need to wake up. They're being squeezed out of the territory they have occupied for the last hundred years or so. They can no longer count on the fact that they're the only visionaries in town, or the only explorers charting the fringes of the imagination. They're being supplanted by a much more dynamic and agressive breed."

I don't find this worrying, myself. I've played a hell of a lot of computer games in my time, though not so much of the MMORPG variety. I enjoy them hugely, some probably have been an influence on the way I write. But they're very different experiences from reading, and if they've increased the potential market for fantasy, I think that can only be a good thing.

These games are written by huge teams, with vast budgets, aimed at the biggest possible markets, and as a result usually are rather bland and cliched, taking as few risks as possible. I don't think it's too difficult for an author, who by the nature of his medium is free of the need to worry about every detail, to come up with something that offers a different experience. I think we, the fantasy authors, can find a way to co-exist with our every multiplying video-game brethren. There's always a need for good writing, in video games as much as anywhere else.

It's true that, with these games, and the Lord of the Rings movies too, the tropes of fantasy have become even more widely and instantly recognised. But to me, it's precisely the familiarity of those tropes that is the point. When everyone's expecting the same old same old, even small deviations can be interesting and surprising. In fact small deviations are especially interesting, because large ones break that sense of familiarity and leave the reader feeling disorientated, let down, and, often, bored.

Jonathan McCalmont responded over at his blog SF Diplomat, by turning the question on its head. I think it's safe to say he's not a fan of fantasy, particularly of the epic, post-Tolkein kind that we're talking about here:

"The MMORPG market, much like the world of fantasy literature, is one that operates on the basis of narrowed horizons. In the world of console gaming, the lack of innovation has reached such a point that any change is treated as earth-shattering. The best example of this was a gun in Half-Life 2 that allowed you to lift things up at a distance. To my eyes this was a new swirl of icing on a cake largely unchanged since the days of doom, but to gamers everywhere it was an innovation."

I totally agree. The first-person shooter is an area with way too little innovation, as the rather disappointing Bioshock seemed to me to prove. But it's interesting that it's also a genre of gaming that is even more overrun with the tropes of bland military sf than the RPG is overrun with the tropes of bland epic fantasy. I think video gaming as a whole is prone to the bland, but it's nothing to do with an 'infection' by fantasy. Much more it's because - as with the blandifying of movies - it's becoming increasingly a corporate big business with vast teams and huge budgets, and that set-up does tend to push things in the direction of the mediocre. He goes on to say:

"The same lowered bar holds sway over innovation in the mainstream fantasy and RPG markets with any fresh deviation from Tolkienian roots seen as an innovation and sufficient grounds for fans of the new work to sneer at the fans of other works (this was something I learned from my run in with George R. R. Martin's fans... to me the books appear to be yet more tales of battle, magic and great men but to the devoted fantasy fan these are worlds away from other works featuring battle, magic and great men)."

I'm not convinced he learned anything from that run-in with Martin's fans apart from how to turn his comments off on potentially incendiary posts. This is exactly the same as claiming High Noon and Unforgiven are identical films because they both feature gunfights, six-shooters and sherriffs. They are both small-town westerns, yes, but a world apart in their presentation of character, their investigation of morality, their approach to violence, right down to the manner in which they are shot and edited. Both great films, incidentally. Likewise, Martin and Tolkein both write epic fantasy, but their approaches are nothing alike. Martin was an innovator in his use of realistic dialogue, in the gritiness (a term that has itself become a cliche, but still) of his world, in his ruthlessness towards his characters, in his tight focus on single points of view to tell the story. Epic fantasy can be bland and derivative, for sure, but to fail to notice the difference between Martin and Tolkein is poor criticism.

"The problem here is that the vast majority of fantasy fans simply have no interest in innovation. If fantasy authors were to hear Chadbourn's rallying cry I suspect that the result would be a decrease in sales across the genre. The problem is not with the world of RPGs or lazy authors, it is the audience and until someone finds a way of evolving the tastes of that audience, the market will reward the writers who are able to pleasingly re-arrange old ideas and not those who present us with new ones."

To me this both patronises and misses the point in equal measure. The majority of readers of any genre have little interest in innovation. They want to read/play/see something that's just like the last thing they liked. That's what a genre is. That's what a popular market is. The same is true of crime writing, of chick-lit, of westerns, romance, black-ops action, and pretty much everything else. Sci-fi is perhaps the one exception because, more than any other, it is the genre of new ideas. But even there, anything very successful always spawns a great slew of unimaginative imitations, and the more successful, the more it'll be imitated. Epic fantasy is, in book terms, extremely successful and so it tends also to be conservative. But that doesn't mean you can't offer something new while still working within the form. And it doesn't mean that readers are too dumb to appreciate something new if you present it to them in a familiar framework, in a form that appeals.

Of course you need innovators. Of course you need the new, the bold, the wildly imaginative. There's a daring romance to throwing caution to the wind, and it's important to push the boundaries. But you can't expect to shift shed loads of units that way, and you shouldn't bitch when you don't. Those who tend to achieve lasting commercial success are those who, like Martin, carefully combine a few new ideas with the familiar, and send the genre in a slightly different direction, usually spawning their own generation of imitators in the process.

The fact is, for the vast majority of readers (and I think I probably count myself among them), too much innovation is boring. Too much innovation is pretentious. Too much innovation is ... wank.

Labels: opinion

Tuesday, 2 October 2007

Maps. Craps?

Tolkein, Jordan, and Martin, all have them. Scott Lynch doesn't, so he put some on his website. Mervyn Peake couldn't possibly. M. John Harrison would probably murder you for suggesting that he should. David Gemmell didn't have any, then he bowed to pressure and included one done by a fan which (apparently) everyone thought was crap. I don't have any printed, but you can bet your ass I've got a whole load of 'em in a ring-binder somewhere.

What are we talking about? Why, that universal staple of the hefty fantasy series, of course, the MAP.

What kind do you go for? Do you have a huge one that folds away, except you can never quite fold it up right once you've opened it, like the one I accidentally tore in my Dad's edition of the Fellowship of the Ring then denied all knowledge of? Or do you have one of those tiny, incomprehensible ones that seems to have been badly photocopied like handouts at school, and a significant portion of the dotted line indicating the "journey of the mismatched group of champions" has been destroyed by the gap between two pages of your printed-on-toilet-paper mass-market paperback?

Should you have one that marks every village in the imagined world in painstaking detail, thereby advertising all the sweat you expended on your system of gnomish nomenclature? Or one that has six cities involved in the story and everything else pretty much just a big white splodge with the coastlines barely even squiggled up properly that just screams, "couldn't be arsed to think up more than twelve names, but my publisher said I had to do this!"

Talking of publishers, I was at the Gollancz Autumn Party the other night, and Editorial Director Simon Spanton was spewing venom (alright, he was being mildly irritated) on the whole subject of maps. He don't like 'em much. He certainly doesn't think they're in any way necessary. He objects to the way they're sometimes included on a knee-jerk. He feels that books are a piece of written work and should stand on that basis without the need for often inaccurate and ugly bodges on the fly-leaf.

I agree with him, up to a point. My own feelings, often repeated and rubbed soft and thin like the material of a favourite shirt, is that maps aren't really suitable to the type of book I write, that is one centred tightly around the characters. To use a film metaphor, I feel that epic fantasy is often told too much in wide shots, which is to say we are shown vast events from a great distance, we are shown little people in a huge landscape, we perhaps lack that feeling of closeness with, and understanding of, the characters. And there's no wider shot than the whole world on a page, right?

I wanted my readers to feel like they were right there with the characters - right inside their heads, if possible - part of the action rather than floating dispassionately above it. I wanted to tell a story as close-up as I could, so you can smell the sweat, and feel the pain, and understand the emotions. I want a reader to be nailed to the text, chewing their fingernails to find out what happens next, not constantly flipping back to the fly-leaf to check just how far north exactly Carleon is from Uffrith, or whatever. The characters often don't know what's going on - they don't have a conveniently accurate map to hand, why should the reader?

I kind of worry that the need for maps is part of a mindset that I'd like - in the gentlest possible way - to be steering readers away from, at least while they're reading my books. A focus on world, and setting, and getting all the details straight, that maybe gets in the way of submersion in the characters and the story. I'd rather they just let it flow over them, left the details in my (hugely capable) hands, and concentrated on each event as it's presented.

Call me foolish as well, but I do think having a map there can damage the sense of scale, awe, and wonder that a reader might have for your world. It's like that moment in the horror film when you finally see the monster. What? That's it? I was scared of a piece of foam rubber? The unknown can be mysterious, exciting, in a way that a few squiggles on a piece of paper often ... aren't. It's a bit like the problem I have with literal fantasy artwork of the characters on a cover. Pictures work very powerfully compared to words. Straight away the reader's imagination is constricted by what they've seen there, and I'd like to think of my readers' imaginations running wild and free, roaming far and wide like a noble mountain goat, or something.

I also reckon that, while the hardcore fantasy fan (and that probably includes 90% of the readers of this blog, but hey, let's go down in a blaze of glory) would often like to see a map, the more general fantasy reader isn't that bothered, and in fact might be quite glad when there isn't one. You see it in the front there, and you kind of feel you have to look, and get some sense of it all before you start, know what I mean? As if the author's suddenly going to appear at some point and test you.

So I guess you could say I'm in the anti-map camp, if we have camps. But the thing is, there's a part of me that loves maps. That understands why readers sometimes complain about their absence. That part that long ago sat happily drawing each tiny tree in the forests on a massive sheet of A2 while the first episodes of Star Trek Next Generation burbled happily away in the background. That part that still likes to take the old RPG supplements into the bathroom so I can peruse the layouts of Orthanc while on the toilet.

Had my publisher wanted a map, either in the UK, the US, or anywhere else, I'd happily have given them one. Even a rubbish one. It would have been a very long way from a deal-breaker, I can tell you that. But none of them have asked. Perhaps one day I'll stick some up on the website, just for the hell of it. But then I hear that little voice whispering, "What if someone notices that Carleon isn't quite as far North of Uffrith as you said it was, eh? What then? You'll be a laughing stock..."

Labels: opinion