Saturday, 31 May 2008

La Vie en Rose

I note that my posts have been getting longer and longer lately, therefore just a quicky. I saw La Vie en Rose the other day, French film about the life of singer Edith Piaf. My wife was going to watch it, I was going to work. I saw the first five minutes, hanging around at the back of the living room, ended up staying for the whole thing. Brilliant film.

The central performance from (rightly oscar winning, quite an achievement for a non-English film) Marion Cotillard is magnificent. In biopics the central actor will typically be convincing at a certain age, then look like a young bloke with naff prosthetics as the old person, or a middle aged actor very, very strongly lit as the young one. In this she is equally completely convincing as teenaged street-singer, as the performer at the height of her powers, and as the dying, illness racked old woman (though not actually that old). Gerard Depardieu is amazing as always, even in a minor role. That guy can do more with one look than most actors manage in a career.

The film is also a real triumph of editing. It darts back and forward from moments late in her life, to her childhood, to the middle and back, moving ever more quickly as it works up to the climax. This sort of technique can sometimes seem pretentious, pointless, adding nothing beyond what might have been there were the film told in chronological order. Here they use it brilliantly to make connections between the different parts of her life, and rather than repeating glimpses from earlier scenes as she remembers her past life - which would have been the obvious thing to do - they always show something new, adding deeper layers of meaning and understanding. Characters drift in and out without the plodding explanation you might expect in a Hollywood treatment of the subject matter. It isn't always clear exactly who they are, but it doesn't really matter. It makes the film amazingly compact for the ground it covers.

I've been raving about a lot of things lately. It's not like me. Usually I hate everything and I don't care who knows it. But there just doesn't seem much point writing posts in order to draw people's attention to the average, the mediocre, and indeed the downright bad. Unless it's my own work, of course. A-ha-ha-HAH.

Rating? A magisterial 9.

Labels: film and tv

Thursday, 29 May 2008

Grand Theft Auto IV

From the dim and distant past of computer gaming to the incandescent, high definition now, and a game that is surely one of the biggest releases of all time. It's interesting, looking at the two together, how far the games industry has come. From a time when games were coded in a couple of months by some geezer with huge specs and a chunky jumper in his attic, to one in which they're developed over years by teams of hundreds with astronomical budgets. The sole preserve of screaming school-kids, bemused dads and terminally uncool twenty-somethings to a multi-billion dollar international industry that eclipses Hollywood, and can surely only grow further.

I've been a lover of this series since the original, top-down game came out way back in '97 on the original Playstation. In many ways the formula hasn't changed in the eight or so games that have followed on various platforms: a hard-bitten crime simulator, if you will, with lashings of fast driving action and tongue-in-cheek splatter that frequently imitates classic gangster films. It's the sense of humour (all too often missing in video games generally) that's always really separated these games from the many stodgy imitations, though, with a sharp line in biting satire on modern life.

It was Grand Theft Auto III, in 2001, that really made the series into a phenomenon and established the basic pattern of gameplay for the games that would follow - introducing a totally 3d city, one of the most detailed and complex ever realised at the time, incorporating some great characterisation and voice-acting and a new level of immersion and gameplay, with vast amounts of side-missions and flexibility. Every title since has been a massive hit, apparently the franchise has sold over 70 million copies. Despite the many, many imitators it has spawned, nothing really comes close for the mixture of beautifully realised urban settings, range of different games modes including driving, action, role-playing, exploration, and sheer sense of humour. The previous installment, San Andreas, in particular was an enormous, epic game spanning three cities and a whole load of country in between. The only games you can really compare these to are others in the series.

So what's better in GTA IV than the previous one?

Well, graphics, for a pretty major start. I've never been someone who really valued graphics of themselves, they're certainly no substitute for gameplay, but this is the first game I've played on a hi-def console on a proper, quality, hi-def LCD TV, and it does look frickin' amazing. The characters are vastly more detailed and expressive than ever before, which helps with the characterisation. Sometimes when you add detail to people and really get in close it can make them look very unreal - a mistake developers make all too often, especially when new technology becomes available - but they've kept a larger than life, over-vivid, slightly cartoony feel to the faces and places that's consistent with the pop-graphic art they've always used on the covers, and flows beautifully with the whole feel of the world.

Liberty City itself is the real star. I don't think a city, or for that matter any kind of environment, has ever been realised so completely and in such detail on a computer game. I mean the place lives , shifts, changes. Time passes, shadows move and lengthen, weather comes and goes. People of all types throng the streets. They knock into you, drop their hot-dog and call you an asshole. Stuff happens - guys chat about nonsense as you pass, hit up girls, get into fights, get chased by overweight cops. It's a city packed with magic moments, and everyone will have their own - gunning your recently stolen sports car past middle park as the sun peeps between the skyscrapers and burns away the morning mist. Crossing the Broker Bridge at sunset, just as the lights come on. At times, like when I first went up in a helicopter over the city, you'll just think, how the hell is this possible? Parks, churches, affluent office blocks and seedy housing projects, graffiti-daubed flyovers and rubbish-strewn back alleys, floodlit refineries and mansions on the heights, rattling l-trains and echoing tunnels, the sense of realism, the detail, the feel and the variety is amazing.

And the city is absolutely massive. It could easily be three hundred city blocks, arranged in five boroughs that are rough analogues of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Jersey City. It is massive, even by the standards of the previous massive cities in the series, and this is somewhat of a curse as well as a blessing. To truly explore every nook and cranny could take months, and because the city's so big and the content is hence comparatively spread out, there isn't that much to find, just looking at random. At least there wasn't when I tried, and so I soon gave up on that aspect, and just went where the game took me. Driving from one place to another, especially in later missions spanning the whole city, can take ages. You're assisted this time round by a nice guideline on the little mini-map, but again this proves more curse than blessing, as you typically end up following it slavishly from one place to another at high speed, eyes half on it and half on the road, generally missing the urban wonder around you lest you drive your motorbike off a pier. I didn't feel like I got to know the city the way I had the cities in San Andreas - a few landmarks, a few main roads, a couple of blocks round my safehouses, but I didn't know the cut-throughs, the alleyways. They never felt like my streets.

The acid sense of humour that has always characterised the series is there in spades, and suffuses every aspect - the ads on the streets for German beer Piswasser, the talk on the radio stations, the send-ups of tv shows (a cartoon in which american space rangers take democracy to the stars by any means necessary is particularly good), the fact that the statue of liberty holds aloft a disposable coffee cup instead of a torch, and so on. And there's bucketloads of character too. The main character, Niko Bellic, could easily have turned out to be an implacable, brutal, bullet-headed balkan killer of the type we're used to seeing on The Shield. Instead he's funny, honest, very likeable, and has an excellent double-act with his cousin, bullshit-merchant Roman. Other characters are pretty much great across the board, and a wide board it is, from Russian gangsters, to Irish Goons, to Sopranos-style low-rent mafiosi, they're all affectionately drawn and nicely acted. You can build friendships with some of them, go out and get pissed together, take in a show, play darts. If they like you enough they'll offer some special service - cut price guns or a good word with the cops if you find yourself wanted. But the little sub-games are rather repetitive, and despite some occasionally hilarious dialogue, maintaining the relationships can quickly seem more of a chore than a diversion.

The combat has been significantly re-tooled, and mostly for the better. Fist-fighting is fudgier than before, for some reason it's very hard to give someone a shoeing once you've knocked them over, but the gunfighting is way better, with reasonable systems for taking cover, aiming and zooming in that lift the shooting sections of the game considerably. And those sections interact and fit into the rest much more smoothly - there are a lot of interiors you can explore now, merging seamlessly with the rest of the world. You get shoot-outs in museums, in hotels, in housing projects, abandoned hospitals, you name it, you kill gangsters in it. With pistols. Pop, pop, pop go me nine. With shotguns. Boo-yah. With SMGs. Rat-a-tat-tat. With assault rifles, grenades, bazookas... Yes, the violence level is still sky high, but there's a far greater sense of realism, and with it seems to come...responsibility. Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't imagine just going out on the streets and cutting loose with a desert eagle in this game, like I regularly used to on others. It just would have seemed...disrespectful of the environment. And out of character with Niko, who's basically a good guy, forced to do bad things. Very bad things. In line with this new realism some of the more splattery extremes have been pruned. No rampages (little challenges to slaughter a certain number of bystanders with a given weapon in a given time). It feels a more grown up, more adult game, perhaps.

So I've touched on what was worse than last time, what else was worse?

Somewhat of a lack of customisability. In San Andreas, there were a mighty range of options for hair, facial hair, tattoos, jewelry, clothes. You could go down the gym and work out (which with my spinal problems is about as close as I get to a gym these days), or you could pig out on fried chicken, and the results would show on the character, buff or flabby accordingly. I went through noticable phases in different cities and areas, tweaking the appearance to fit the environment. In GTA IV there are far fewer options - the character is always physically the same (kind of fly-weight boxer with a crew-cut, stubble, and a stance that says, "fuck you") there's limited choice of clothes and shoes but not much more. Four shops in the entire game where there were a cornucopia of barbers, tattoo parlours, gyms and clothes places before. There was also a system of experience in San Andreas - you'd get better with a certain type of gun the more you used it, for example. Maybe I've got OCD (actually I definitely have) but the mere existence of things like that make me want to explore them. You felt as if the character grew as the game went on, from punk kid to hardened gangster to feared kingpin. All that was gone in GTA IV - at the end of the game you're basically the same shovel-faced balkan killer you were at the start, just with better shoes and a suit, maybe.

Related to this slight feel of lack of progress is that there seems to be a lot less side-stuff to do, and what there is is less compelling. Specifically lost are the businesses you could buy up, do a couple of jobs to sort out, and would then start making money for you. Maybe there was nothing particularly special about them in terms of gameplay, but it created a sense of building an empire that I really enjoyed. Likewise you no longer buy safehouses, you just get given them at various key points, and there are far fewer. One of the big reasons for earning the money in San Andreas always seemed to be to buy a better pad. You'd look at a big house on the hill and think, one day... With that gone there didn't really seem to be much point in earning all the money. Five or six grand would buy you all the clothes you'd ever need, so then it's just exhorbitant medical bills after you're riddled with lead by a bunch of angry mafiosi, and lots and lots of guns. And you usually pick up all the guns you'd ever need anyway, which leaves the money feeling kind of pointless. There was no fighting for territory, as in San Andreas, no ownership of the streets, so Niko becomes a kind of eternal freelancer, working for bigger, better, richer bosses as he goes along, sure, but basically always an outsider. That was disappointing, especially since Niko's cousin is a kind of lame-ass business man - you'd have thought building up the family business would have been an easy set of missions to include.

There are little extra bits and pieces you can do, of course, just as there were previously. You can hunt criminals in a cop-car, take fares in a cab, steal cars to order, hunt down 200 pigeons scattered about the city if you're completely insane, but without much reason to make the money it feels a bit pointless, and changes very little except the % completed statistic. And I'm getting a bit old to worry about that. It becomes about the main missions only, and getting from one to the other as fast as possible, and the sense of daily life gets kind of lost. It's a good thing that some of the missions are absolutely brilliant. The heat-influenced bank heist in particular - three masked men charging through the back alleys of chinatown, blazing away with assault rifles, escaping down the subway tunnels - is one of the most impressive sequences I've ever seen on a game.

The writing of the cut-scenes, the voice acting and the interaction between the characters is great throughout, but there's a bit of a lack of star turns. San Andreas had some dream casting - Samuel L Jackson and Chris Penn as the bent cops? Peter Fonda as the grass-growing hippy? James Woods as the shady CIA man? Ice T as the washed-up rapper? These were the guys you'd pick if you could pick anyone. GTA IV didn't have any voices that I really recognised. It generally felt a less huge, less epic game, smaller-scale, with less crazy excesses (not necessarily a bad thing) but also a more pedestrian plot and a less satisfying resolution. I found myself rushing through it a bit towards the end, a sure sign that it had slightly lost my interest. I think they pulled a blinder as well by setting the last couple of games in the recent past - 80s, Miami-vice, Carlito's Way style Miami, and 90s, Boyz n the Hood, Colours era LA were instantly themed and recognisable. Setting this game in the now made it somehow less impactful.

In this era of internet connections and downloadable content, perhaps some of these holes will be filled in with future patches. Perhaps the multi-player mode adds layers of depth, or at least additional gameplay, I missed out on. The city they've created could certainly support another two or three complete games without seeming repetitive. I guess time will tell on that score, it's not an area I've really started to explore yet, and I hear additional content will be exclusive to XBox anyway. Ah well...

So the verdict, after all this waffle? A very good game, still, don't get me wrong. But it feels as if it stands slightly in the shadow of world-beating forebears, and in an effort to streamline and simplify they've maybe lost some depth. The all important humour is there, and the setting is spectacular, but the game within it is, for me, a much lesser one than San Andreas. That game I would have given 10/10 without a doubt. For me, GTA IV is closer to an 8.

Labels: games

Tuesday, 27 May 2008

A History of Gaming 1 - Childhood

My name is Joe, and I'm a video games addict.

Been playing them all my life. A lot. Quite a bit less over the last couple of years, what with the writing and the child and all the rest of it, so there hasn't really seemed an apt moment to begin to discuss them. But, as some of you may be aware, Grand Theft Auto IV came out recently, as a result of which I treated myself to a Playstation 3. So over the last few days, rather than waste all my writing time pissing about on the internet, I've been wasting it revving a stolen motorbike through the mean streets of Liberty City, and gunning down gangsters. More of this later, for the time being let me only say that I've found it not quite as magnetic as the previous installment, San Andreas, but still completely brilliant, and - very rare and very welcome in video gaming - the thing that really makes it is the humour, the personality, the writing.

But since, at 33 (a young and spritely one), I've pretty much grown up along with the computer games industry, and witnessed a lot of it take shape first hand, I thought it might be amusing (for me, at least), to push back the mists of time and reminisce about my long association with the medium. To pick out some of the landmarks that have entertained me, transported me, amazed me, and dare I say influenced my writing over the years...

I think we were the third household in my neighbourhood to own a computer when I was...maybe 7 or 8? My old mate Al's dad had a Sinclair ZX80 (huge metal box with clackety-clack-clacky clear plastic keys, action something like the stops on a 1700s organ), my old mate Tom's dad had a home-built Tangerine (the case was made out of wood. Yes, wood, painted magnolia as I recall.) We got an Acorn Atom. It had a staggering 2K of RAM. That's 2000 bytes, or 16,000 bits, biatches! I can still remember the excitement as we swtiched it on and saw that > cursor flash, flash, flashing on the monitor (greenscreen, maybe, or it might even have been just a black and white telly with a screen the size of her majesty's 3p stamp.) Gaming opportunities were limited, however. Probably stuff like space invaders and pac-man were out there at the time in the arcades, probably asteroids and a few others too, but on the Atom all that was really available was Stargate, in which you maneuvred a triangular block of eight or nine massive pixels left to right and tried to shoot other blocks of massive pixels which dropped from above (leaving a fizzing cathode-ray trail behind them). We were utterly gripped and stunned by it, played it madly, hammering at the clackety-clack keyboard until half the keys broke off leaving little metal bars covered in razor-sharp solder, then hammering at those until our fingertips were red-raw. Ah, happy days.

Some time later we got a BBC Model B. It had a staggering 32K of RAM. 32,000 bytes, read 'em and weep, mofos! It had eight colours! You heard right - colours! A whole bold new world opened up. Admittedly, not as much of a one as opened up for owners of the (relatively contemporary with the BBC) Commodore 64, or the sexy rubber-keyboard Sinclair Spectrum 48K. They got top-whack fly shit like Lords of Midnight (very early fantasy adventure/war game which I played about three times round a mate's house and affected me so strongly that I still dream about it), Way of the Exploding Fist (the great, great, granddaddy of all beat-em-ups), and Marsport (whose crap side-to-side graphics and boring gameplay were hailed as revolutionary). The BBC was sold on a semi-apocriphal academic-cum-educational tip, so fun was out, at least to begin with. But we had rocket-raid, horizontally scrolling shooter, which we often played with three of us round the keyboard, my brother steering the ship, me shooting, and my dad dropping the bombs. Wicked times, bro! We also had text adventures. That is games where everything was described by text, and you would enter commands by text. Not much of a development beyond fighting fantasy gamebooks, in fact a step back in some ways. Anyone who remembers those text adventures ever complete one? I remember Philosopher's Quest, Castle of Riddles, and Adventure Quest early on. The ludicrous thing was that, especially in these first efforts, you had to come up with exactly the right phrasing to make something work. To younger people the following will sound inconceivable:

You are standing outside a castle. To the north there is a forest.

What now?

>GO NORTH

You cannot do that right now.

>WALK NORTH

You cannot do that right now.

>NORTH

You cannot do that right now.

>FUCK OFF

You cannot do that right now.

To older people it will no doubt bring back tears of fist-clenched frutstration.

We had the BBC a long time, maybe 4 or 5 years, so things came a long way in that period. Every new game would herald some new development, and noticable genres started to appear which are still around today, albeit it in forms so hugely evolved that they are barely recognisable. Platform games, like Killer Gorilla, Blagger, Manic Miner, and later isometric stuff from ultimate like knight lore. Racing games like Revs. Horizontally, vertically, and diagonally scrolling shooters of all descriptions, always provided with a high score table that you couldn't save and would hence be lost whenever you turned the computer off, occasionally prompting you to try and leave the computer on for ten days straight.

All this magnificent software was supplied on her majesty's audio cassette, probably at around the cost of 8.99, which is seven thousand pounds in today's money (or three million dollars). You'd blow thirty weeks' pocket money, then spend ten minutes loading a game, though it felt like hours, and the machine would make a noise like, "wheeeee-gah-gaaaarrrrrggghhhh-wheeeee-gah-gaaaarrrrrggghhhh-wheeeee-gah-gaaaarrrrrggghhhh-wheeeeee" the whole time while a hexidecimal counter went from 0 to what seemed like 7000 and D, a brightly coloured pixelly picture in the background loudly proclaiming what it was you were missing. Some of you know what I'm talking about. Later floppy discs appeared - not the hard-cased 3.5inch ones that have only recently disappeared to be replaced by CD and DVD ROM and flash drives, but the proper 5.25inch floppy, wibbly-wobbly ones. The double-disk drive we had weighed about 70 kilos, and made a noise like a washing machine. But it moved like the proverbial shit off a shovel compared to audio tape, let me tell you.

The BBC also featured the first Word Processor with which I was ever acquainted. Wordstar, a piece of software so powerful that you had to send your computer away so it could be installed on the motherboard on its own chip. Me and my mate Tom actually tried to write a fantasy masterpiece on it, believe it or not. I don't remember the title, but it featured the attempts of three mismatched young companions to reclaim the lost kingdom of their people, and featured the timeless sentence: "they will never forget their long-forgotten land." Hugo, anyone?

So what really stands out from those sunny slopes of long ago, in terms of gaming? What do I still fondly think of, draw inspiration from, not perhaps for what it was, but for what it made me feel? Well, for me, a game called Twin Kingdom Valley, which was a graphic adventure (basically a text adventure but with pictures) in a magical valley split by the lake of Watersmeet into a desert and a forest kingdom. The amazing thing was there was a picture for pretty much every one of its hundreds of locations. They'd seem absurd now, perhaps, but at the time it was magical. I still don't know how they coded such a massive game into 32K. It was a also a lot more free-form than the adventures I'd played heretofore, not an impossibly grammatical puzzle in every location, and featured combat, which was WAY cool.

>HIT TROLL WITH BROADSWORD

A troll is hit with a broadsword. A troll is dead.

Now that's more like it!

Then there was Citadel, a colossal side-on platform game from Superior Software which featured a massive game world with all kinds of settings, and some puzzles which actually made sense. Gasp. I actually completed that one, which was a real rarity back in those days. Turned out to be about an alien invasion, in the end, of all things. Doesn't everything, though...

And finally, the game which represents by far the biggest quantum leap forward in gaming I've ever witnessed, which saw mind-expanding innovation in pretty much every area, which was literally YEARS ahead of its time ... Elite. It was basically a space combat game, but also featured trading, piracy, bounty hunting, exploration. It was probably the first game to be entirely open-ended, so you could do whatever you pleased on it, set your own goals. The universe was indescribably massive (repetitive, perhaps, but not by the standards of the day, and undoubtedly massive). Above all, it was the first serious game to feature 3d graphics. Wire-frame, see through vector-graphics, but still. Can you believe the impact? Before, and for quite a while after for that matter, everything was cardboard sprites, usually seen side-on, often moving round single static screens. In Elite you were plunged into a three dimensional world, of objects tumbling in space, of planets and suns, of dogfights with pirate ships, of fumbling, fatal attempts to dock with space-stations.

With games that take huge leaps in one area or another, they often suffer in others. Ground-breaking graphics is all too often accompanied by shoddy gameplay. Not so here. The structure of trading, to make money, to buy better weapons, to kill pirates, to get better combat ratings, to make more money, seems simple now, obvious, maybe, but was compelling beyond belief at the time. And the flying itself was revolutionary, swift, responsive, effortlessly intuitive. The ships seemed to have weight, inertia. The AI was like nothing seen before - enemies would break off, spin, tumble away, evade. The radar was easy to read and always worked. Hard to believe it was released more than 25 years ago. Looking back on this game now, it seems such a vast leap forward that it's almost an anomaly, an aberration that you have to consider separately from everything else that followed for about five years. It was to other games of the time as the human being is to the amoeba. This was a game so mind-blowingly good that it was successfully released, years later, on the next generation of computers with only the most passing of cosmetic changes.

Elite. Greatest game of all time? For me, probably. It's certainly hard to imagine, in this much more jaded age, anything having such an impact across the board as that game did.

Anyway, that takes me up until about age 12, I think. If any of you give a toss, by all means share some of your own gaming experiences in the comments section. Nothing past about 1985, though! We're going to get there later. In the next thrilling installment, I get me an Atari ST. 1024K, man! That's right, we call that a frikking MEGABYTE! And what's this big grey, squeaky box? It's a little thing called a MOUSE, motherf*cker!

EDIT: On looking some of these games up on the internet, I've found Wikipedia links for a lot, with screenshots that might bring back some memories, so I've added some in where possible. You can also find video walkthroughs of some, complete with sound effects on google video. A lot of them are actually available through various emulators. Lords of Midnight is apparently still quite widely played twenty-five years later, and has a few thriving communities dedicated to it. Twin Kingdom Valley can be downloaded to play on your mobile phone, believe it or not. That's an interesting point, actually, how as technology changes some of the classics get new leases of life on different platforms...

Labels: games

Saturday, 24 May 2008

Joe Mallozzi's Book Club Part 2

So I have responded to the questions of Joe's readers over here at immense and self-indulgent length. Check it out, it is a scream. And exciting. But also makes you think deeply. Kind of like The First Law trilogy, in fact.

So if you've somehow missed me talking about my general approach to fantasy here over the past few months, or if you wanted to know my answers to such questions as:

"Do you prefer sugar or no sugar in your tea?"

"How much research did you do into swords and battles?"

"Do you tone it down for readers of a sensitive disposition?"

And many more, or if you were curious about the difference between whinging and whining, there really is nowhere else to go. My thanks to Joe M for providing the forum, and, of course, for shifting some books to the unwitting public...

Labels: interviews, news

Tuesday, 20 May 2008

Joe Mallozzi's Book Club

No, not an offbeat episode of the Sopranos, but an exciting initiative from writer, critic, bon vivant, and Stargate Atlantis joint-supremo Joe Mallozzi. We go back a long way me and Joe. We first met at one of Baron Destructo's interminable drinks events, it's a long story, and since then we've never looked back. You'd be amazed the conversational mileage that can be derived from simply having the same first name as someone else - already I have more in common with him than almost anyone else I know.

Anyway, as well as a writer, exec. producer, blogger and prolific eater, the other Joe is also a keen reader of sci-fi and, more recently, fantasy, and has decided to present some of this high-class genre material to his many readers. He examines, discusses, and invites comments on a sci-fi book, horror book, and fantasy book each month. This week's choice? Why, only the first part of Joe Abercrombie's seminal modern fantasy trilogy The First Law, no book other than The Blade Itself!

But dial down your pacemakers, because to make matters more exciting still, Joe has managed to prevail upon many of the authors of his featured works (some of whom aren't even called Joe) to join in the discussions. He's already had my US editor, the wonderful Lou Anders on to discuss his anthology Fast Forward, and he's got folks such as John Scalzi, John Shirley, Kage Baker, and KJ Bishop upcoming. And yes, indeed, you guessed it, I'll be hijacking Joe's blog later in the week to answer questions/dodge sh*t flung at me by his readers in relation to the Blade Itself. There are already a few gems showing up in the comments section, including such stuff as:

"I can't really review 'The Blade Itself' because I only made it to page 100 before I gave up and turned to 'The Android's Dream'. I guess the book was just not for me."

A ha ha ha. But seriously, I think this is a great thing Joe's doing, and I'm delighted to be involved. By all means drop by yourselves, and join in the fun...

Labels: news, reviews

Monday, 19 May 2008

God of Publication Dates Part 3

Ah, forgot to mention one interesting detail (well, interesting to me anyway). Looks as if the UK trade edition of Best Served Cold will be hardback only, rather than the previous setup of a small hardback run and a general trade paperback release. However it'll be priced about the same as the trade paperbacks have been previously (so in the region of £12.99, I'm guessing). Then there'll be a mass-market paperback probably 12 months later. Lovers of hardcovers rejoice! Haters of trade paperbacks rejoice!

With any luck the US edition should come out about the same time as the UK edition this time round as well. No longer need you cast your jealous eyes across the briny Atlantic. Americans Rejoice!

All details subject to confirmation and total change at short notice. You can preorder Best Served Cold on amazon.co.uk, which features a blurb I don't particularly like. They still say april, and they still say paperback. These details, as you now know, are WRONG. Ah, well. Everyone rejoice!

Labels: news

Saturday, 17 May 2008

God of Publication Dates Part 2

Well, here are two publication dates that I'm pretty sure won't move back. Why? Because the book's already written, that's why!


Last Argument of Kings will be out in the US in September, from Pyr books. You can order it now on amazon.com. Before they are Hanged actually shipped a month early, so you never know, this one might do too...


And Last Argument of Kings will be out in Germany in Oktober, under the name "Konigsklingen", which I'm taking a wild guess means something along the lines of "King's Blade". So the series is Kriegsklingen, Feuerklingen, and Konigsklingen, or Warblade, Fireblade, and King's Blade. Old skool, man, but they're doing pretty darn well over there apparently, so you won't catch me complaining. No sirree.

Anyway, it's available for pre-order on amazon.de for any german-speakers amongst you. Although, thinking about it, if you only spoke german you might have some trouble understanding this post. It's paired with the third book in the Eragon series, would you believe - not sure how good a match THAT'll be for the YA fantasy crowd, what with all the explicit violence, sex, and swearing but, hey, Eragon sells shed loads so, again, you won't catch me complaining. I could only find the cover at this rather poor resolution, but it appears to feature a kind of a halberdy thing on blue. I don't remember any polearms featuring particularly heavily in the text, but since the more common epic-fantasy staple edged weapons of sword (on green - Kriegsklingen) and axe (on red - Feuerklingen) have already been used, you know, where do you go? Mace or Warhammer? Blunt instruments. Dagger? Too short. Spear? Not really bladey enough. Scimitar? Too Gurkish. Falchion? Sabre? Estoc? Too obscure. Anyway, I digress. Konigsklingen - Oktober.

Woohoo! I love it when books I've already written come out in other markets. It feels like being paid for doing no work. It is being paid for doing no work! Or, ahem, you know, reaping the hard-won benefits of earlier midnight toil...

Labels: announcements, news

Friday, 16 May 2008

The God of Publication Dates

Gather round, my friends, for I have some (slightly) bad news. Publication Date for Best Served Cold has moved from April 2009 back to June 2009. Only a couple of months, which is probably small fry for some of you folks who are used to waiting for books, but I thought that you should be the first to know. Other than me. And my editor. And some other folks at the publisher. And some booksellers. But I thought you'd want to know, anyway, nice and early, to keep any disappointment as small and far off as possible. Nothing worse than camping outside the bookstore all night in the pissing rain, charging in bright-eyed and sweaty-palmed as the doors open only to be told the book's been put back a year, right?

Now I hang around some forums, so I see people get quite irritated about shifting publication dates, and I entirely understand. So in the interests of full transparency, let me attempt to explain a) what's going on with my writing process that has caused the publication date to be moved in this case and, b) why it is that you seem to get considerable delays even once you hear a manuscript has been handed in.

So, Best Served Cold. It's a simple story, in a way, a lot less complicated than The First Law, certainly. So why's it taken me a good few months longer to write than I expected? New characters is the main problem. New characters mean new approaches, new feels to create. For me the characters are the essence of the book, so getting them properly realised is key. That's taken time to a degree I didn't entirely aniticipate. The characters in the First Law had fermented in my mind over the course of years, then I'd taken two or three years with no pressure to happily work the approaches out in the first book before I ever got a publishing contract, and long before anything was printed. You know, when it was a hobby and fun, rather than the hideous drudgery of actual work. These new characters, particularly the central one, have had to be worked out from scratch and that's been (and still is being) a challenge.

Plus I'd got used to the pace I was working at with Last Argument of Kings, and foolishly extrapolated my likely writing pace from there. That was pretty damn fast, took about 14 months including all the editing. But that was writing the third in a trilogy, the characters, plots, endings long established in my mind and ready to be vomited out onto the page. This new project has proved more difficult. In a sense, since the trilogy was one long story, this book has felt much more like my "difficult second album" than the second book did, which was only really a continuation of the first. I am beginning to understand why people end up writing endless series...

Partly in order to make my life easier, and partly because I like books that tend toward the shorter and more concise end of the epic fantasy spectrum, I'd aimed for something tighter than the previous three (which were 195,000, 200,000, and 230,000 words respectively, oh yeah, real short and concise, Joe), somewhere in the region of 150,000-175,000, which I thought I could knock off in 12 months. Slight errors at the planning stage (chronic overambition, incompetence, failure, that kind of thing) have led to the book getting quite a bit longer than that - I'm guessing it'll work out about 220,000 now. Longer books take longer to write, you'll be surprised to learn.

Then there are the distractions and pressures that come with having books out there in the marketplace and (relatively) successful. Interviews, blogging, responding to email, endlessly searching for anyone talking about you, checking your amazon sales ranks every hour in four different countries, etc. That vital work all takes up time and energy one could have expended writing. And though I'm doing a lot less of the day job these days, it's funny how the pace of writing doesn't necessarily increase to match (more on this in due course, perhaps).

Then, given that this is a standalone book, I decided to take a different approach. With a series, one would desire to write the entire thing before the first book is published, so if some brilliant idea occurs while writing the last you can just alter the first here or there to match. In the real world this tends not to be possible, since a man's gotta eat and so on, and generally you'll have to publish the first book before you've written the rest, which means you need to be pretty damn sure of where you're going if you want your last book to be any good. It means a lot of revising and thinking as you go along. An awful lot, in the case of The First Law. Because Best Served Cold is a standalone I thought, aha, I'll just Bosh out a first draft quick sharp, not worry too much about getting it right, then revise and edit much more heavily than usual en masse, giving much greater economy of scale! The shackles are off! I am free! Free! Problem is I know I've left a lot of stuff that needs a lot of work behind, and that's going to mean more editing than with the previous books, which is going to mean more time after the first draft is finished to get things right, and etc.

So cut the sh*t, Joe, can you just tell us what authors will never bloody tell us, and say where are you actually up to with this book? Well, er, yes, thanks for asking. It's in seven parts, and I'm just finishing the first draft of the fifth part, so about three quarters of the way through. Well, that doesn't seem so bad, it's only May, a whole eleven months before the original pub date! True, I still hope to have the first draft finished and then thoroughly revised to my own satisfaction maybe end of August. Two months for some furious editing, polish and tidy up, and a month for copy edit and back and forth, have the bastard well and truly nailed by the end of the year. Proofs out, all hail my genius, unprecedented combination of critical and commercial success, buried under an avalanche of cash and awards, no, no, not another Hugo, I couldn't possibly, oh alright then just one more, mansion in the country with pool shaped like a magic sword, right?

But I know what you're thinking now. If it's all finished before the end of the year, why the f*ck does anyone need to move the pub date from April to June?

Come closer, closer. No, even closer. Not that close, I can smell you. And attend, as I reveal to you the hidden mysteries of the dark arts of publishing.

There's a lot more to it than just getting it typeset, proof-reading for errors, then boshing it off to the printers and counting the cash. For one thing the production department of a big publisher may have dozens of books going through at a time, from many different imprints, and everything has to take its place in the queue. They can't just be twiddling their thumbs waiting for that one author you like to finish their manuscript. These things can take some time.

But there are much more time-consuming processes than the obvious ones of physically producing the product. If you're going to give a book the best chance of selling well then booksellers need to know when it's going to appear some time in advance. The more warning they get, the further in advance they can plan their buying, the better chance of getting better display space and support. Editors need some time to get folks in their own company enthused about a book - the publicists, the reps who will try to sell books on to booksellers, the rights department who may be trying to sell the book to other markets. The longer you have and the firmer the date, the better chance of prising some marketing cash from the gripping fingers of the soul-less money men (I don't mean it, I really don't). The more time you have between finishing the final edit and publishing the book means more time to get proofs out to reviewers and more time for them to read the book, which means more chance of it getting reviews, of there being some buzz, or at least some awareness of the existence of a book before it comes out. All of this is going to help sales. Indeed, for a little known author it could make the difference between some exposure and none, between some sales and very few.

Then there is the question of scheduling. A publisher doesn't want to be releasing two similar books too close together, because they'll end up competing with each other, not only for the generous cash of the book-buying public, but also for the attention of the marketing within their own organisation, the reps who go out and try and sell the books to booksellers, and the booksellers themselves who need to fill their shelves. They don't want to be saying, "this book is the most important epic fantasy released anywhere this month ... apart from this one which we also have, which is just as good if not better, well, not better, but ... where are you going?" Schedules get filled up, books have to be moved around other books, and the later the delay occurs the worse the problem, which is why sometimes a small delay in delivery can mean publication has to be shifted months later, into the next free slot.

So you can see there are a compelling stack of reasons why it's in the best interests of a book to have 9-12 months between delivery of a first draft and publication. With the really big, well-established authors it's less important. Booksellers, reps and readers aren't going to say no to A Dance With Dragons because it doesn't turn up on time, for example, but if you push it down to less than six months you're limiting editing time, proof-reading time, putting added pressure on everyone involved and taking some risks with the quality of the output. Ever wondered why books that are long-delayed may seem sloppily edited? Wonder no longer...

Phew. So that's why we've decided to move the publication date of Best Served Cold back a couple of months at this early stage, to reduce the pressure on the writing somewhat, to ensure the editing time isn't squeezed, to give the book the best chance as it goes through the pipes of marketing, repping, selling and so on. The God of Publication Dates is a jealous god, and it's best to upset it as little as possible. Best to move the book now, nice and early, to avoid disappointment later. Yours and mine. We all want the best possible product, after all.

So, as I say, Best Served Cold, June 2009, stick it in your diaries. I'm entirely confident it won't have to go back any further than that.

Honest...

Labels: announcements, news, process

Monday, 12 May 2008

Assorted Stuff

The guys at Westeros.org have done a little survey to establish the top ten favourite sf&f authors for their readership, and guess who came in 9th place?

That's right, new kid on the block, Joe Abercrombie.

Oh, yes indeed. Finally OBJECTIVE AND INCONTROVERTIBLE PROOF of what I have long suspected, that I am a writer situated WITHOUT FEAR OF CONTRADICTION at the DIZZY SUMMIT OF MY FIELD.

In order to reach the exalted heights of ninth place it was necessary, of course, to clamber up a mountain of the skulls of lesser authors. I opened a can of whoop-ass on such talentless hacks as Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, and Edgar Allen Poe. I spanked Haruki Murakami, pwned Umberto Eco, and made Franz Kafka where his ASS for a HAT. I know what you're thinking. Those last three aren't really sf&f authors by any meaningful definition are they? Well, no, I suppose they're not, but they're all united in GETTING LESS VOTES THAN ME.

Of course, this is a site dedicated to GRRM, so it's understandable that epic fantasy, and epic fantasy of the grittier persuasion for that matter, should do well with the membership there. Plus there's always a huge effect of recency in such votes and I have had three books out pretty close together, one of them just a couple of months ago, so the god of release dates (or is he a devil?) has been kind to me on this occasion. Still very gratifying, of course. My thanks to everyone who voted.

For me.

What's that you say, you've read the entire First Law Trilogy and want more Joe Abercrombie? Well how about going to JW Builders, where they have not one, but two Joe Abercrombies for hire at once! Father and son, no less. Admittedly, Joe Sr. and Joe Jr. don't write gritty yet hilarious fantasy, but rather are experts in steel construction within the Cedaredge Colorado region.

File this one under surreal. Natalie Hatch has listed me in her post on "more foxy male authors". There, I am, all dark and dangerous, just under that picture of Chris Ryan looking all buff and oiled up. I must just correct the small error there however - I am an editor, not a producer. As far as foxiness goes, though, GUILTY ... AS ... CHARGED. Dear, dear, the things one can achieve with good lighting. And the things one finds using google blog search...

Back to safer and more familiar ground! A review of Last Argument of Kings from Robert at Sci-Fi London:

"all of the characters, even the bit players, are beautifully realised, being recognisable without resorting to cliche, the world they live in is nicely presented but without overpowering the story like so many fantasy worlds do and the writing is straightforward and direct giving the action scenes an immediacy that moves things along at a decent clip but at the same time it doesn't flinch from giving us the grim details where necessary ... The conclusion to this gripping trilogy, like it's forerunners, is worth every second of your rapt attention. If you haven't had the pleasure of diving into Joe Abercrombie's world then I urge you to do so now, you'll be glad you did."

I likes it. A more mixed review from Larry Nolen over at Strange Horizons, where they like a bit of, in the timeless words of Samuel L. Jackson, that serious gourmet sh*t:

"My reaction to this novel could be summarized as "what could have been." If the characters had been developed just a bit more, if Abercrombie had "shown" their conflicts rather than just "telling" us about them, if there had been a better balance between the external conflict and the characters' internal clashes ... if all of that had happened, then Last Argument of Kings could have been a work that transcended its setting. Instead, The First Law series as a whole will appeal mostly to epic fantasy junkies, with little to recommend it to those who believe that epic fantasies as a whole are little more than tired repetitions of the same worn-out schema."

Limited appeal? I beg to differ! Am I not ABSOLUTELY DEFINITELY OBJECTIVELY one of the ten best f&sf authors on the planet ever? I think I am! Larry has invited me to call him a poopyhead in response. Naturally, I am entirely above such things, and will merely note instead that he's used the phrase, "as a whole" twice in one sentence. Ah, what could have been - if it weren't for such tired repetitions of worn out schema this could have been a review that transcended its setting...

Still, there's nothing to stop you lot, the voice of the unwashed masses, calling Larry a poopyhead in the comments section below. I'm sure he'll also thoroughly enjoy any use of the terms "pretentious" and "elitist", along with, perhaps, some numerical evaluations of his reviewing skills, with as many decimal places as you should desire...

Labels: ha ha, reviews

Wednesday, 7 May 2008

Hi-Brow Heaven - The Histories

What the hell is WRONG with me? I hate EVERYTHING, and here I am being embarrassingly enthusiastic about four things in a row? What have I enjoyed lately, you ask? Why, only the RSC's production of Shakespeare's History Cycle at the Roundhouse in London, in chronological order (so Richard II, Henry IV parts 1&2, Henry V, Henry VI 1,2&3, and Richard III). Eight entirely uncut plays, and on two separate occasions three plays in one day.

Oh yeah. Let it never be said that I is not one cultured, hi-brow motherf*cker.

Three uncut plays in one day is a lot. Thirteen hours or more in the theatre and surrounds, maybe eight hours in the chair. If they hadn't been good it could've been pretty unpleasant. If they'd been bad it could've been hellish.

But, on the whole, they were amazing.

Stunning acting - I've rarely seen it look so natural, fluid and involving, possibly because these actors have been virtually living together for the past six years or so, and performing these plays to audiences for a good part of that time. It's a world away from a couple of actors drily spouting the lines at each other while others stand stiffly round and watch. The familiarity with the verse, the drama in the gestures and the glances, the small responses of onlookers, all make it very easy to understand.

Truly incredible staging, in the main - performed in the round, but with gangways at the front as well as the back so that there is an effortless flow to the movement of actors on and off stage. There's also a lot of rope-work - guys glide in from above, dangle from straps, burst up from below. The entire French court, harpsichord and all, at one point hang languidly suspended above the stage from trapezes. I make it sound gimmicky, but believe me it ain't, I've seen enough gimmicky Shakespeare (the tap-dancing production of Romeo and Juliet will stick particularly in my mind until my dying day, and not in a good way) and this was the opposite. There was always a point, a reference in the text, and in the main it was very stripped back, very simple - a huge amount was achieved with a bit of smoke and some clever lighting, some feathers drifting down from above or some other gentle touch. Never the slightest sense of being embarrassed by the text, of wanting to jazz it up for the modern audience.

Many breathtaking moments, particularly in the Henry VIs - Bedford opening up the stage to let the ghost of Henry V rise from its grave to lead the charge. Edward IV sweeping on, newly crowned, to talk of happy futures, blood leaking from his long white gown and leaving a slick across the floor. Jack Cade hanging upside down among his carnival of bloody followers to pass sentence on anyone who can write. The Henry VIs were particularly excellent - although they're usually thought of as minor works and not often performed - there was something about the scattergun, quickfire, ensemble nature of them that worked particularly well with the company and the fluid way it was staged.

If one was in a churlish frame of mind (which, of course, I usually am) one could point to a couple of weaknesses - I'm partial to a bit of David Warner (I mean, come on, he was Sark in Tron, Gul Madred in Star Trek NG, and - one of my favourite roles of all time - the voice of Jon Irenicus in Baldur's Gate II for chrissakes), but he's a subtle sort of actor, and I felt he was a bit miscast as Falstaff. Henry IV 2 lagged a bit in places, but then it's probably the poorest of the eight plays, a bit of a sequel for sequel's sake, perhaps, looking like a rerun of the greatest hits of Henry IV 1, but with less of the excitement and none of the novelty. Something I, as a fantasy author, can only whole-heartedly deplore.

The Richard III was slightly disappointing for me, as well. By no means bad, but they made an odd decision, after doing the other seven in largely medieval-cum-elizabethan style, to set that one firmly in modern, gangster-y dress, which suited the play well enough on its own but seemed to separate it from the rest of the cycle and render it more mundane, and on occasion maybe even just that little bit gimmicky. Jonathan Slinger had been brilliantly menacing as hunchbacked Gloucester in the Henry VIs, furious and charming by turns, but the Richard III seemed to be too much played for laughs, too rarely for real menace.

Details, though. On the whole it was a maginificent twenty or so hours of theatre, and definitely given an added depth by seeing the whole cycle more or less together in one piece, and with the same actors playing their characters throughout, resurfacing as ghosts, picking up echoes of old characters in new roles. No waiting a year between installments here. Ahem.

I could go on. But the chances are high that one or more of these apply to you:

a) don't give a toss about Shakespeare.

b) don't live in England, so have limited chance of seeing these productions.

c) since the run has nearly finished and the rest of it is sold out, can't see it now even if you wanted to.

d) you are totally bored, and wondering when I'll start bitching about my own reviews and cussing stuff off again. Soon, my friends, soon. No way can life stay THIS good for long.

Therefore I close.

Labels: film and tv

Thursday, 1 May 2008

Clarke, Morgan, Tiny Trousers

I was at the Arthur C. Clarke Awards last night. Richard Morgan won, for Black Man. Wooooh! Go Gollancz! Etc. Here he is, with award:


Thanks to Jon Weir for the picture, and many congratulations to Morgsy, couldn't happen to a nicer bloke. I know what you're thinking. They give you a book? Surely the one thing a writer could never need more of. But don't worry, they actually give you money as well for this one. Actual money. I'll be hitting him up for a loan later on today...

It was good, in a way, to see an award that gets some stick for leaning too far towards the literary extremes of the genre, go to an unashamedly sci-fi book from an unashamedly genre publisher. After the ceremony, folks associated with Gollancz repaired to a Chinese restaurant to bask in the reflected glory and ingest a lethal cocktail of msg and saturated fats. Mmmm. Smells like victory.

A cornucopia of award-winning SF writers were in attendance, including the aforementioned Morgan, Roger Levy, Adam Roberts, Paul McAuley, Geoff Ryman, Chris Wooding, Stephen Baxter, and none other than Harry Harrison, whose Stainless Steel Rat and Bill the Galactic Hero I well remember reading as a kid, in his 80s and still going strong, talking of collapsing short-story markets and immense Russian print-runs.

At one point in the evening I very definitely saw a pair of tiny trousers, in a poor quality plastic bag, passed from Adam Roberts to Roger Levy. A gesture the precise significance of which escapes me. Perhaps a kind of Sicilian insult from one Literary SF writer to another?

"Your writing has no balls."

Labels: news