Tuesday, 25 August 2009

The Heroes

With Best Served Cold already three months out (can it really be so long?), perhaps the time has come to talk a little about my next book. Like Best Served Cold it's intended to be a semi-standalone, which can be read on its own (hopefully) but has a few characters and settings in common with the First Law.

It is called:

The Heroes

Both because the action centres around a ring of standing stones called the Heroes, and because it's about heroism and that (meant semi-ironically, of course). It mostly takes place over the course of three days, and is the story of a single battle for control of the North. Think Lord of the Rings meets A Bridge Too Far, with a sprinkling of Band of Brothers and Generation Kill. It's about war, you get me? Principally it follows the (mis)adventures of six assorted persons on both sides and different levels of command, whose paths intersect during the course of the battle in various fateful, horrible, wonderful, surprisingly violent, surprisingly unviolent, and hilarious ways. With the Northmen: a veteran losing his nerve who just wants to keep his crew alive, an ex-Prince determined to claw his way back to power by any means necessary, a young lad determined to win a place in the songs for himself. With the Union: A depressive swordsman who used to be the king's bodyguard, a profiteering standard-bearer, and the venomously ambitious daughter of the Marshal in command. But of course a fair few familiar faces show up on both sides...

I'm just finishing up the first draft of the second part of five, so two fifths of the way through, about 85,000 words in. Which means the whole thing is looking like about 220,000 words - similar length to Best Served Cold and Last Argument of Kings. Really want to write some shorter books one of these days. REALLY want to. Provided I keep writing relatively smoothly (which is by no means a certainty given that we've got a massive building project starting over the next few months), the whole first draft will hopefully be done spring next year. A fair bit of editing will no doubt be required, though, meaning that an October publication is just too tight. For small fry like me November through January is pretty much the zone of death, which means February 2011 is probably the soonest you guys can expect to see it lighting up the shelves, alas.

That'll mean 20 months between books, which is a fair bit more than I'd like in general but, hey, maybe I'll be able to get a head start on the next thing (yeah, right). It also means no book from me in 2010, though I'll have a short story out in an anthology. So, the headlines:

The Heroes. It's about War. February 2011 (hopefully).

Labels: announcements, news, process

Tuesday, 18 August 2009

The Magicians

So some time back in June some guy called Lev Grossman emails me and asks (very politely), since his book is paired with mine on amazon uk, whether I'd fancy reading it, since he was getting a copy of Best Served Cold. I was like, "yeah, whatever, free book." If I had known then that Lev Grossman was in fact the book critic for Time Magazine, I would have been far more sycophantic in my correspondence. Far more.

Took a while for the book to arrive, and believe me, it's a beautiful looking hardcover on which serious design effort has been expended, with the deckled edges, and the author's initials stamped into the book under the dustjacket, and a lavish map not printed craply across two pages but on proper end sheets and what have you. It also begins with a quote from one of my favourite speeches from Shakespeare, so we were off to a good start, I can tell you.

Anyway - Quentin Coldwater is a super-clever nerd depressive who hates his life and is obsessed with a series of twee fantasy books about Fillory, an invented land highly reminiscent of Narnia. Everything seems to change when he passes an entrance exam to a school of magic in upstate New York and is trained to be a magician, but magic turns out to pose more problems than it solves...

I guess you could say - if you were fond of incompetently describing things by likening them to things it's only superficially like, which, of course, I am - that there's a Harry Potter meets Narnia meets Catcher in the Rye vibe about it. I'm not sure if it's fair to say that Grossman is trying to do with Harry Potter and Narnia something not entirely unlike what I'm trying to do with Lord of the Rings and the Belgariad, that is to present a story that is self-consciously classic with a grittier, more realistic, more morally ambiguous spin and a slightly ironic raised eyebrow at its source material. In general, I think he's been pretty successful, sometimes very - it's sharply observed, it's surprising, it's often funny, sometimes very imaginative and occasionally quite scary, and ultimately gets you thinking, which is good thing for any book to do.

Some mild spoilers will follow, so the obsessive compulsive should look away. The book splits into four sections. In the first and much the largest Quentin attends magic school from entrance exam to graduation. For me this was the least effective, but that may well be because (gasp) I've never read any Harry Potter so I was missing a lot of references. In the third part Quentin and some of his friends (or not) travel to magical Fillory. This I felt was much more effective - the contrast between the wondrous location with its naiads and talking animals and the banality of the misfiring adolescent relationships and d&d flavoured in-jokes of the protagonists allowed for a lot of laughs. Plus when magic began to be used in anger, it was pretty shocking.

But oddly for a book about magic (or perhaps not oddly, since it's really about the relationship between the fantastical and the humdrum), I found it was at its most powerful when it was at its most mundane. Soul-destroying holidays in grey Brooklyn after the wonders of termtime delving into the mysteries of the universe. Loafing around in banal New York, bored, trying to work out what to do with one's life after graduating. The best part for me was the last, in which Quentin abandons his godlike powers in order to live a tedious existence as a mid-level executive in a Manhattan office block. The depictions of magic were often fascinating, but they didn't have the ring of truth about them (how could they, they're magic), the depictions of depression, of boredom, of ennui definitely did, and it was the honesty of those that really made this book work for me...

Labels: reading

Monday, 10 August 2009

Inspirations for Best Served Cold

Wishing I'd release another trilogy? Great news, everyone, I have! A trilogy of guest blog posts, that is, at amazon.com's omnivoracious, on the subjects of my inspirations for Best Served Cold. Stating one's inspirations is a messy and difficult business, a bit like trying to talk about the events that made you what you are as a person. You always have to oversimplify and make the process seem a great deal more mechanical than it is. Often hard to really say why things turn out the way they do. Still, here they are:

Point Blank, Lee Marvin, and Revenge.

Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy.

The Condottieri.

Enjoy responsibly.

Labels: influences

Wednesday, 5 August 2009

Both Sides of the Coin

More opinions on my writing pour out into the ether with every exhalation, it sometimes seems, and some over the last few weeks from notable sources too. We begin with a review from Lisa Tuttle in no less historic organ than The Times:

"Joe Abercrombie is probably the brightest star among the new generation of British fantasy writers"

Probably? How dare you, madam?

"Abercrombie never underestimates the horrors that people are prepared to inflict on one another, or their longlasting, often unexpected, consequences. I am not the target audience for this sort of story but it hooked me. Abercrombie writes a vivid, well-paced tale that never loosens its grip. His action scenes are cinematic in the best sense, and the characters are all distinct and interestingly different."

Closely followed by a review from Time magazine's book critic and geek supremo Lev Grossman:

"Abercrombie writes dark, adult fantasy, by which I mean there's a lot of stabbing in it, and after people stab each other they sometimes have sex with each other. His tone is morbid and funny and hard-boiled, not wholly dissimilar to that of Iain Banks ... Like Fritz Leiber he has a gift for describing hand to hand combat -- you can see in your head where the blades are going, what is clanging off what, the sweat, the blood, the banter. And like George R. R. Martin Abercrombie has the will and the cruelty to actually kill and maim his characters ... Volumetrically speaking, it's hard to think of another fantasy novel in which this much blood gets spilled."

There you go. I am like all the best bits of Iain Banks, Fritz Leiber, and George RR Martin combined. Honest. Lev Grossman says so, so it is fact. I'm reading his book at the moment, as it goes, and muchly enjoying it, of which more in due course. Best Served Cold has also been perused by the star of Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, The Guild, and much more, Felicia Day, also a connoiseur of all things geekly, who tweets:

"OMG Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold is out today and its great! LOVE his "First Law" Trilogy. Hard-edged, gritty fantasy at its best!"

Seems like a throwaway line, but I am shocked to be informed that whenever she twitters it reaches over a million people. That is some internet muscle right there. Probably that's more people even than my blog reaches, if you can believe it.

But it's not all champagne and oysters over here, oh no. I have always undertaken to provide the world with both sides of the coin, the rough with the smooth, the bad reviews with the good, and so to a consideration of The First Law trilogy from Jonathan Goodwin, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. I will quote its searing conclusion:

"A book, presumably written during this decade, which seems to specifically invoke various doctrines of power and the exercise thereof, and which prominently features torture, might be said to be a political allegory malgre lui. To extend this would take me to into the type of quasi-Zizekianism that I warded away earlier; but I think it's there. I hear echoes of the Drurian Strauss in some of the discussions of power and (not to) the people, and what popular revolt there is in the novel is eaten or led by the Eater. Vaguely pregnant with meaning, this."

Oh, man, he made mincemeat of me! Or, at least, he might have, if I had the foggiest clue what the hell he was talking about.

Labels: reviews