Thursday, 31 December 2009

Best Of...

Happy Birthday to Me. Happy Birthday to Me. Happy Birthday dear me-eeeee...

Yes indeed, another year of dry humour, wet nappies, sleepless nights, wonderful reviews, shitty reviews, and storming success drags to a close. So long 2009! Nice knowing you. A busy year, for me. I had a baby. I moved from London to Bath. I sold a flat and bought one. I even published another book! With all these good things to celebrate, one wonders why I still feel slightly anxious all the time. It's the modern condition, people!

An end, as well, to another year of blogging. Shall we look back to some of the highlights...?

Most Commented On Blog Post
Storming up the charts with 80 comments was my response to my favourite review of the year "People suck, war is bad, and the world is a bottomless shithole," which included, alongside the trademark apparently self-deprecating while actually being self-glorifying wit, some thoughtful introspection on the subject of ragged and unhappy endings. It even managed to beat last year's 60 comment winner. Proof positive, as if any were needed, that thought-provoking consideration of genre issues CAN be more interesting than being hit over the head with a piece of wood. A score for the intelligentsia. Runners up were an opportunity for you all to bitch about my US cover (always popular), with 55 comments, and my musings on my neighbour's teenage son never having heard of Dungeons & Dragons, with 42. Perhaps if I can think of more worthwhile and thoughtful posts to make I can break the 100 mark next year. No. I don't think so either...

Best Foreign Trip
I might have felt strangely sick the whole time I was there for no apparent reason, but Sweden/Norway your streets is clean, your trains is reasonable yet punctual, your people is friendly and above averagely good-looking, and your sf&f specialist bookstores is excellent. I also remain a committed fan of your modernist minimal design, unassuming royal families, and efficient education, health, and welfare systems.

Best Authorial Bitch-Fight involving me
Was definitely the no-holds-barred grudge match between me and Brent Weeks at the Borders Book Blog wich I totally won. Ask anyone. There's even some talk that we'll be taking this show on the road next year...

Best Authorial Love-In involving me
My thoughtful yet hilarious interview with Patrick Rothfuss on the occasion of his recent charity drive.

Best Authorial Blurb about my Works
Has to be the George RR Martin. I still feel deeply smug about that one.

Best "Best SF&F of 2009" list of 2009
Werthead demonstrates his impeccable good taste by selecting Best Served Cold as his best book of 2009, saying, "a tale of revenge, murder, assassination, war and generally pleasant stuff, with Abercrombie somehow outstripping the first trilogy in terms of mayhem." Graeme demonstrated an equal level of discernment - "It delivered on all fronts and just kept delivering." The redoubtable Dave Bradley, editor of SFX, has also declared Best Served Cold his best book of 2009 calling it a "brilliantly brutal tale of revenge". I note in passing he also had Dragon Age up there. Nice call, Dave. Rob Grant's taste at Sci-Fi London would have been as good if it weren't for that pesky Jesse Bullington and his bleak medieval european stylings...

Best Served Cold has popped up on a few other lists too. Fantasy Book Critic's, Joe Sherry's , even the editor's picks for sf&f at amazon.co.uk, where I stand proudly among such notables as Terry Pratchett, Jane Austen, and Stephanie Meyer. It's a varied crowd over there...

But lest we over-sugar the pudding, Best Served Cold also made Western author Iain Parnam's most disappointing books of 2009. He thought, "everyone is repellent, the story is dreary, nothing matters much, and the wit is missing." I shrug me a river. It's all subjective, people.

Books
I know what you're thinking - who the hell reads books any more? But this year I managed to get through a few, and some of them weren't even written by me. Non-fiction highlight would probably be CV Wedgewood's Thirty Years War. A classic of narrative history. Fiction highlight? Despite some tough competition from the likes of Fritz Leiber, Junot Diaz and Jeff Vandermeer, you'd have to walk a very long way through a post-apocaplyptic wasteland to beat Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Searingly stark and bleak, but somehow still life-affirming. Like a visit to Brooks Nightclub in Lancaster used to be.

Films
Well I must say my socks were quite blown off by Avatar, it may well have been the most jaw-dropping cinema experience for me since Fellowship of the Ring, way back in 1904 when I didn't have kids, but along somewhat more traditional lines District 9 and No Country for Old Men were certainly memorable too. Watchmen ... not so much.

TV
Battlestar Galactica ended more with a whimper than a bang, which left the final season of The Shield as my TV Highlight. That certainly ended with a bang. IN YOUR FACE. Michael Chiklis also stalks off with my coveted "Most Loathsome yet Strangely Sympathetic Bald Character" award. Mad Men continued to be great, second series of Dexter was good but, for my money, not as good as the last. Other things that have variously titillated, intrigued and amused included 30 Rock, True Blood, and, of course, Strictly Come Dancing. What am I going to DO with my Sunday mornings now it's over?

Games
Good year, good year. Despite tough competition from the old-school roleplaying of Dragon Age and the Medici-stabbing thrills of Assassin's Creed II, it has to be the smooth-as-velvet next-generation adventure charms of Uncharted II that gave my boat the most float this year. The importance of PC games seems to be very much dwindling for me, as console games gradually invade the rpg and srategy territory that was traditionally theirs. Medieval:Total War is possibly my favourite game of all time, so I found Empire to be a tad disappointing. I haven't played it a lot since I lack a PC powerful enough to run it well, but the AI seems kind of rubbish to me. It usually takes them a year or two to get those games properly balanced, though, so who knows. Perhaps a future classic...

And there we have it. Let rip the party poppers. Roll on 2010...

Labels: film and tv, games, interviews, reading, reviews

Sunday, 27 December 2009

Avatar

Holy smokes, I thought this was mind-blowing. Say what you like about James Cameron, the man hits what he aims at. With Avatar I think it's safe to say he was aiming at big, big, big screen sci-fi action spectacular, and for me he fairly hit the bullseye.

You could say that the big blue skinny native aliens ticked pretty much every cliche in the noble savage book, that the eco-message was on the ham-fisted side, that the dialogue was occasinally a bit silly, that the lead character wasn't particularly compelling, especially in human rather than alien guise, and that people occasionally did things that weren't terribly believable, but it would be a stingy viewer who didn't concede that most of that was utterly muscled aside by the stunning visuals, the incredible imagination, the sheer skill of the way it was put together. The alien world was like stepping into a fully realised Roger Dean painting, the human technology was just as believable, the action sequences really were amazing, and the story ... well, it was a bit familiar, but I'm all for old stories done in new ways, especially when the overall experience is as astonishing as this is. It ain't often I get to the end of a 2 hour 40 film wishing it was a bit longer...

It may partly be that it's the first time I've seen anything in 3d at the cinema, and it may well be that in 2d, on the small screen, it'll all look a bit lurid and pompous, but on the big screen, wow, utterly spectacular and involving.

Labels: film and tv

Wednesday, 23 December 2009

God Bless Us, Every One

'Tis the season of joy, and a merry christmas unto you all. I look out of my window at a winter wonderland, which looks lovely until I contemplate a four hour drive tomorrow morning. Brrrrrr.

But christmas is not only the season of good cheer, smiling kiddies and presents under the tree. It is also the season of end-of-year best-of lists. So has Santa anything in his sack for me? Oooh! Pat of Pat's Fantasy Hotlist voted Best Served Cold his Number 1 book of 2009!

What's that you say? It's a 7? Well, you know, if you squint and kind of turn your head a bit sideways...

Ken has his best reads of 2009 up as well, though they're not necessarily in order, so let's just ASSUME that he thought Last Argument of Kings was bestest of all, shall we?

As for genre sf&f author Andy Remic, he didn't think The Blade Itself was the best fantasy he read this year at all, he thought:

"The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie is the best new fantasy book I've read in the last 10 years. Yes. You heard that right ... The writing is precise, perfectly crafted, and so very well put together, the story is a sublime interaction better than any so-called World of Warcraft immersion, and the violence and language a necessary harshness of the world Abercrombie has created."

Zing! A very merry yuletide, everyone.

Labels: reviews

Monday, 14 December 2009

Wolfsangel

My 200th post. Who ever would have predicted that I wouldn't have got bored and given up by now? But no, here I am, still avoiding doing real work. Perhaps it was kind of predictable after all...

But Christmas is coming, and what better time to recommend things that none of you will be able to get for months? Wolfsangel, by MD Lachlan is being published by Gollancz next year (which is how come I've got hold of a manuscript), and it is a strange brew indeed. Part fantasy, part horror, part historical adventure, bound up with a tight, lean style and featuring some of the strangest and most sinister magic I've encountered.

It's set in dark ages scandinavia so, you know, vikings and that, but supposes that some of the magical elements of norse myth are real. Or kind of real. Maybe. So in one sense it's set in our world, but in another it reminded me of Robert Low's excellent The Whale Road in that it manages to evoke the weirdness of the viking mindset to the point where even the normal people feel a lot more alien than most denizens of epic fantasy. It's savage, dark, strange and unpredictable, which are all good things in my book.

I guess if I had to be critical (and you know how much I hate doing that) I'd say that I felt the book was at its most effective when it stayed pretty firmly anchored in the real - or at least in the viking world rather than the full-on magical one. Towards the end the magical elements came more and more to the fore while the politics, warfare and viking life dropped away. I wouldn't say it lost it's way, but it found it's way to some pretty strange ground alright.

But overall, a dark and original book, recommended for people who like weird magic, unpredictable outcomes, gore, and vikings, which, let's face it, is probably everyone who reads this blog...

Labels: reading

Wednesday, 9 December 2009

Dragon Age

Oooooh, I liked this a lot. Right up my boulevard.

Bioware have been making great RPGs for a long time. I was a huge lover of Baldur's Gate and its sequel when they came out three hundred years ago, and played the arse out of both of them. Neverwinter Nights was good but seemed more limited, more formulaic. Then of late they've drifted in a more arcade-y sort of a direction - unavoidable perhaps in a world where PC games are dying a slow death and you have to design games to run on consoles too, perhaps for a slightly less cerebral audience. Jade Empire was pretty weak. And I wasn't a massive lover of Knights of the Old Republic either. Mass Effect was, well, no better than good for me. I was starting to worry that they'd abandoned serious fantasy RPGing to the Elder Scrolls (cold shivers). But no! For here is Dragon Age, and with it - gah! Oh. I've been splattered with gore again.

I can't remember playing a fantasy RPG that's as dark and nasty as this one. The hubris of mages has led to the poisoning of heaven and the world being tyrranised by occasional erruptions of slavering evil. Magic is fundamentally dangerous, and those who use it are constantly at risk of being posessed by demons, with the result they must be watched over by templars with itchy trigger-fingers. The main religion - the chantry - is sinister and oppressive. Elves have lost most of their ancient technology and either live as semi-savages in the woods, are corralled in ghettoes, or are pressed into slavery by humans. Dwarves are caste-bound, feuding and isolationist and their once great subterranean empire is gradually collapsing under constant onslaught by subterranean darkspawn. And humans are treacherous, greedy, backstabbing slime. I liked the world a lot, you probably won't be surprised to hear, probably more than any other computer game fantasy invention I can think of. There was plenty of detail there, plenty of background and texture, but it wasn't awash with blather to the point where it just looked like a load of repetitive cliched mush to the casual observer (Oblivion, I'm looking at you). It mixed the right amount of trope-y-ness with the right amount of innovation, surprise and darkness.

They've dialled up the blood quite high as well, to add to that 18 certificated grittiness, and proclaim that this is ADULT. Everyone likes a good decapitation, but the obsession with gore is a little distracting at times. Bioware's own logo is splattered onto the screen in blood at the start, and that does rather set the tone. This is particularly noticeable when, just after a fight, you get into conversation with someone, and exchange pleasantries while your character is daubed head to foot in gore.

I've heard people bitch about the graphics, and I don't know, I just didn't have that issue. Sure, it doesn't have the amazing light effects and incredible vistas of Uncharted, but it's a very different type of game. Maybe graphics on games is like prose on books - people tend to say it's good if they like the thing in general. I kind of liked the graphics on Dragon Age, they had personality, they were consistent with the setting, the faces were more varied and expressive than I can remember seeing in other similar games.

The actual game system seems to have moved away from the d&d special abilities once-a-day model towards a timed activation, sustained and activated powers thingy that reminded me of online RPGs like Guild Wars. Seemed as if there was quite a bit of depth to it, though, in the combination of various different powers, spells and equipment, but co-ordinating a four person party on the PS3 is a bit of a ball-ache, so I tended to end up controlling the main character and leaving the others to do their thing. You can set up quite detailed scripted commands for characters, though, a bit like in Final Fantasy 12, which is quite handy. One thing I would say is that as you get towards the end of the game and can make pretty much infinite health and magic potions at relatively low cost, you can just set your characters up to burn through those whenever they need them and it all does become pretty easy. Maybe I should have just dialled up the difficulty, but it did feel like the game slightly lacked the truly immense side-challenges that keep you playing something like Final Fantasy VII for hundreds of hours. Still, it would be a miserly reviewer who complained too much about the size of Dragon Age, because it's a big, big game. Took me about sixty hours to complete, and with various different framing storylines and character types you feel like you could get quite a lot from playing through again. In fact I'm already thinking about what sort of character I'd go for next time, which is usually a very good sign...

The world feels varied. You don't get massive repetition of areas (again, Oblivion, I'm looking at you, and with a disappointed shaking of my head. Go and stand in the corner). A couple of streets and houses start to look familiar, true, but you don't get hundreds of identikit dungeons. And I'm not sure how they pulled off the trick, since in many ways the game is clearly made up of a few distinct areas with very sharply delineated edges, but it feels like a big world in a way that, say, Mass Effect, utterly failed to do for me.

But above all the game just tells a compelling story, and one which kept me interested and playing into the small hours from start to finish. The characters are a bit more interesting and multi-dimensional than you expect in this type of thing. They get annoyed and leave the party. They turn on you. They make surprising suggestions. Some of them are kinda shits. Some of them are occasionally even a bit funny. Voice acting is generally pretty good. And the quests you're sent on rarely turn out to be quite as simple as advertised. Most people have darker sides and hidden agendas. There's some drama to be had. It's very rare for a game of this type to offer difficult choices, but a couple of times towards the end I was left genuinely not sure which way to go with a particular decision.

So overall, despite a couple of flaws, I thought it was a cracking effort and I'm delighted to see Bioware back to doing what they do best. Furthermore I think it can only be a good thing that there's some serious competition for the Elder Scrolls as far as serious fantasy roleplaying goes, for though I had my issues with Oblivion, I'm excited to see what Bethesda can do with a sequel after the excellent Fallout 3.

9/10, though I was close to a ten, I must say, because I haven't straight up enjoyed and felt compelled to play a game so much in a long time. Feels like its been a really good year for games, this. Perhaps the latest generation of consoles are finally coming of age...

Labels: games

Monday, 7 December 2009

Rothfuss and Abercrombie - in Conversation

Have you ever wanted to see your very favouritest new-ish epic fantasy author interviewed by, say, your second favouritest? Well now could be your chance...

For over at his blog, you can witness the transcript of a conversation between award-winning, New York Times bestselling, widely highly thought of author of Name of the Wind Patrick "best new beard in fantasy" Rothfuss, and award-nominated, not quite New York Times bestselling, widely thought of author of other books which aren't Name of the Wind, Joe "could you even call that stubble" Abercrombie.

Unfortunately it was a conversation carried out via her majesty's email rather than in leather armchairs, upon a spotlit stage, with much furrowing of brows, steepling of fingers, silences exploding with meaning, and staring at the ceiling in consideration of the fantastic depth of our own thought processes before a rapt audience. But still. No less (or, indeed, more) insightful for that.

The occasion? For anyone unaware, Mr. Rothfuss last year ran a fundraiser for Heifer International which pulled in over $100,000. This year he's at it again, and he has all kinds of wonderful things to give away contributed by persons in the science fiction and fantasy community. Among them some signed copies of some book called Best Served Cold by some author who isn't Pat Rothfuss. So give today, and you can combine that warm glowy feeling (no, not of wetting yourself, of philanthropy) with the joy of self-centred acquisition.

Proof positive that the world isn't actually as evil a place as you'd think from JUST reading The First Law.

Labels: interviews, news

Friday, 4 December 2009

Progress Report

Posting has been erratic lately due to the necessity of playing Dragon Age until the small hours of the night. It's a dirty job, but someone has to take the fight to those pesky darkspawn. You all are lucky to have me and my plucky band of heroes out there fighting the good fight on your behalf. Consider that.

In the few moments I've had in between struggling against the forces of evil, disciplining my wayward children, and trying to exert control on my as yet unstarted building project, I've finished my first draft of the third of five parts of my latest book, The Heroes. Ah, it hardly feels as if I've even begun and already over half way through. 140,000 words so far, or coming up on three Great Gatsbys. I really should write some shorter books one of these days.

Still, I think it's starting to come together. Central characters are taking shape, some themes and threads are becoming more important while others fade into the shadows to be brutally murdered and dragged away to unmarked graves during the editing process. With any luck I'll plan out the final two parts over the next month and have them drafted out by spring, largely edited by summer, and therefore ready for publication Feb 2011 as previously promised with fingers well crossed behind my back. Naturally neither I nor anyone else even faintly connected with me takes any responibility for possible failures to meet this deadline. I suggest you read the small print on the contract with the reader. Those things aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on.

In other news - The Fool Jobs, my story for the Anders/Strahan edited Swords and Dark Magic, is now copy edited and done, and ready to proudly take its place as the rearguard to a fantastic collection of writers. The anthology should be along June 2010, and I'm very excited to read it myself. Well, not my story so much, I've read that one. But the other stories, definitely.

In other, other news Chris McGrath has turned in artwork for the alternative UK Mass Market edition of Before They are Hanged, and it is GREAT. Seriously, I was a little surprised by the chequered response to the alternative Blade Itself, but if anyone doesn't like this one I will turn up at your house and BURN YOU. I'll post a copy as soon as design sorceress Laura Brett has worked her evil-but-oh-so-good magic upon it, then you can all whoop and snap your outrage like the pack of mangey curs you are.

Right. Back to Dragon Age.

Labels: news, progress