Sunday, 31 January 2010

SFX Weekender / Gemmell Award

I have received a schedule for the SFX weekender, taking place at no less a location than Pontins at Camber Sands. Apparently there may still be some changes as the details get ironed out, but for the time being, here is my schedule:

Friday, 12.45-13.30 (Main Void) - Gollancz panel, along with imprint stablemates Dave Moody, Chris Wooding, Justina Robson, Tom Lloyd, John Meaney, and Richard Morgan, and who knows, perhaps one or other of the magnificent Ozzes who make it all happen from behind their curtain...

Saturday 5th Feb, 10.00-10.45 (Main Void) - David Gemmell Legend Award Panel, along with award organiser Debbie Miller, and authors Stan Nichols, Richard Morgan, Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Saturday 6th Feb, 16.00-16.30 (Slaughtered Lamb) - Me, alone - my incandescent brilliance undimmed by the presence of other authors as the tiny moon briefly occludes the majestic fiery orb of the sun during a solar eclipse - reading readings from books written by me, probably including something from the forthcoming The Heroes, to an awestruck crowd (should there be one) and answering questions (should there be any).

Anyone who's attending the Weekender, and would like anything signed, can by all means collar me at any of these places, though I'll also more than likely be happy to oblige if you collar me elsewhere, which probably, I shouldn't wonder, for the rest of the time, means in the bar. Books should be available from dealers there as well, though I couldn't absolutely swear to that.

Talking of the David Gemmel Legend Award, which it looks like I will be at the Weekender, I note that Nic Clarke has completed a probing examination of last year's shortlist at Strange Horizons (part I here, and part II here). It's interesting reading, and not just because she clearly realises what the internet-using population of the world was clearly TOO DAMN THICK, WRONG-HEADED or PROFOUNDLY EVIL to realise, that mine iz the bestest ritten out of that hole load of bookz.

This caused author Mark Charan Newton, who is running a very thoughtful and insightful blog (curse him), to reflect upon the absence of serious discussion about last year's Gemmell Award, or at least serious comparison of its nominees:

"I must admit to finding it bizarre that any award can have a shortlist where titles are barely compared to each other. How can you call a book the "best" without such an analysis? Getting as many people to vote online seems a spurious way to go about this, when clearly no one could have read so many titles."

I certainly agree about the online vote aspect, I much preferred the idea of a public vote on the longlist - which would have meant a decent amount of public involvement and a relatively commercial shortlist - then a panel to decide the winner, which would hopefully encourage debate, reduce any chance of vote-stuffing, and hopefully prevent the award endlessly going to the most popular series currently going (I'm a little worried it'll just end up going to, say, the final three books of the Wheel of Time three years in a row, which there probably isn't much point in. Awards are at their most useless when they just point Catholics towards the Vatican, as it were.) as well as meaning that the people making the choice do actually have to read and compare the books, rather than just vote for the one they've read.

But overall, though I'd like to see more, I'm not honestly sure lack of in-depth discussion is that important. Firstly, it's a new award, and it takes time for these things to bed in and be taken seriously, and a lot of what determines how seriously it'll be taken and by who is who actually wins the awards - the character of this has yet to really be established. In due course it may wither or it may become important. It's also interesting that despite everyone saying a public vote would be incredibly predictable, no one actually predicted the outcome at all last year. Secondly, the award generated some debate in those places that people talk about these kind of books, which generally aren't the same ones where people talk about other awards, since other genre awards really don't tend to go to these kind of books - follow me? Thirdly, I'm not sure debate on blogs should be the barometer of success for an award. The Gemmell did get a little attention outside of the genre, and it did get a little attention from booksellers, all in its first year. The more knowledgable can by all means correct me, but my understanding is that genre awards are not terribly significant commercially, and some of the bigger ones are getting less significant by the year. Be nice to have something that can actually get some books in a window, wouldn't it?

Anyway, just talkin'. I like serious criticism as much as the next guy. I look forward to Mark's in-depth comparison of this year's entire DGLA longlist.

Labels: appearances, reviews

Saturday, 23 January 2010

Ebooks, Audiobooks

I've been getting quite a few emails about the absence of kindle editions of late, which I am now very pleased to announce are available via amazon.com:

The Blade Itself
Before They are Hanged
Last Argument of Kings
Best Served Cold

An audiobook of Best Served Cold has also recently come out from Tantor Media, which is available as a download from Audible or in oldskool physical compact disk form , though one should be aware it is unabridged and therefore somewhere around 30 hours, or 22 cds, in length. Wow, that should keep y'all busy. This is an American version, and though I haven't listened yet myself, I imagine it's an American reading, which would seem a little strange to me, though probably not if you were American. There are supposed to be some British readings of the First Law appearing at some point, but they've been delayed some time due to contractual wranglings of some kind at a level far above me, and at the moment they're slated on Orion's website to appear in June this year. So we'll see...

Labels: announcements, audiobooks, ebooks

Thursday, 21 January 2010

Bristolcon and other Appearances

A little heads up, some time in advance, to let anyone who might be interested know that I'll be attending Bristolcon 2010 on November 6th this year. This is an event in its infancy (second year only), and consequently will probably be a reasonably small and intimate affair. One day only, so if you're in the region there'll be no need to shell out for a hotel. Guests of Honour are yours truly and well-known writer of novels, comics, and Doctor Who, Paul Cornell, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if a few other local authors and industry types were to show their faces. The program has yet to be announced, but I would imagine it will include such things as panels, readings, Q&As, and I'm sure anyone who wanted anything signed by me could do so. More news as I get it.

A quick reminder of other confirmed appearances - I'll be at the SFX weekender at Camber Sands from 5th-7th Feb (Brrrrr!), I'll be at (if you can believe this one) the Dubai Literary Festival from 9th-14th March (not brrrrr!), and I'll be at Eastercon 2nd-4th April.

Labels: appearances

Thursday, 14 January 2010

The New Sword and Sorcery

The cover for Swords and Dark Magic, an anthology in which I've got a story coming out in June next year. You'll note the sub-title, "The New Sword and Sorcery". The editors - Lou Anders (who publishes the First Law in the US, among many other things) and Jonathan Strahan - perceived something of a new flourishing of sword and sorcery of late, or perhaps an ascendance of sword and sorcery influences within chunky fantasy, and so they decided to produce an anthology that aimed to present in one volume stories from some of the established masters of the subgenre with some from the newer pipsqueaks and impostors such as myself. Looking at the writers involved (Steven Erikson, Glen Cook, Gene Wolfe, James Enge, C.J. Cherryh, K. J. Parker, Garth Nix, Michael Moorcock, Tim Lebbon, Robert Silverberg, Greg Keyes, Michael Shea, Scott Lynch, Tanith Lee, Caitlin R Kiernan, Bill Willingham, and some idiot called Joe Abercrombie) it would seem they've succeeded admirably.

I'm delighted to have a story included in such heavyweight company, of course, but it begs a question that I've been thinking about a little bit ever since. Not as much as, "ow, my neck hurts," or, "man, my house is cold," but a bit.

Do I write Sword and Sorcery?

Well do I, punk? When I started writing, I probably wouldn't have said so. I'd have said I write important mainstream literary books that plumb the depths of the human condition, and just so happen to include a few wizards, a magic tower or two, and a whole lot of swords. A ha ha! Of course I wouldn't have said that, that would've been absurd. I'd have said I write epic fantasy. Important epic fantasy that plumbs the depth of the human condition.

The fantasy that I read growing up - those books that I'd consider my early influences - are really much more from the epic school. The grandaddy himself, of course, and the wellspring from which the subgenre flows - David Eddings. But also the writers from that great tradition of core 80s epic fantasy who were so influenced by him, like Weiss and Hickman, Michael Scott Rohan and JRR Tolkein. Le Guin's Earthsea was another, though I always saw that as being somehow in a slightly different category - maybe because they were so much shorter and more focused, or maybe because they had such a distinct feel. The only guy I really read who one would say is in the tradition of sword and sorcery was Michael Moorcock - mainly Elric and Corum - but, on the whole, no doubt, when it came to my fantasy I liked it epic. That feeling was only cemented when later, in the 90s, after I'd largely stopped reading fantasy, I came upon George RR Martin's Game of Thrones and was blown away by seeing a lot of things I felt had been missing from the genre so surprisingly and ruthlessly expressed.

So (and prepare yourself to cringe) up until I started taking my own writing seriously, until after The Blade Itself was published, even, I'd never read any Howard (though I frequently watched Conan the Barbarian as a boy). I'd never read any Fritz Leiber (though my Dad had some of his scifi on the special scifi shelf, the one down behind the sofa). I'd never even heard of Jack Vance. Oh, the horror.

Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories featuring swashbuckling rogues Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (which I thoroughly advise you to read because in the main they're still hugely enjoyable) epitomise Sword and Sorcery for me. They were written over a few decades, but the earlier ones are roughly contemporary with Lord of the Rings, and reading them now they feel like the road not travelled by commercial fantasy in the 80s and early 90s. In a sense (and within the confines of being adventure stories within a medievalish setting featuring magic and swords) they are the opposite of Tolkien. Vivid, murky, self-serving characters in brief, focused, small-scale stories in decidedly seedy, smelly, lawless, gritty settings - what might be called 'low' fantasy rather than 'high'. Character and action are emphasised over rigorous worldbuilding. Above all they have a sense of humour, a sense of fun, a sense of not taking it all too seriously.

It feels to me now as if Sword and Sorcery was on the heavy retreat in the eighties, at least in significant written form, crushed under an avalanche of Tolkien-cloning world-build-a-thons and moral absolutes in big, chunky, epic form (though I daresay it was still flourishing in dank and seedy corners unknown to the front of the bookstore). But where it was hugely influential, I now realise, was in the development of Role Playing Games. Short, focused stories about small groups of seedy, wisecracking characters out for themselves were custom made for the format. Adventures and campaigns of that type are vastly easier to run than epic confrontations of good against evil with casts of thousands. Having read Vance, Lieber and Howard now I can see their thumbprints are all over Dungeons and Dragons, and of course the influence of Dungeons and Dragons on roleplaying, both of the dice and paper variety and later of the computerised variety, is profound.

It's interesting (albeit probably not terribly surprising) that so many fantasy authors were role-players in their day. Looking at that list above I know that Scott Lynch published supplements in his time, and Steven Erikson's world is based on one developed for role-playing. I'd be shocked if a lot of the other contributors didn't have a few strange-looking dice at the back of a cupboard somewhere. Now I'd imagine most of them have long been familiar with writers like Howard and Leiber, but for me the Sword and Sorcery came circuitously, via roleplaying games, fused with Tolkien and the epic stuff he inspired, and led (seasoned by thousands of other non-fantasy book, film, and gaming influences) to the bastard offspring which is my work. Looking at what I produce now (and especially at Best Served Cold), I feel it has as much in common, at heart, with Leiber as it does with Tolkien.

So do I write Sword and Sorcery? Yeah, I guess, kinda. The New Sword and Sorcery, maybe?

Labels: influences, opinion

Friday, 8 January 2010

Inglourious Basterds

The first scene was terrific.

Cristoph Waltz was mesmerising.

I usually like Brad Pitt but he was totally forgettable in this.

I'm not sure whether the scene with Mike Myers impersonating Austin Powers impersonating a British general was awful or brilliant, but I tend towards the latter.

Some scenes went on really, really, REALLY long while achieving virtually nothing.

There is a very fine line between hilarious yet shocking shoot-outs in which everyone kills each other (TM), and just removing all your half-decent characters much too early.

There were times when peculiar looming close-ups would appear for no apparent reason. I wasn't sure if he was riffing off something and I didn't know what it was, or if it was just a mess. It certainly seemed a mess. An uncomfortable pile-up of western, war-time melodrama, and modernist ultra-brutal war story.

The trademark Tarantino BIG TITLES, strange cutaways, voice-overed montages, and apparently incongruous sound effects and music did not in this case contribute to the feeling of a coherent and cohesive whole.

There were further glimpses of quality, usually involving Cristoph Waltz.

But mostly it was a self-indulgent shambles.

Labels: film and tv

Wednesday, 6 January 2010

The Emperor's New Covers 2

Following on from the alternative UK mass-market cover for The Blade Itself which aroused some surprising ire and some even more surprising arousal in various comments sections, comes this one from artist Chris McGrath and Designer Laura Brett for Before They are Hanged:

Click on it to embiggen. CLICK ON IT. And in case anyone's confused as to who that's meant to be this time around, it's Superior Glokta, in Dagoska, from the book, "Before They are Hanged", by British fantasy author Joe Abercrombie. I like this one a LOT. Very atmospheric, dangerous, dark, intriguing, and sets the perfect atmosphere for those sections of the book.

But (judging from previous cover discussions), some of you may not like it as much as I do, so before anyone flings themselves from the roof of the newly completed Burj Dubai in protest screaming, "Glokta doesn't look like that in my own mind you bastaaaaaaaaaaaards!" It is important to underline that the parchmenty, B-format (slightly larger) mass market paperbacks whose covers have won such consistent approval:

will continue to be printed and made available to a hungry British public. These new treatments are intended as alternatives, and have come about partly because some key bricks and mortar booksellers have come to us saying, "we've done well with these books but we think we could do even better if they looked like X" where X equals a perhaps more traditional fantasy look featuring a character. A look that may appeal to a slightly different market share, and may hence spread the love a little, and sell some books to folks who might have looked straight past the original covers.

But new cover looks can also stimulate some renewed interest and attention by themselves, and it also gives booksellers the opportunity to pick whichever look they'd like to stock, and so hopefully get the books stocked and shelved more widely. Many have already taken the opportunity to do so with the new The Blade Itself, and with any luck they will follow on with this one. A new Last Argument of Kings will follow in a month or so with Jezal on the cover, and judging by the preliminary sketch, it's going to be pretty damn good as well...

You may now throw things at me, but be aware that I am fully prepared to blame my editor for this if things turn ugly.

Ah! I almost forgot. In other news, voting has begun on the longlist for this year's David Gemmell Legend Award, which I was last year robbed of by Andrzej Sapkowski getting more votes than me. It's a free public vote, so by all means drop by and, I don't know, vote for Best Served Cold or something. Wouldn't want to unduly influence you to vote for Best Served Cold. There are a lot of good books on the longlist, including Best Served Cold. Be nice to make the shortlist again, though it seems unlikely that anyone will be able to resist the march of the all-conquering Jordan/Sanderson alliance this year. Just to prove I'm not biased, you can also vote for either the UK Cover or US Cover of Best Served Cold for the new Ravenheart Award for cover art as well, should you desire...

Labels: artwork

Sunday, 3 January 2010

Moon/Star Trek

Saw a couple of last year's sci-fi features over the last week.

Moon is a thoughtful, low-budget, psychological science fiction piece that, in its depiction of one man losing his marbles in the loneliness of space, put me somewhat in mind of that old classic Silent Running. Sam Rockwell turns in not one but two excellent performances as the one-man crew (if you've seen it you'll know what I mean) of a power-harvesting operation on the moon, and Kevin Spacey backs up as the voice of his Hal-alike sinister robot buddy. He has but days left on his three-year contract when he starts to see things out there, and paranoia and head-fucks ensue. I'd say the outcome is actually a bit less interesting than I was hoping for, but it's still an intelligent and affecting old-school piece

A film that seemed to deliberately avoid being either intelligent or affecting is the recent "reboot" of Star Trek. I was a huge fan of Next Generation back in the 90s, watched the whole lot of about 160 episodes within a few weeks. Occasionally, and particularly during the Lwxana Troi episodes, me and my friends would shout, "bollocks!" at the tv, but generally I loved that show. I'm also an admirer of JJ Abrams' Lost and Cloverfield, he produces some clever, original, entertaining stuff. Plus I'd heard some very positive reports of this new take on the original Star Trek from people who really do know the difference, and so I was expecting big things.

I thought it was bad. Let me tell you why.

Star Trek always tried to be clever. It didn't always succeed, and at its worst it spouted a lot of boring, pretentious pseudo-scientific waffle, but it was always aspirational. It aimed to gel with science, to have internal consistency, and at times it reached real heights, tackled serious science-fictional, ethical, political issues in dramatic and entertaining ways. The reboot ... not so much.

Spoilers to follow.

Star Fleet Regulation 619 apparently means that any officer emotionally involved in the mission can be relieved of command. Ignoring the delightfully vague wording, how do you define emotional involvement? Once planets get all blown up and billions killed and the universe as we know it under threat surely we all get a tad emotional, no? And use of said regulation in the film? To allow utterly unqualified Kirk (whose father had been killed by the villain) to replace reasonably qualified Spock (because his mother had been killed by the villain). Wha?

A black hole is not in fact a hyper-dense collapsed star that exerts such powerful gravity that even light cannot escape from its event horizon. No. It iz kind of like a big magic mirror, like out of Zelda, which you can get dragged into and will probly go back in time though I'm not shure how far coz that's science, but you can get away from it by TOTALLY BLOWING UP YOUR OWN WARP CORE. KABLOOOOOOOOOOW!!!!!!! It is an explosion so ace it is BLUE!!!!!!

Star Fleet is very advanced. The bridge of its latest Flagship USS Enterprise looks like WAY cool with all kinds of transparent shit and ergonomic back-friendly chairs and glowy touch buttons like on an i-phone. But its engine room looks like a soviet-era russian slime factory with big turny-turny wheels and great huge twisty pipes full of bubbly blue water.

Space battles in star trek were once a question of careful decision making and pinpoint timing, all played out within the unimaginable inky vastness of actual space. "Aft torpedoes, fire!" and all that. Proceed at quarter impulse. We all remember the classic sequence of Kirk battling Khan in the nebula, right? It was all about cunning. All slow build-up, then sudden and deadly. Phasers were precise and surgical. But why have one phaser firing when you can have ten thousand? Surely that'll make the film ... 10,000 times better! With the reboot the Enterprise can blaze away like a crap seventies lightshow at an ancient Egyptian monument. Zanger zanger zanger go the pretty fairylights!

Worst of all was the villain, Nero, who seemed to suffer from every crap-villain cliche in the crap-villain rule book. I was talking about how much I enjoyed Avatar the other day (though I seem to have these two films entirely the wrong way round by most people's estimation), and observing that, despite it's plotting issues, the villains were pretty convincing. I understood what they were doing and why. When looked at from the villain's point of view, the film still made sense. Nero's motivations made no sense, his plan made no sense, his individual actions were all completely mad, and not in a Hannibal Lector way, just in a "I can't be arsed to work out a story that makes any sense" way. Why did his mining ship look like a thistle? Why was his mining ship so heavily armed it could annihilate a klingon armada (from the future, maybe, but could a modern supertanker defeat a fleet of World War II warships?) Why did he blame the entire federation for the destruction of Romulus? What was he doing in the 25 years between blowing up a federation ship and waiting for Spock to appear? Why did he not try to make contact with the Romulus of the past? Why all the tattoos? Why, why, why, would he maroon Spock on an ice planet to watch another planet explode when he could have kept him on his own bridge to do it, then killed him at his leisure? If you wanted to force someone to watch the destruction of earth, would you maroon them on Saturn? I am quite mad, insanely angry, and absurdly powerful, but only within certain spookily plot-helpful parameters!!! Raaaargh!!!! Even his demise was a rubbish psycho-cliche (No! I would rather die than accept help from you!) SHITTEST. VILLAIN. EVAH.

Now there were glimpses of quality through the haze. Some of the characters were very nicely played, Bones and Spock in particular (though Simon Pegg's comic relief Scotty was neither comic nor relieving for my money), some of the effects work was nice, and I liked how it was sometimes surprisingly ruthless. There were a good few laughs too, but for me it was like sticking nice bumpers, underlighting and a flash spoiler on an old banger that just don't go. It had the classic problem of trying to give every character their little moment regardless of whether it made a contribution to the whole. I was too distracted by reeling from one nonsensical clanger to another to ever get immersed in any of the character work or the action. There didn't seem to be a coherent film there at all, just a load of sequences all tossed together and shot with a really irritating star filter that put sparkly horizontal flares on everything.

I mean, I'm all for a focus on entertainment, especially when converting from small screen to big, after all Star Trek's most successful film outings have been the most action-oriented (Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country) and its diabolical worst the most self-consciously, pompously intellectual (I cannot speak the name of Star Trek V). And I concede that the franchise was badly in need of a reboot after the largely rubbish Voyager and Enterprise, but I don't see why we have to so conspicuously disconnect the grey matter. Maybe if I'd seen it on the big screen I'd have been wowed by the scale, like I was with Avatar. Maybe I've been harsh, but I was disappointed. It'd be a shame if the sf franchise that aspired to depth and intelligence ended up as dumb and shallow as this.

Say it with me, now. Bollocks!

EDIT: It has been drawn to my attention that Adam Roberts posted an eerily similar review more than six months ago with deeper insight and better gags. Curse these ivory tower sf-hating holloway-don academic english professor types!

Labels: film and tv