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

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

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, 22 June 2009

The Brief, Wondrous Road of Oscar Finch

For a man who reads few books, I have read quite a few books recently. Three excellent pieces of fiction in particular, though only one of them could be considered fantasy and that of a rather peculiar and fungus-ridden variety. Still, I warmly recommend all three to anyone capable of reading in English, for they are excellent (as I said above), and all quick, sharp, page-turning reads as well. You could probably fit all three into a hollowed out hardcover of Storm of Swords and have room left over for a banana. And believe me, once you'd finished the last of them, you'd really need that banana.

First up - Junot Diaz' Pulitzer prize-winning The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The exodus from the Dominican Republic of Trujillo and the immigrant experience in the US as examined through the eyes of several members of one dysfunctional family. If you expect that the winner of such a heavyweight prize would have to be written in an overbearing, difficult, heavyweight way, then (in this case, at least) you're WAY wrong. This is airy, readable, conversational, bursting with humour and personality. My mum gave me a great piece of writing advice - always be truthful, always be real, and this book has authenticity in spades. It's also told partly from the point of view of a geeky child obsessed with Lord of the Rings (among other fantastic and science fictional things) and so is littered with some brilliant genre-based metaphors for those of you who know about that sort of thing (not me, obviously), sometimes hilariously innapropriate (the great dictator, when assassinated, stumbles from his bullet-riddled limousine having taken 400 hit points of damage). There's one brilliant paragraph in which Diaz manages to use a metaphor from Star Trek and one from John Boorman's Point Blank. Has he been inside my mind? The book's split into several parts, each from the point of view of a different member of the extended family, some going back to the 30s and 40s in the Dominican Republic (which is wild, vivid and dangerous enough to virtually qualify as a fantasy world, especially for someone who grew up in 80s Lancaster), some taking place right up to the present day. For me some sections worked better than others, but overall it's a joyful, characterful, rewarding read.

Next up, Jeff Vandermeer's Finch. A compromised detective struggles to solve a difficult double murder in a bizarre, crumbling city occupied by enemy forces. So far so noir. Except the enemy are giant mushrooms. I hadn't read any of Vandermeer's stuff before, but his reputation is ... kinda literary, I guess. All these distinctions are fundamentally bullshit, of course, but nonetheless I was expecting something complicated, difficult, possibly with wild ideas and beautiful writing but perhaps not too much in the way of coherent story. But the writing, though vivid, is tight as a drum, never over-complicated, and the imagination as man meets fungus meets city and all three flow together into a noir nightmare is like nothing else I've read. He makes the book work both as a crazy fantasy and as a tough detective story, both parts complimenting the other. If I were to go for a filmic metaphor I might have to say Chinatown meets Naked Lunch with a sprinkling of Tetsuo II: The Bodyhammer. And a side of mushrooms. Giant, man eating, hallucinatory mushrooms. There are a few moments, perhaps, where the forward momentum slackens and we come dangerously close to infodumping, the plot seems to creak a little and there's a risk that - like a jet fighter driven forward only by its own thrust - it might come crashing to the ground, explode and kill its pilot in an almighty fireball. But then the fungal afterburners kick in and the book blasts once more into the heavens of imagination. Nothing's fully explained at the end, but that isn't really the point of a book like this (if there are any other books like this, which there probably aren't). I read this in proof form, and I don't think it's out for a few months, but I strongly advise you to pick up a copy when it does appear because I very much doubt you'll have read it's like before. A must for fans of fantasy, noir, great writing, or, of course, fungus.

And so we come to the end. Of this post, and the world. Cormac McCarthy probably doesn't need my help in drawing the attention of readers to his (also) Pulitzer-winning The Road, since it's been out for a long time, has been on Oprah and that and sold squillions of copies, and is being made into a film even as we speak with that nice Viggo Mortensen. But if you've been frozen in a glacier for the last few years, allow me to expound. The Road is an irripresible comedy of manners that will have you chuckling from the very first page. Perhaps that's not entirely accurate. Unless by irrepresible comedy of manners you mean ash-blasted post-apocalyptic horrorshow, and by chuckling you mean gripped and harrowed. This is one bleak-ass book, but also a completely magnificent one that in the midst of its brutality, desperation and utter waste somehow manages to be strangely inspiring. I'd read a couple of McCarthy's books before and found them interesting but difficult to get into, so stripped bare and brutal are the prose, the characters and the events. But the stark and ruthless writing matched the content beautifully in this book, no doubt. Awe-inspiring.

Anything else - er, there's an interview up with me at SF Signal, should anyone be interested, and with that I'm off to Scandinavia to talk at some bookstores. If any of you will be attending in Stockholm, Gothenberg, or Oslo, I will look forward immensely to seeing you there. The rest of you, I will post when I get back...

Labels: interviews, reading

Tuesday, 10 March 2009

Retribution Falls

For the last three or four years I've barely been reading at all, mostly because the times I would once have spent with a book (tube journeys to and from work mostly) I've tended to spend on my own writing - either staring into space and thinking about things or slashing at print-outs with a red pen. In an effort to redress this shameful situation and recharge the batteries of inspiration somewhat I've been reading quite a bit since the new year, mostly non-fiction about WAR by way of research and inspiration for my next project.

However, my editor would not stop GOING ON about this book she'd been working on, and my disgust knew no boundaries when I realised it wasn't one of mine. Naturally I consider praise for any other author a wounding betrayal, particularly since I know the author in question, Chris Wooding, pretty well and run my life thoroughly according to Gore Vidal's principle of, "every time a friend succeeds a little part of me dies." So I picked up a proof with the intention of skimming a chapter or two and in the ardent hope of debunking the inflated myth of Wooding's talent. It hurts me, oh how it hurts me to have to grudgingly lend my mumbling voice to the choir of approval.

The book in question is his forthcoming Retribution Falls. I guess in rough outline you could say it's something like Firefly (something very like, really, though that's no bad thing) but with a little steampunky victoriana replacing the wild-west elements of the setting and a sprinkling of magical demon-dust on the top. The Firefly comparison is apt for me, not just in the general outline of "Charming reprobate ship's Captain tries to scrape a semi-criminal living from a messed-up world in a patched together heap-of-junk ship with the help of a mismatched reprobate crew each with their own demons in the closet (sometimes literally)" but also in the neat combination of swashbuckling excitement and wisecracking patter with sometimes surprisingly hard-edged violence, moral ambiguity, and a cumulative depth. Not depth of a universal point-making kind, necessarily, but depth in terms of its depiction and investigation of a set of flawed characters and the relationships between them. Like Firefly, it pulls the neat trick of sucking you in with pure entertainment value, and delivering substance while you're not looking.

Usually there will be things that will jerk me out of a reading experience, events or dialogue or constructions that get me thinking, "Yeah? Really? I dunno..." with my eyebrows all slanted. Not so here, really. Each element works well and adds to the whole. It's smoooooth, like the Commodores. I guess you could criticise it for things it isn't, if that's your bag. It isn't dark and heavy. It isn't massively original. It isn't immensely surprising. But that'd be a bit like criticising Usain Bolt for being not that great with a discuss. Erm, he's a sprinter. Retribution Falls picks you up, and it whisks you swiftly and entertainingly along, and it sets you down with a big smile on your face.

Can't say fairer than that.

Labels: reading

Tuesday, 13 January 2009

Forthcoming Attractions

Ah, that long, slow lull at the start of the year. Always seems to take a couple of weeks for things to really get moving again, don't it? Plus I'm in celebration/mourning for the end of my last book, and engaged in that thumb-twiddling period we call thinking about the next book.

So, this month I will mostly be:

1. Doing a round of updates to the website, which hopefully will go live before long, though possibly not until next month, and will include a sizable extract from Best Served Cold. None other than the explosive whole first chapter. Contain your enthusiasm, people! Though you might want a bucket of ice-water handy when I tell you that there might also be a link to a MAP OF STYRIA. I am too good to you. Around the same time, with any luck and a little help from the God of Release Dates, proofs of Best Served Cold should begin to go out, accompanied by, I can pretty much guarantee, outrageous claims on the back cover as to my genius, critical acclaim, exclusivity, commerciality, sales, and sexual prowess which may verge dangerously close to hype. Guard your fragile minds, advance readers, lest you be beguiled. I wonder if it will be with this book or the next that I will suffer a brutal backlash for my surely unsustainable levels of interweb popularity. It only takes one little boy, after all, to pull his finger out of the dyke and say, "you know, I'm not sure Abercrombie's really all that good..." And before you know it we'll be swept away by a flood of shit reviews. You mark my words. I'm prepared to weather the storm, though, because, as we all know, it isn't until you recieve a universal critical crap-panning that the sales really skyrocket...

2. Writing a short story. Yes, that's right. Never done it before, so it should be interesting. I'm also using it as a bit of a sounding board for some character ideas, as it's going to feature a set of characters who'll be central to the NEXT BOOK (see below). The story is for an anthology which I'm quite excited to be a part of, nominally of sword and sorcery stories, although with the convergence of sword and sorcery with epic fantasy into the whole area of edgy fantasy it looks like it will feature contributions from all kinds of exciting new faces on the fantasy scene, seasoned by some well-known, long-established and much-respected names. Can't say who yet. Won't be coming along until 2010, though, so fight desperately to contain that excitement, people!

3. And, of course, planning for that all important NEXT BOOK. The strange life of the author, wherein I'm pondering the next book six months before most readers will get to read the last, such that by the time it comes out, I'm thoroughly buried in the next project where praise or criticism for the last are both equally burdensome. Oh yes (you can't see, but I'm beating my chest), it is so terribly hard to be a maverick creative! Anyway, let it never be said that I keep you in the dark. The next (fifth) book will be a standalone not unlike Best Served Cold - that is taking place in the world of the First Law and featuring some minor characters from the trilogy in more central roles - but if you can think of Best Served Cold as Dark Fantasy meets Hard-Boiled Thriller, this book will be a kind of Dark Fantasy meets Hard-Edged War Story, and will be the thrilling tale of one great battle for control of the North, over the course of three days, from several points of view on both sides and at different levels of the action. Characters will include - a world weary crew of Named Men, a keen young lad desperate to become a hero and claim a name of his own, a Prince determined to regain his father's lost throne by any means necessary, a girl who may or may not be able to talk to god, and a fencing champion dispatched to the North as the King of the Union's observer. Naturally there'll be blood on the snow, blood in the mist, blood in the rain, blood on standing stones, treachery, heroism, cowardice, and blood. Oh, and hilarious banter. And blood. Current, but very, very rough no-promises-made-please-don't-hurt-me-if-I-miss-it projected publication date is October 2010.

And yes, I have a working title, and no, I'm not telling you what it is. Like all the best strip-tease artists, I must retain some shred of mystery, you know...

4. Tangential to number 3, above, I'm doing something that's been virtually unheard of for me over the last few years, and doing some actual reading in the hope of getting some ideas and inspiration. Not fantasy, of course, because, you know, who reads that crap? But a lot of books, fiction and non-fiction, about WAR, from Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, to Grant's Memoirs, to Vietnam combat experiences. And actually I'll be reading some war-related fantasy too. So there. One thing I've already read which I warmly recommend, is a book called The Whale Road, by Robert Low. It's about Vikings, and does a great job of communicating the alien-ness of their mindset, partly through some very nice rhythmic writing, which really gets a sense of the characters and their setting across without wasting pages on exposition. I recommend it. A short book which casts a long shadow.

Oh, and additionally, before I forget. Voting for the David Gemmell Legend Award has now begun, in which a sixty-something long-list of pretty much everything published by a sf/f imprint last year will be reduced to a shortlist of five for further voting to establish the bestest heroicest fantasiest book published last year. We all know the answer to that, right? Whatever THEY may say. Now normally I'd step back, dignified, like, 'cause I'm nothing if not dignified, and let the chips fall where they may. But the organisers have contacted me (as they have all the other folks on the longlist) to ask that I help publicise the award on my website. Therefore:

VOTE FOR ME! VOTE FOR ME! LAST ARGUMENT OF KINGS FTW! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.

That is all.

Labels: news, reading

Friday, 10 October 2008

The Other The Blade Itself

So I've just done a little piece for a website called Writer's Read, a website where writers say ... what they read. Shockingly, I have actually been reading something recently. Thought I'd crosspost it here:

Over the last couple of weeks - in an airport, on a flight, and standing on the stairs for an hour this evening - I have been reading an exciting first novel that has set its genre aflame, called The Blade Itself.

I know what you're thinking. "But isn't that your book? How dare you promote it in such a barefaced manner? You pompous arse!" And you'd be right. I am a pompous arse. But not for that reason. Because although I have been reading an exciting first novel entitled The Blade Itself, the genre it set aflame was not fantasy but crime, and the author was not me, but a very pleasant young man from Chicago called Marcus Sakey.


Allow me to explain. It was, I think, several months after I sold my book, The Blade Itself, to a publisher, but several months before it was published, that I became aware that someone else had sold a book called The Blade Itself in the US. There is no hint of copying, the timing makes it impossible, we had simply, simultaneously, picked the same title, derived from a quote from Homer's Odyssey, "the blade itself incites to violence." Great minds think alike, I guess. And mine. When The Blade Itself was optioned for a film a few months ago I received a welter of congratulations from readers. A welter which greatly surprised me, since my agent had not been in touch. It was, in fact, Marcus Sakey's book, The Blade Itself, which had been taken to the bosom of Hollywood. In Siena, Italy a couple of weeks ago, my wife needed a book for the flight, so we stopped into a bookshop to peruse the English Language section. As I occasionally do when in a bookshop, I checked to see if my books were in stock. They did have The Blade Itself. You guessed it. Marcus Sakey's The Blade Itself.

So I thought I'd check it out. And I'm glad I did. It's a recognisable style of story - guy with a shady past makes good but his shady past comes back to haunt him - but it's nicely written with some good characterisation, a strong eye for detail, and the tough prose one would expect. At times I felt the plot tended to drive the characters rather than the other way around, but the build up and climax really were cracking, hence my finishing the book standing on the stairs. All in all a great piece of crime writing, and I look forward to reading whatever else Sakey puts out. Providing none of it shares titles with any of my other books, of course....

So my advice? Read The Blade Itself. Both of 'em.

Labels: interviews, reading

Thursday, 13 March 2008

The Steel Remains

Now, I read very little fantasy these days, and my knowledge of the genre is pretty pathetic. I can remember a couple of years ago when The Blade Itself came out I had a review that described the book as having a "Vancian reminiscence." "Vancian?" I asked my editors, with one eyebrow raised. "That's right, like Jack Vance." "Jack Vance?" I asked with both eyebrows raised. They looked at me as if I'd asked who Elvis was. I've read Tolkien, course. Dragonlance, Eddings, bit of Jordan, guilty as charged. Martin, Moorcock, and LeGuin, yes. But more recently, you can pretty much forget it. Bakker, not a word. Erikson, not a peep. Mieville, not a sausage.

I believe if you're going to be a serious critic, you need to know the genre you're talking about pretty damn well, so you can see where a piece stands in relation to others. Furthermore, as a writer of fantasy myself, I find a) rating other people's work is a bit close to the bone, since I know how it feels to be rated myself, and I don't always enjoy it, and b) I find it very hard to get properly submerged in fantasy writing now - I'm always picking at it, thinking how I'd do it differently, and so on - like a glassblower looking at someone else's beautiful vase and moaning that he wouldn't have done the fluting just that way. Some writers are critics too, and the best of luck to them, but I'm not one, really, except in the "like arseholes, everyone's got opinions" sense. But Simon Spanton at Gollancz asked me for mine (opinion, that is, not arsehole) on sf author Richard Morgan's foray into the world of epic fantasy, The Steel Remains.

I will not presume to review it, there'll be folk enough doing that shortly, I'm sure. I'll just say how it struck me.

This is a good book. It may very well be part of a really great series. It's an extreme book, a challenging book in all kinds of ways - themes, content, and style. It reaches the parts most epic fantasies don't reach and many fantasy readers may not want to have reached. Morgan seems to say to them - tough shit, and you've got to greatly admire his bollocks in doing so. No-one could accuse him of moving into fantasy in order to take the easy commercial path. NO-ONE.

Larry from Wotmania was recently examining bad criticism in the genre, and pointing out that there's nothing lazier than talking about one book by glibly comparing it to another. I will now, therefore, encaspsulate The Steel Remains by glibly comparing it to a whole load of other stuff that it's only vaguely like. Observe me in action:

There's not much Tolkien in the mix at all, not much epic massiveness, no good and evil whatsoever, just loads of evil, and boy is there no romanticism. But there's not much Martin either, which surprised me, because that's more what I was expecting - Morgan's isn't a low magic world really, in fact there's quite a range of the wierd and wonderful in there. Elves (but messed up), Lizardmen (kind of), Dragons (of a sort), Magic swords (ish), sorcery (maybe). If I had to say what the world made me think of (work with me, Larry, work with me) it's probably closest to something like the sweaty back-streets of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar, with a bit of the endless steppe from the Conan the Barbarian movie, and the lost, ancient technologies of the Elder Scrolls computer games. A world full of the strange and unexplained, but also a very grim one, constantly in the shadow of old and terrible wars with lashings of religious bigotry, sexual oppression, messy executions, and slavery.

I'm probably doing it a disservice and making it sound piecemeal, which it isn't really. In fact it's pretty interesting with quite a few (to me at least) original notions in there, especially as the book goes on. A surprsingly tasty cocktail, for one with so varied a set of ingredients. Certainly the book doesn't feel at all like some ham-fisted reaction against fantasy, just a very different take on it. Some would probably say it's light on the worldbuilding, and be confused as to where x is in relation to y, but that suits me fine, as you can imagine.

What else can I compare it to? It has the explosive violence of, well, Richard Morgan (only about twice as explosive), the moral ambiguity of vintage Moorcock (but about three times as dark), with the explicit sexual content of Martin (only about ten times more explicit, and I'm not kidding), the harsh language of Scott Lynch (times about 1,000,000). If those things put you off, really, don't bother. The first couple of pages will probably give you a bit of mouth sick. The lyricism of Patrick Rothfuss? Not so much. The languid descriptions of Robert Jordan? No. The charming rural laughs of Eddings? No. No. No.

Anyway, I was honoured to be asked for a line or two on it, so here's mine:

"Bold, brutal, and making no compromises - Morgan doesn't so much twist the cliches of fantasy as take an axe to them. Then set them on fire. Then put them out by pissing on them."

I suspect the last sentence won't make many press releases, but I like to think that Mr. Morgan would approve. I ended up liking The Steel Remains a lot, and I think a lot of other people will too, but I must admit it took me quite a while to get there.

For one thing, I'm not used to reading other people's manuscripts, and since it looked kind of like one of mine, it took me a while to just read it without thinking stuff like, "no, no, wrong adverb." Setting and binding definitely helps to give books authority - I find reading proofs a bit odd, in fact, so this was quite weird to begin with. Also, Morgan's approach to fantasy feels somewhere in the same ballpark as mine. I mean, it's not actually alike in any meaningful way, far further apart than a whole host of writers are to Tolkien, say. But close enough that I felt not just like a glass-blower assessing someone else's glassware, but a maker of little glass unicorns looking at someone else's glass unicorns. A pathetic metaphor. What I'm trying to say is it drops you in at the deep end, in the middle of the action, and lets the reader sink or swim. It's harsh, with some occasional black humour, has used-up, world-weary, semi-likeable characters, some heavy violence, a very modern sensibility and a feel of edgy realism. Probably it was that much harder for me to achieve "submersion" in it, if you like, than it will be for most, because it's my cup of tea, and I was therefore tasting it with much greater and more critical discernment than usual. It's my cup of tea, only a lot stronger than I usually take it, I must admit. Real brown and soupy. Like the bag's been left in overnight, or something. This is some strong medicine, and as I was going through, I must admit that I found myself often wondering - how extreme, in all sorts of ways, is too extreme?

It's not that I'm a prude (he says, loosening his well-starched dog collar by just the tiniest fraction that strict social decorum will allow), and often I got caught up in it all and the heart would be pumping, but sometimes I'd wipe the latest explosion of gore, shit, or spunk from my face and just think, "must we? Must we, again?" It occasionally gave me that feeling of, "if you're playing on 10 all the time, and you want that little bit more, where do you go?" Some will definitely love this book and some will definitely hate it, but a few may reasonably think it could have been just a tad less lurid at times and gained punch as a result...

There's also an unremitting grimness that makes it all pretty heavy-going in places. Ariel coined the term "Brutalist Fantasy" and I think that's very apt. Everyone is in fear, in danger, alone, oppressed, hated, self-loathing, tortured by their pasts, and the result is that it feels, at least for the first half, perhaps a bit one-toned. The upside is that a couple of deft touches of humanity later on, from some of the places you least expect them, shine brightly against the grim backdrop, and when the central characters finally come together for the finale, the bond between them is surprisingly effective and really quite touching.

But probably the biggest problem I had with the book, and this is a personal reaction rather than a general criticism, is its utterly unflinching modernity - in the prose, and in the dialogue. No doubt it's entirely intentional, but I did find it jarring. Barbarians use phrases like "back in '55", everyone from swineherd, to knight, to emperor, says "yeah," frequently, and everyone, and I mean everyone, says "fuck." They say it a lot. They say it a fucking lot.

Now, don't get me wrong, I despise faux victorian romanticism in prose and dialogue as much as the next man. A lot more, in fact. I'm not asking anyone to go all "prithee", "pon mine honour" and "ifaith, my liege", but at the same time I feel the words you pick are very important, and for me some of the language didn't necessarily communicate much about the characters and the settings in question, in fact it conflicted with them quite badly, at least at first, and gave it all an oddly schizophrenic feel. An epic fantasy with the prose of ... well, of a Richard Morgan dystopian sci-fi. The issue of what is or is not anachronistic is one we could spend a great deal of time discussing, so I'll duck it like the coward I am. I must say I got used to the unflinching, unapologetic modernism over time, but I never quite liked it. I would not be at all surprised if Morgan has used the word "fuck" more in one book than Scott Lynch in two and me in three all put together. In fact I'd be surprised if he hadn't. He may well have used it more than in all of his previous books put together. I love a bit of swearing, I've written empassioned defences of its use in fantasy but there definitely is such a thing as too much. I wouldn't consider it an anachronism, but in the end, five times in one paragraph, it just gets repetitive, boring, ineffective. Obviously, everyone will have a different threshold there, but for me, there was waaaaaaay too much, at least early on.

Now I know what you're all thinking. "Joe, you hypocritical bastard, these are just the same criticisms you're constantly and shrilly defending yourself against!" Ooops. You're right. Modern verbiage. Too much swearing. Too much dark. Over-the-top violence. I can only scratch my head and say, it's all a question of balance, and every reader or writer will find theirs in a different place, and if you think my stuff is in any way extreme, then think again, rapidly, because fantasy just got a whole lot more extreme, guys. I am proudly middle-of-the road, now. I am made bland, and inoffensive, and believe me, so is everybody else.

Anyway, these are details, really, which made me struggle at first, but that generally fell away as the book went on and I got drawn into the setting, and the people, and the unfolding of the mystery. By the last hundred pages or so I was properly gripped. It's a slow builder, and takes a bit of time getting there (another criticism everyone always has of my books), but has a cracking action finale, and an ending that would seem to promise some very interesting developments as the series goes on. It also strikes a nice balance between resolution of a book and setting up of a trilogy, something that's harder than you might think. I hesitate to say, "if you like the works of x, y, or z, then give The Steel Remains a try," because really it's pretty much unlike anything else, and that's why you should give it a try. You might love it, you might loathe it, but you'll certainly find it difficult to ignore...

Labels: reading