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

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

Monday, 23 November 2009

On the Spot

Been quite a while since I did any interviews, for some reason, but that's all about to change, because there's one up at BookSpotCentral conducted by Elena Nola! We discuss stylistic voices, my winding path to the dizzy heights of full-time authoring, the book I'm currently working on, and the word f*ck, among other things.

I am too good to you...

Labels: interviews