Tag: Black Gate

Abercrombie’s inquisition

So, I finished reading Abercrombie’s The First Law series. I quite liked it despite the various criticisms I’ve mentioned in the past, but I wanted to mention something that struck me about the book’s most interesting character, the torturer of the Royal Inquisition, Sand dan Glotka. Abercrombie devotes a great deal of time and attention to Glotka and it shows. His backstory is involved and interesting, his descent from superficial hero to deeply introspective anti-hero is compelling, and he manages to come off in a sympathetic manner despite the many awful deeds he consciously elects to perform. There is only one significant problem with the character of Glotka.

The greater part of the Inquisition as portrayed in The First Law is a load of historical bollocks.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

Book review: The Heroes

The Heroes, by Joe Abercrombie
Orbit (560 pages, $24.99, February 2011)

After the lively discussion of two weeks ago regarding the decline and fall of modern fantasy fiction begun by Leo Grin, I find a certain ironic pleasure in being able to unequivocally declare that Joe Abercrombie is, without question, the best writer of fantasy military fiction being published today. Were it not for the fictitious medievalesque setting, The Heroes would barely qualify as fantasy at all, but even so, as pure military fiction, Abercrombie compares favorably with David Drake, Ralph Peters, David Weber, and even Tom Clancy post-Red Storm Rising. I quite enjoyed the book and very much look forward to reading more of Abercrombie’s dark and bloody work in the future.

The Heroes is a stand-alone novel that utilizes many characters from Abercrombie’s popular epic nihilism series, The First Law. It is a small-scale tale of a three-day battle between the Union and the newly crowned King of the North, and is somewhat reminiscent of historical tales of Gettysburg and other epic battles in the way the action tends to revolve around the physical environment, such as the prehistoric monuments on the large hill that provide the novel with its title. The title is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, as it happens, given that the theme of the book, smashed home as ferociously as one of Abercrombie’s anti-hero’s heavy swords hammers into the skull of a defeated enemy, is that there are no heroes and victorious battles and heroic deeds alike go ultimately for naught.

Read the rest of the review of The Heroes at the Black Gate

Surviving the test of time

Bestselling Novels
#TitleAuthor
1.The Broad HighwayJeffrey Farnol
2.The Prodigal JudgeVaughan Kester
3.The Winning of Barbara WorthHarold Bell Wright
4.QueedHenry Sydnor Harrison
5.The HarvesterGene Stratton Porter
6.The Iron WomanMargaret Deland
7.The Long RollMary Johnston
8.Molly Make-BelieveEleanor Abbott
9.The RosaryFlorence L. Barclay
10.The Common LawRobert W. Chambers

How many of these writers or novels do you recognize? They are the 10 best-selling authors of exactly 100 years ago. I am a reasonably well-read individual, and I have to admit that I have never heard of any of these books or any of these authors except for Robert W. Chambers, who also wrote the ur-Lovecraftian collection of short stories entitled The King in Yellow. One of the things that became clear in last week’s discussion about the literary decline of the fantasy genre, (or, as I would argue, the literary decline of the SF/F genre), is that very few of those involved in the discussion appeared to fully realize just how unusual it is for literary works to survive 70 years, as the works of Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien have, let alone 100. Nor, as should be readily apparent from the names and titles on this bestseller’s list from 1911, should one be inclined to confuse book sales with literary longevity, let alone immortality.

Read the entire post at the Black Gate. Then comment here, or there, as you prefer.

The collective Vanilla Ice

Some of the comments at the Black Gate on yesterday’s post regarding the decline and fall of the fantasy novel really have to be read to be believed. There has been a great deal of what appears to be willful obtuseness and a determined inability to understand standard definitions on display, but there’s not much that needs to be said against an argument that relies upon the idea that the basic concept of Western civilization has no intrinsic meaning… although it would certainly make for an amusingly meta defense of post-modernism in modern fantasy.

In any event, I replied thusly: Matt and [B], there appears to be little to discuss with either of you on the subject of Western civilization, still less its observable decline in demographic and other terms, as your knowledge of the concept clearly doesn’t even rise to the level of Wikipedia. Nor is this the proper venue to explain the principium contradictionis, so I suggest you read up on what the “Western world” and “the Occident” are and how they have been defined for decades, if not centuries. What you have presented, Matt, is not a rebuttal, but rather a collection of contorted wordplay and suppositions which attempts to avoid the manifestly obvious. Let me put it in terms you might be willing to acknowledge. Suppose you were to write a modern fantasy set in America circa 2010, but completely leaving out all science and technology. Don’t you think that would create a ludicrously false image of both the setting and the basic mindsets of the characters? Then suppose that people began claiming this omission of science and technology as well as scientific modes of thinking actually presented a more realistic understanding of the period than its inclusion. That would border on the insane, wouldn’t you agree?

Read the rest of my reply at the Black Gate. And if you feel moved to comment there, be considerate and polite. Playing hardball is completely fine here, but it is not the way things are done there.

Matt has also written what I consider to be a more relevant post on the moral aspect of the subject that you should find interesting.