Category Archive for ‘news’
2016 in Review
Posted on December 31st, 2016 in film and tv, games, news, opinion, progress, whisky deathmatch
New Year’s Eve, people, and you know what that means. Yes, indeed, I am 42 years old today. Can it really be a year since I reviewed last year? Apparently it can.
2016, then. Bloody hell. It’s been quite the year for deaths and political upheavals. The blog continues to be in a fairly moribund state – indeed this is my first post in, what, four months or more? Sad! Still, I’ve been doing this a while now, and I think it’s better that I use it when I’ve got something substantial to announce or discuss than just trying to dream up content to fill the space. So posting will continue to be light around here, I shouldn’t wonder. Probably you’d all rather have more fiction anyway, if given the choice…
A YEAR IN BOOKSELLING – With the publication of my collection of Short Stories, Sharp Ends, I now have ten books in print, would you believe. The Blade Itself came out in May 2006, so it’s rather neatly ten books in ten years, although the distribution’s been pretty lumpy and, since I actually started writing The Blade Itself in 2001, if I remember correctly, I haven’t actually written anywhere near as fast as a book a year. Sharp Ends made I think number 8 on the Times Hardcover list, which is a pretty strong showing for short stories, and everything else continues to tick over nicely. Georgia was the first new translation deal in a while, making somewhere between 25 and 30 total. After an awful lot of travelling last year I’ve toured a fair bit less, though I was out and about in the UK for Sharp Ends and visited Spain and the US a couple of times.
A YEAR IN BOOK WRITING – Another slightly piecemeal year interrupted by some side projects and bits and pieces, but I got going in earnest on the new book in the second half and I’m now not far off a reasonable first draft. In case anyone’s unaware what the current project is, I’m working on another trilogy in the First Law world, taking place about fifteen years after Red Country, but my ideal plan is to draft the whole trilogy before publishing the first book, so I can see exactly what I’ve got and where I’m going before going back to revise and fine-tune that first book. There are good reasons why they say the start of a book should be the last thing you write, and I think ideally that applies to series too, where the realities of publishing make it a possibility. The advantage is hopefully a more coherent and polished series plus a rapid and well-planned publication schedule, the disadvantage is a long wait for the first book. I can’t really see a scenario in which you get a new book from me before the end of 2018, and maybe later. But we’ll see…
TV and FILM – We live in a golden age of TV, no doubt. There’s just a steady splurge of quality, boundary-pushing stuff coming out of Netflix, which for me this year has included Narcos, Stranger Things, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Better Call Saul, Bloodline, Daredevil, Luke Cage, among others. Game of Thrones had in some respects its best series yet – certainly the most exciting and pay-off heavy, though for me I thought you could tell in the details that they’d run out of book to draw on. Enjoyed the first season of The Expanse a lot – just the right mix of the familiar and the original. Amazon’s Man in the High Castle was a triumph of setting and design but the jury’s still somewhat out on whether they can knit a convincing narrative out of it. Black Sails continued to deliver in its third season. Gotham season two was a little patchy, but strong at its best and for me still the pick of the recent crop of superhero stuff – it’s dark enough but still has a cartoony, comic-book sensibility. Second season of Italian crime drama Gomorrah was as brilliant as the first – hugely recommended. I even watched a couple of things on olde-style terrestrial TV. I must admit The Night Manager underwhelmed me a bit – it was good, but it failed to ever really catch fire. Planet Earth II was just astonishing, though. I was blown away by David Attenborough’s natural history as a kid and I’m still watching it now with my kids. Superb film-making on every level.
Cinema continues to be a much more minor interest, really. I probably go to the cinema more to watch kids films than adult ones. I always love a western, but The Revenant I found a little disappointing – beautiful but uninvoving. The Hateful Eight I quite liked but maybe because I was expecting less. For me Tarantino’s best since Pulp Fiction but then that’s not a high bar. Indeed Hateful Eight and the Revenant had about the right amount of dialogue for two films but just very badly distributed between them… You had to love Deadpool, so boldly and cleverly put together around a great central performance, and the time was just right for an irreverent adult take on the superhero movie, not that the Marvel steamroller looks like stopping anytime soon. Rogue One was good, not without issues and patchiness, but good, though digital Peter Cushing seemed to prove that live actors have a bright future for some time to come. Arrival touched the numinous at times but in the end offered up one of those mysteries that’s a lot less exciting once it’s solved. Which leaves La La Land as my film of the year by some margin – an original and brilliantly made musical which managed to be joyful and intimate without being soft-centred.
GAMES – I’ve dialled back the gaming this year somewhat. Final Fantasy XV was a decent if not a vintage entry in the Japanese crazy hairstyles roleplaying series, a lot more fun and a lot less pompous than the last one I played, but also even more incomprehensible than usual from a plot standpoint and strangely dudebro-tastic. Uncharted 4 rather inexplicably failed to float my boat – I loved the first one and liked the other two, but this most recent one, despite the usual great looks, barnstorming set pieces and sparky personality, just really bored me. I put it down half way through, which almost never happens for me. Perhaps just a format that’s had its day. I played a big batch of Telltale games and largely enjoyed them all. The Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead Season 2 were both great, but the touch on the Game of Thrones adaptation was a little less sure. The more ‘painterly’ graphical style made things look more wooden not less, the story was a lot more distributed, and you just got the sense that nothing you did would actually make all that much difference. Some great shocks along the way, though. Just started Tales from the Borderlands, and that’s been great so far. Bursting with the wit and cartoonish visual flair that Game of Thrones lacked somewhat. That maybe leaves Dark Souls III as my game of a rather weak year, an entry that continued to fine-tune the system and perhaps make it a little more accessible, while retaining most of the sense of wonder and gruelling gameplay.
WHISKY – Decided to try and finish a few bottles off and cut down my burgeoning collection of dusty glassware, so I didn’t get much new this year. Mackmyra, Swedish distillery, was an interesting light tipple. Then I got a great cask strength Glenfarclas – an independent distillery I really like that specialises in the classic rich, sherried style. Oh, and an Old Pulteney 1989 – I’m not always a fan of that salty maritime business but this is great, complicated, rounded stuff.
THE YEAR AHEAD – There’s a lot up in the air as we go into 2017 both from a professional and personal standpoint. We’ll probably be moving in the new year and starting off another big building and renovation project which will no doubt suck up a lot of energy, and I’m waiting to hear whether a long-standing side project is finally going to bear fruit. I’ll be hitting my usual haunt in Aviles in spain in the summer, and probably Worldcon in Finland too, though that’s yet to be confirmed. Other than that, it’s going to be full steam ahead with the new trilogy, hopefully finishing a first draft of the first book in early feb, so I can then spend a couple of months going over it, refining the characters’ voices and arcs so I’ve got a good foundation for a more detailed plan of the other two books. The dream would be to get well into a draft of the second book by this time next year, but you know what they say about dreams…
Happy new year, readers!
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Progress Report August ’16
Posted on August 28th, 2016 in news, progress
It occurs to me that I have been pretty goddamn remiss on the blogging front over recent times. Nothing lays that bare more than the realisation that my last of what were supposed to be regular bi-monthly progress reports was nearly a year ago. I have become that author I never wanted to be – you know, the one with the dusty old website last updated in 2012 with a post saying ‘I’m back!’, and a front page that proudly trumpets an early review for their last-book-but-three.
Still, I’ve just returned from a long holiday in Scandinavia with the kids (well, when I say holiday, I mean a constant refereeing of various family squabbles) and maybe I can get some regularity back into the posting and writing. Stranger things have happened…
A progress report, then. The last year’s been an odd one (maybe they all are in this business), with some non-book bits and pieces bubbling away in the background and taking up a fair bit of time and energy, of which more later, perhaps. Sharp Ends, my collection of stories in the First Law world, came out at the end of April, and book-wise I’ve been developing a new trilogy set in the First Law world since then. As I’ve probably said before, this is a set of books taking place maybe 25-30 years after the end of Last Argument of Kings, in a world moving rapidly forward into the turmoil of early industrialisation, set mainly in the Union (and the North), featuring some old friends in the background while focussing mostly on a new cast, and perhaps picking up some threads left over from the First Law trilogy a little more directly than the standalone books have.
The First Law was really stewing in my brain throughout my youth, gradually developing, and I spent years as a hobbyist writer, before being published, experimenting with the characters and style and thinking about the plot. The Shattered Sea, meanwhile, was a much more focussed set of three individual, linked stories, really, rather than a grand ambitious trilogy. So you could say I’ve never really taken on such a big project as a professional writer, and I want to make sure I take the time to get it as good as it can be. That means to some extent trying to replicate the situation with the first trilogy – to remove the pressure of imminent deadlines, to just live with the characters until I get comfortable with them and their voices distill down and become vivid and interesting (hopefully), in that effortless way that in fact takes an awful lot of effort to develop. For me, characters are always at the heart of a book (or books) – if the people aren’t interesting, no plot, however packed with shock and explosions, will ever make a mark, whereas if the characters are fascinating and the voices arresting you can watch them do nothing and still be captivated.
Still, you need a plot and a setting and all that other stuff too, and my experience has been that you don’t always know what you need a character to be until you get to the end of a book. Character and plot grow up together and inform each other, in other words. You’ve got to plan carefully, but at the same time you’ve got to experience how the writing comes out – what the characters feel like on the page before you really know where you’re going. So my hugely ambitious and probably in the end completely unworkable plan with these books is to plunge through a rough draft of all three as fast as I can, then see where I stand, and revise the first one thoroughly for publication. That, of course, will mean a pretty considerable wait for the first book but, hopefully, a regular publication schedule thereafter and, again hopefully, the best and most coherent end product.
Anyway, long story short, this is planned to be a trilogy of nine parts – three books each of three parts – and I’ve drafted the first and am tackling the second – so getting towards half way through a really rough first draft of the first book. Feeling pretty pleased with it so far, though experience has taught me that I’ll generally hate books at this stage and suffer many and frequent crises of confidence, so I try not to have high hopes for my feelings while a project is underway. Making progress is enough, actually liking what you’re doing is way too much to ask at this stage. Hoping to put in some concerted chair time in the run up to Christmas and make some epic progress. But then I’m always hoping for that…
And there is your progress report for August.
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10 Years
Posted on May 4th, 2016 in announcements, news
Hard to believe, I know, but The Blade Itself was first published in the UK on May 4th 2006, ten years ago today.
To put it in context, (and a context I have some trouble getting my head around) The Blade Itself has now been out as long as A Game of Thrones had been out when The Blade Itself first came out. Ten years. Makes one reflect on all that has happened since…
For a debut, it certainly did well out of the gate, but at the time it felt pretty unspectacular compared to my hopes of sweeping down a marble staircase with a dirty martini to instant rapturous approval from the public. Casting my mind back, I wasn’t prepared for the way that, after the first little flurry of generally pretty good reviews and attention, once the book was published it seemed to drop into a pit of silence. I’d scour the internet hourly back then, hoovering up every mention, revelling in every kind word, obsessing over every criticism. But the series built steadily, particularly once it found a US publisher a year after coming out in the UK, and each new book drove interest in the first. It’s only just coming out now in some territories – I think Simplified Chinese may have been the most recent, and these days The First Law is published in close to 30 languages.
I guess you could say I’ve been a published author for 10 years, although honestly I’m only just getting comfortable with describing myself as a ‘writer’, and ‘author’ still feels somehow presumptuous. In fact you could probably say that I’ve been a writer since 2001, as that was when I started experimenting with the book that would become The Blade Itself, and a professional writer since 2005, as that was when I signed my first deal with Gollancz. Still, though it meant I could take my writing much more seriously than I had been doing, my first advance was far from life-changing, and I was still working as a TV editor when I wrote Before They are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings, and even Best Served Cold. It wasn’t until maybe 2010 I could reasonably describe myself as a full-time writer, and I was still doing the odd editing job for a year or two after that.
In the 10 years, I’ve published 10 books (if we’re counting a collection of short stories which just creeps into the period by a week or two), though I’ve actually written a bit slower than a book a year. The fastest were the Shattered Sea books at maybe 10 months a piece, the slowest Red Country and Best Served Cold which took maybe 20 months each. Evened out over the whole period – the average pushed down considerably by the time I’ve spent planning, revising and editing and therefore not writing new words – it seems I write about 10,000 words a month.
I’ve sold, in all territories and all formats – and you’ll have to forgive the inaccuracy because you’d be amazed how difficult it is to get hard data on these things – somewhere in the region of 3-4 million books. Most of those are in English, and I probably sell very roughly the same amount of books in the UK market as the US. UK numbers include Australia and a lot of English editions sold across Europe, but the US market is still considerably bigger, so perhaps unsurprisingly that makes me much more successful at home than across the pond. My last five hardcovers have made the UK top five, only one has troubled the US bestseller list, and that crept on to the extended list somewhere around no. 25.
It’s been quite a ten years to be in publishing – the landscape of the industry has transformed since 2006, probably more than in any other decade since the printing press came in. It seems hard to believe now, but when Pyr bought US rights in the First Law in 2007 they actually weren’t interested in the e-book rights. These days e-book is half the game, at least in some territories and for some types of fiction, and audiobook has become vastly more important too. When I signed my first deal with Gollancz, self-publishing – with the necessity to print and warehouse your own copies and somehow rep them to individual bookstores – was close to unthinkable. These days it’s an increasingly popular and effective route to market. When I was first involved in discussions about sales the great fear was that the terrifying colossus of Waterstones – which had just gobbled up Ottakars in the UK – would come to monopolise bookselling, and publishers were doing all they could to help out plucky little niche sellers like Amazon. Now Amazon are challenging not just brick and mortar bookstores but the whole paradigm of traditional publishing.
In spite of the upheavals, though, I feel optimistic. Upheaval can mean vibrancy, and innovation, and new opportunity. It seems as if paper books are finding an equilibrium with e-books that leaves room for both, and my own feeling is that traditional and self-publishing will do the same, keeping publishers on their toes and opening up new options for writers. In the end, whatever the medium and method of publication, there’ll always be a hunger for good writing. Writers will always need the guidance and support of good editors and agents, as well as art, design, marketing, publicity, and all the processes that connect a reader to a book they enjoy. Writing can be a solitary business, but no one can do everything themselves. If there’s one thing I’m thankful for over the last ten years it’s the people I’ve worked with, especially the editors who’ve championed and improved my books: Lou Anders at Pyr, Devi Pillai at Orbit, Tricia Narwani at Del Rey, Jane Johnson, Nick Lake and Natasha Bardon at Harper Collins, and lastly but by no means leastly, Gillian Redfearn, who bought The Blade Itself as an assistant editor at Gollancz, has been my partner in crimes against fantasy fiction for the whole ten years, and now runs the imprint.
Anyway, this is starting to feel more like an obituary than a celebration. With luck and a fair wind I’ll be exasperating editors, disappointing readers, and poisoning the genre for decades to come. Happy Birthday to The Blade Itself. Many happy returns, say I…
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Sharp Ends UK Tour
Posted on March 14th, 2016 in announcements, appearances, news
I’m going to be doing a quick 5 day tour in the UK in April for the release of Sharp Ends. We shall be visiting London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol and Bath.
Daytime events tend to be just the quick meet and greet, shake of hands, sign the book. Evening events come with reading and Q&A as well. Unless time is really tight (which it usually isn’t) I’ll try to sign anything of mine you bring, though it would only be good manners to buy something from the store who are hosting the event, and I know you all have impeccable manners.
Full schedule in the attached picture. By all means get in touch with the stores for tickets and further information, and hopefully I’ll see some of you out there…
For those I won’t be visiting – apologies, I go where my publicist directs me, and she works out a schedule based on the logistics of travel, the stores that she knows have a good track record with events, and the stores that make a particular enthusiastic pitch for an event with me personally. There’s a certain beaten track of bigger stores in bigger cities that you can move between relatively easily, and who are used to hosting events and therefore have a pool of customers who are used to coming to events. On the one hand you’d love to travel more widely and visit some places rarely visited, but on the other hand that puts pressure on the travelling and can lead to some really badly attended events, which are no fun for me or for those folks who turn up. So it’s a bit of a self-reinforcing cycle of visiting the same stores…
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Two’s Company
Posted on January 12th, 2016 in announcements, news
Tor.com have put a brand new never before published story by me, Two’s Company. You can read it right now, over there, for free.
This is one of five stories from my forthcoming collection Sharp Ends that feature my female Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser style thief and warrior odd couple, Shevedieh and Javre, and that form a kind of spine to the whole thing around which the other stories are arranged.
So read it, don’t read it, enjoy it, don’t enjoy it, maybe even preorder the collection. The choice is yours. What a time to be alive!
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2015 in Review
Posted on December 31st, 2015 in announcements, film and tv, games, news, process, whisky deathmatch
New Year’s Eve, and you know what that means? Happy birthday to me. Yes, indeed, I am 41 years old today and this is my 7th yearly review post. Time marches only one way, my friends…
I’ve been hugely blog-lazy this year. There are still many authors blogging very effectively, but it’s not quite the standard tool of authorial public relations that it was at one time. A lot of my day to day activity has now moved to twitter, I’ve gone over the various stages of the publishing process in the past and have little to add, and I’m less inclined to vomit my opinions at length onto the internet, having done so enough in the past and been surprised and outraged not to see the world change too much as a result. I still follow the various controversies that spring up but when it comes to contributing, I dunno, it seems like there are better things to do with my time. I’ll certainly keep the blogging going for significant announcements and the occasional review, but it’ll probably only bubble away for the foreseeable future. We’ll see…
A YEAR IN BOOKSELLING – The First Law and its sequels roll inexorably on, it would appear, and I’m told the 6 books have now sold over 3 million copies in all languages and formats, though hard data is always surprisingly hard to come by. Meanwhile I released not 1 but 2 books in a year for the first (and probably last) time, and both Half the World and Half a War made the top 5 on the Sunday Times Bestseller list. I did a load of travelling, touring and events, including visits to Australia, America, Russia, Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy, and a week’s touring in the UK. Some was great, some probably less worthwhile, and I’ll definitely be scaling the events back next year in a bid to get more work done. I actually won some awards this year, would you believe – A Locus award for Best YA Novel for Half a King, and another for best Novelette for Tough Times All Over, as well as the Schwabischer Lindwyrm for, well, showing up, I guess. That one comes with a very comely 5 kg bronze statuette, though it did trigger a security alert at Stuttgart Airport.
A YEAR IN BOOK WRITING – What with the releases and the touring it’s been a slightly strange, piecemeal year on the writing front. Jan and Feb were spent finishing off Half a War, which needed a lot of editing (much of it done on the road in Australia). Then I had a lot of trips and travelling around the two book releases, in between which I was writing the last four or five stories to complete my collection Sharp Ends. Then, over the last few months, I’ve been working up ideas for a new trilogy in the world of the First Law, and starting to experiment with the first few chapters, which is showing some promise in between my traditional and entirely predictable slumps into pessimistic despondency. It’s a strange thing – no matter how many books you write you never really feel fully equipped for the one you’re writing.
TV and FILM – Once again I’ve watched a metric shed-load of TV, most of it good to some degree. I think this year has been notable for my personal method of consumption shifting from part DVD to almost exclusively streaming via Netflix and Amazon Prime, with quite a lot of what I’ve watched being Netflix or Amazon originals. The landscape shifts, indeed it does. An eclectic set of personal favourites have included The Walking Dead, Hell on Wheels, Black Sails, Vikings, Sense8, Peaky Blinders, Attack on Titan, The Bridge (original obvs), The Good Wife, Suits, Fargo, Narcos, Gomorrah, Gotham.
What with the kids and everything the cinema doesn’t happen too often. I felt The Force Awakens walked a very fine line between all kinds of conflicting demands to deliver a hugely entertaining film that actually felt like Star Wars again even if, at times, it perhaps felt a little too much like Star Wars. But my film of the year had to be the gobsmacking Mad Max: Fury Road, a tour de force of action and design which somehow managed to be edge-of-the-seat involving without really having a plot, performances or even a script. Very much looking forward to the Hateful Eight and the Revenant in the new year, though. I’ve always loved me a good western…
GAMES – Blog laziness has meant that I’ve failed to review much of what I’ve played, but it’s been a decent year, particularly strong in the open-world roleplaying department. I actually thought the game version of Mad Max, though a little repetitive and Assassin’s Creed-y, was a nice effort with some great visuals and atmosphere . Also Assassin’s Creed-y was Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, the first Assassin’s Creed I’ve played since the rather horrible Assassin’s Creed 3. They really do make too many of these, but Syndicate was a big improvement – a nice imagining of Victorian London and a choice of more interesting central characters (including, gasp, a woman) giving it a bit more zip, even if the framing story still seems more of a lame-ing story and the use of historical characters like crime-fighting Darwin and investigative reporting Dickens rather set the teeth on edge. There was plenty to like about Metal Gear Solid V, the latest from famous maverick video game auteur Hideo Kojima – with some awesome visuals by ace Hideo Kojima, genuinely rewarding and varied tactical espionage action worked out by genius Hideo Kojima, and several of expert Hideo Kojima’s best ultra-dramatic set piece dramatic sequences that you don’t play but just watch, mostly. Unfortunately Kojima’s incomprehensible plotting, Kojima’s intensely tiresome adolescent focus on sweaty boobs, and Kojima’s endless trumpeting of his own name dampened my enthusiasm considerably. My third best of the year has got to be Bloodborne, which successfully took the ultra-challenging Dark Souls formula into cosmic horror territory with some tweaks that improved playability and atmosphere without losing the ultra-difficulty and sense of crushing darkness we all so enjoy. My second best would be Fallout 4, a cynical post-apocalyptic setting I’ve always loved and Bethesda’s most detailed world yet. Bags of content and hugely enjoyable in the early and middle games, it was somewhat let down by a lacklustre and limited central plot and an endgame that rather artlessly revealed its own total lack of choices. Which leaves, as you may well already have guessed, drum roll please, The Witcher 3 as my game of the year. I didn’t even review it at the time I was so busy with other stuff, and I played it too long ago to have a huge amount to say now, but I think it may be the best effort I’ve ever seen at combining open world and free will for the player with convincing characters and central narrative. I found the actual gameplay a little limited, after a while it became way too easy, but those criticisms aside it was flipping brilliant. A truly vast world but packed with detail, and with the kind of meaningful coherence you rarely see in a video game (maybe as a result of it being a literary world adapted, rather than a world devised purely for a game). It also featured some amazing, expressive character designs and some clever plotting with real moments of high drama. You also have to admire the developer’s cottage industry ethos and fan-friendly attitude. Two thumbs up.
WHISKY – Been a bit of a year for blends, with Taketsuru 12, Hibiki 12 and 17, and Ballantine’s 21 all scratching that smooth, light, easy-drinking itch while still retaining plenty of character. Ardbeg always works for me though this year’s Perpetuum wasn’t a patch on previous special releases like Supernova or Ardbog. Bruichladdich Black Art also hit the spot in a big way for a big, complicated, relatively lightly peated Islay.
THE YEAR AHEAD – 2016 looks like a different sort of year again, with much preparation, exploration and experimentation. Sharp Ends was finished a while back and is due out in the US and UK at the end of April. Probably there’ll be a few UK events for that, and it looks like I’ll be returning to my familiar haunt of Aviles for Celsius Festival in July, but otherwise I’m trying to keep the overseas events to a minimum so I can concentrate on getting my new trilogy up and running. I’ve already got some relatively solid ideas together for that, and have written an experimental first few chapters to try the characters on for size. Rather than planning exhaustively right away I’m aiming at an approach more similar to what I did with the First Law – work up some ideas, experiment with some scenes, revise and refine the character’s voices, work up some more ideas, refine some more, live with it and see how I feel. In an ideal world I’d like to roughly draft all three books before fine-tuning, revising and editing each for publication, as I think that’ll give me the best chance at the most complete and coherent trilogy, as well as a controlled and timely publication schedule, but I expect that’ll depend on how fast I can get this first book written, and it may be that other mysterious projects which have long been bubbling away in the background will boil over and require a certain amount of attention. Either way, there’s going to be a fair gap between Sharp Ends and my next book, but hopefully that’ll be offset by faster publication later. I shall keep you informed…
Happy new year, readers!
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Sharp Ends
Posted on August 24th, 2015 in announcements, news
I’m delighted to announce that my collection of short stories is (nearly) complete and will be published by Gollancz in the UK and Orbit in the US in April 2016. It shall be called Sharp Ends: Stories from the World of the First Law, and will contain 13 stories, all set in the Circle of the World over a period that starts some ten years before the beginning of The Blade Itself and ends a few years after Red Country closes, featuring a rogue’s gallery of familiar and unfamiliar characters. Most of these have been (or will have been) published somewhere else before – in anthologies with other authors or special editions of the First Law books, but in general they haven’t been available that widely. Several are entirely new, including one that teeters on the edge of being defined a novella.
The table of contents:
A Beautiful Bastard: The Union army may be full of bastards, but there’s only one big enough to think he can save the day single-handed when the Gurkish come calling: the incomparable Colonel Sand dan Glokta.
Made a Monster: After years of bloodshed, the idealistic chieftain Bethod is desperate to bring peace to the North. There’s only one obstacle left – his own lunatic champion.
Small Kindnesses: The hopes of Shevedieh, the best thief in Westport, to turn her back on crime, come crashing down when she finds a huge drunkard sleeping in her doorway. Doing the right thing always comes at a price…
The Fool Jobs: Curnden Craw has been sent with his dozen to recover a thing from beyond the Crinna. One small problem. No one seems to know what the thing is.
Skipping Town: Shevedieh and Javre, ill-matched adventurers, find themselves forced to flee yet another self-made disaster.
Hell: ‘I have seen hell, and it is a great city under siege.’ The fall of Dagoska through the eyes of a young acolyte.
Two’s Company: Javre, Lioness of Hoskopp, runs into Cracknut Whirrun on a bridge over a remote canyon. Can Shevedieh persuade either of these proud heroes to step aside?
Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Three not entirely innocent bystanders are sucked into the chaos of Monzcarro Murcatto’s vengeance.
Some Desperado: There is no honour among thieves when the outlaw Smoke finds herself being hunted down by her own comrades.
Yesterday, Near a Village Called Barden: Royal Observer Bremer dan Gorst reports to the king on another ugly little skirmish as summer dies in the North.
Three’s a Crowd: It’s a foolish man who steals from the best thief in Styria, and when Horald the Finger steals her lover, it’s time for Shevedieh to stop running and start fighting. For those who work in the shadows, though, few things are ever quite as they seem…
Freedom: Being an absolutely true account of the liberation of the town of Averstock from the grip of the incorrigible rebel menace by the famous Nicomo Cosca.
Tough Times all Over: All Carcolf wants is to take her package from here to there, but in the city of fogs and whispers, there are always a dozen other rogues with their own ideas.
More news, including a reveal of the cover, when I get it…
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One Week until Half a War…
Posted on July 9th, 2015 in appearances, news
Half a War comes out in the UK in hardcover, e-book and audiobook in but 7 short days. Here be its cover…
And here be its blurb…
Words are weapons
Princess Skara has seen all she loved made blood and ashes. She is left with only words. But the right words can be as deadly as any blade. She must conquer her fears and sharpen her wits to a lethal edge if she is to reclaim her birthright.
Only half a war is fought with swords
The deep-cunning Father Yarvi has walked a long road from crippled slave to king’s minister. He has made allies of old foes and stitched together an uneasy peace. But now the ruthless Grandmother Wexen has raised the greatest army since the elves made war on God, and put Bright Yilling at its head – a man who worships no god but Death.
Sometimes one must fight evil with evil
Some – like Thorn Bathu and the sword-bearer Raith – are born to fight, perhaps to die. Others – like Brand the smith and Koll the wood-carver – would rather stand in the light. But when Mother War spreads her iron wings, she may cast the whole Shattered Sea into darkness.
And here be some early reviews…
“The final instalment in the Shattered Sea series is the perfect ending to an outstanding YA trilogy … Joe Abercrombie has long been the master of grim and gritty fantasy, but Half a War proves that he’s got all the skills of a master romance writer. The battles are bloody, the twists are shocking, and the deaths are heartbreaking.”
– SFX
“War reaches the boiling point in the impressive conclusion … Abercrombie piles on shocking betrayals and charges his characters a high price for vengeance in this powerful and fitting final volume.”
– Publishers Weekly
“The narrative, well-sprinkled with gory action and impelled by characters at this stage not just familiar, but gratifying, moves along at a brisk clip. Best of all, the relentless intrigues, plots, and schemes bubble just below the surface.”
– Kirkus
“In his Shattered Sea saga, Abercrombie has created a series that is by shades engaging, mesmerising and jaw-dropping, possessing themes and complex characters so rarely interrogated by YA fiction.”
– Sci Fi Now
Here are the times and dates for my UK events next week, with visits to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, York, Nottingham, Ely, Colchester, London, Reading, Bristol, and the YA Literature Convention…
And over here you can find further information, the first three chapters as a sample and, oh, look at that, information on where you can preorder…
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The First Law Trilogy goes into Orbit
Posted on June 30th, 2015 in announcements, artwork, news
I’m delighted to announce that in September, Orbit Books are going to be re-releasing the First Law Trilogy in the US. They’ve been publishing the standalone books since the start, and will be publishing a collection of short stories in the same world early next year, so this will put all the First Law books under one roof. We’re working on a new cover approach for all six, but in the meantime they’ll have a contemporary twist on the original cover treatment…
E-books should be unaffected in the short term, but availability of the physical books might be patchy in the US until these new ones hit the bookstores…
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Half a War Extract
Posted on June 8th, 2015 in news
Half a War, the thrilling conclusion to my Shattered Sea trilogy, is out in but a few brief weeks, would you believe – on 16th July in the UK and 28th July in the US. You can read the first three chapters right now just over here, on my website. Should that give you a taste for it, you should find preorder information not that far away…
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