The Great Reread Project Mark III

A couple of years ago I did a series here about my favourite books and authors. Once I'd completed it, I got to thinking that I had all these great books that I'd loved and I rarely ever reread (too many shiny new things to take my attention). I made a resolution to reread more. I'm now on my 3rd go round the alphabet and thought that this time I'd blog the rereads, we'll soon find out if the 'suck fairy' has come to visit any of my favourite stories.

I guess the above picture gives away my choice this time.

Joe Abercrombie first came to attention of fantasy readers in 2006 with the publication of The Blade Itself, the opening volume of his epic fantasy First Law trilogy.

He followed that with 3 standalone books all set in the same secondary world as First Law and often featuring characters from that trilogy.

The Heroes is the second of those. Abercrombie was inspired by works like George R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, Glen Cook's Black Company books and even Steven Erikson's Malazan series. He became one of the first of a new wave of fantasy authors favouring a low magic approach, gritty 'realistic' settings and characters who are largely absent a moral compass.

While the standalones are just that and can be read without having read the original trilogy they do feature characters from that and occasionally reference events that take place in it. To keep readers spoiler free I'd advise reading both the three books of First Law (The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged and The Last Argument of Kings), then Best Served Cold (the first standalone book) before tackling The Heroes.

A lot of readers that I've seen tend to rate Best Served Cold as the best of the standalones, if not Abercrombie's best book. I swim against the stream there. I did like Best Served Cold, but once I got into it, it became rather predictable.

The blurb on the back of The Heroes says simply Three Men, One Battle, No Heroes. That's a wonderful summation of the book, although there are more than three men and more than one battle, but there are indeed no heroes.

The book is the story of a battle between the forces of the Union and the Northmen. The Heroes of the title aren't people at all. It's the name given to a group of large standing stones, on top of a hill, which the Northmen will hold at any cost.

The Heroes covers a number of people involved in this fight. From the driven Union soldier Bremer dan Gorst, fighting to redeem himself and possibly not just seeking glory, but death in the getting of it. The leader of the Northmen Black Dow, an amoral vicious killing machine, who only exists to bring misery to anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path, his trusted lieutenant the straight edged Curnden Craw, who is sick of all the fighting, but just doesn't know how to stop doing it. There's Prince Calder, considered a coward by his own people in the north, but really just someone who's trying to survive as best he can. Finree dan Brock, a young military wife who wants to make things better for all involved, but at the same time advance her husband's career in an upwards trajectory. Corporal Tunny, a wily Union soldier, who always comes out alive and generally richer in the doing of it. Finally there's Beck, a young Northman who is trying to make himself a hero in an effort to impress a long dead father he never even knew.

The side characters in this are also marvellous, mostly from the north. I particularly liked the female warrior Wonderful and the reckless sword wielding philosopher Whirrun of Bligh. It's no coincidence that Whirrun is one of the funniest characters in the book (it's worth it just for his 'cheese trap').

Abecrombie's metaphor laden descriptions are great to read and really paint a picture. He shines when he writes battle scenes. One of these is a chapter long and puts the reader right in the middle of the action. Moving from participant to participant, the story continuing as one fighter is cut down and then picking up with the soldier who did the deed and entering their PoV. It is a masterful piece of writing.

There is no magic in The Heroes. If it weren't set on a fictional secondary world it could almost qualify as a piece of historical fiction. It is a wonderful bit of writing and a superlative example of the sub genre that has come to be known as 'grimdark'. I highly recommend it and there's no better way to say War is Hell.

Next, whatever I pick from the B's on the shelf.

Things change

I read a lot, at any one time I'm generally reading multiple books. Usually it's two. I have one for general reading and one that sits on the bedside table and I read a chapter or two of it at night just before turning the light out.

At present it's four. They are, in no particular order:

Sworn in Steel by Douglas Hulick. This is the sequel to Hulick's debut Among Thieves. It follows the fortunes of Drothe, a member of Ildrecca's criminal underclass. It's similar in tone and theme to Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards series which is largely about a different thief in a different setting, but has stylistic and thematic similarities. I was a huge fan of Lynch's Locke Lamora, which is why I picked up Among Thieves and I liked it enough to try the sequel, more on that later.

Sparrow Hill Road by Seanan McGuire. This is kind of a reread for me. Rose Marshall is a pretty little dead girl who died in 1953 while on the way to her prom. She became a ghost and seems destined to wander the highways and byways of the continental United States both in this world and the afterlife. Rose saves who she can and guides who she can't through to another world. Twelve of the stories in Sparrow Hill Road were initially published online on the site Edge of Propinquity. That was where I first read them, but always thought they'd make a great collection all put together. Clearly I wasn't alone there. Seanan edited them, prettied them up and strung them together with a narrative, she also added a brand new story to make it a baker's dozen. I'm enjoying the renewal of my friendship with Rose.

I've got Gaie Sebold's Shanghai Sparrow because I really liked her Babylon Steel duology. I haven't read that far into Shanghai Sparrow, but it seems to have more in common with Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist than it does with Babylon Steel. I did kind of know that going in, so I don't mind and I do like exploring this new steampunk Victorian world that she's created for her light fingered protagonist to play in.

What Makes This Book So Great by Jo Walton isn't a book as such, it's a collection of blog posts that the author wrote for website Tor.com between July 2008 and February 2011. They're reviews of a sort, but unlike most reviews that you find about the interwebz and on blogs they're not about the newest shiniest release or the newest shiniest thing that the blog owner has just discovered, they're about classics mostly, sometimes quite obscure books as well and as Jo Walton is a committed rereader she's often read the books multiple times. I actually kind of like her take as a reader and rereader on the books and she approaches them from the point of view as a reader, not a reviewer or critic. It is a skill I wish I had.

It's Jo Walton's collection of posts and my feelings about the first book on the list that occasioned this post.

You may have noticed that the four books are all quite different. Sworn in Steel is a very typical example of what used to be called high or epic fantasy, and seems to have morphed into something many people now refer to as grim dark.

Sparrow Hill Road is an urban fantasy about an urban legend written in the style of Raymond Chandler by way of Joss Whedon. In fact Rose's narration often puts me in mind of Chuck Wendig's Miriam Black from that series, although Rose's mouth is far cleaner than Miriam's.

Shanghai Sparrow is one of the new breed of steam punk, and although I don't think it's been marketed this way, it has a curious YA feel to it.

What Makes This Book So Great is a non fiction series of essays musing on the genre, and focussing mostly on science fiction.

Before going into What Makes This Book So Great I knew it would be mostly about science fiction. One, my wife had read it and told me so, and two, Jo Walton wrote the highly acclaimed and multi award winning Among Others, which is largely about one person's love affair with classic science fiction. In fact I do wonder if some of Among Others was inspired by the author writing the posts for Tor.com.

I probably haven't mentioned it here, in fact I'm sure I haven't, but science fiction and I don't play well together. It just doesn't connect with me a lot of the time. I do have science fiction books that I have read and loved, but given the choice between a sci-fi and BFF (Big Fat Fantasy, not best friends forever), I'll go the BFF every time.

At least I used to. Now I'd probably look for an urban fantasy or something that is a bit different, maybe one of those things that agents, publishers and book sellers hate, because they can't fit into a nice neat label and aren't sure how to sell it or where to display it.

I used to run another blog (http://travelethroughiest.blogspot.com) that started as a reread of Dave Sim's ground breaking independent graphic novel Cerebus and morphed into a review blog. I wound it up about 18 months ago, because I felt I was talking to crickets (I got very little traffic. Kind of like this place really, but I shall not complain) and I felt under pressure every time I read something and put it up on the site to say things about it.

However I found that when I started reviewing books, even if most of my reviews weren't read by anyone other than me, that I started to think and assess what I was reading more carefully and work out what was good or bad about the books and why I liked or didn't like them.

I thought the changing of my tastes was a new thing, but to be honest I don't think it is. I used to read a lot of high fantasy. I went from Tolkien to Brooks to Eddings to Feist to Jordan to Martin to Abercrombie to Lynch. Note: I didn't mention either Donaldson or Goodkind because for some reason I just couldn't get into either writer. I've read Lord Foul's Bane three times and I've never liked it or been able to see in it what others could. Wizard's First Rule was so badly written that I never made it past the first half of it before it turned into a wall banger (that's a book that you dislike so much you hurl it across the room, where it hits the wall and falls to the floor, hopefully to rot). I must confess that the TV show based on Goodkind's work was a guilty pleasure. Don't get me wrong, it was truly awful, but it was so bad that it was fun to watch. Of the cast only Bruce Spence ever seemed to really get the joke and played his role with his tongue jammed firmly in his cheek. I probably should also throw Steven Erikson in there, too. I tried to read Malazan, but got halfway through Memories of Ice (the 3rd book), before I said to myself 'I really don't care about any of these people or what happens to them.' so gave up on the series.

Sometime in 2010 I started to venture out of the high fantasy sub genre and look at other things. Things that were different or stretched the boundaries or were hard to classify. Some of this was due to disenchantment with the prevalence of grim dark, which unless it was superlative (Abercrombie and Lynch) began to bore me. There's only so many morally ambiguous, or completely bankrupt, anti heroes that one can take before they all begin to blur into each other. It was almost like the authors made this pact with each other to try and one up one another on that front. My BMF is worse than your BMF.

I don't read much of what classifies as grim dark now. I still read new work by Abercrombie and Lynch and Martin, on the rare occasions when he actually finishes a book, and I don't think I could ever fall out of love with Locke Lamora, and Joe Abercrombie does what he can to push the boundaries of what we regard as the new sub genre.

I guess this brings me to a question which some people may ask. How do you read 4 things, all different, at once? Well, as I said earlier one of them is the bedside book (at present that's What Makes This Book So Great) and I alternate between the others during the day when I read.

It's generally only 3 books, but I couldn't not read Sparrow Hill Road, however to do that I had to put one aside, and this time it was Sworn in Steel, now while I'm about 200 pages into a 500 page book there, and I waited for nearly 3 years to read it, it isn't really grabbing me that much that I can't put it aside. It's one of these grim dark things and while I find it better than most my tastes seems to have moved on from those now.

What I wrote went much the same way. I spent years writing a big epic fantasy and then when that just wasn't working I tried to morph it into a grim dark. That didn't work either. I found my niche with Realmspace, apparently portal fantasy is anathema to the world outside, so I may have wasted my time writing it, but I did enjoy myself and whole lot more than I was when I was working fruitlessly on the others. I've also recently written the first book of what I hope to make into an urban fantasy series and that's called The Foxwood Chronicles. So, yes things do change, with writers and readers.

The idea

Everything starts with an idea. How does someone like me, who was a fan of epic fantasy, but liked the occasional urban fantasy, wind up writing a light and funny YA fantasy adventure?

That probably started with me joining a writing group on a forum I frequent. Like many online writing groups it started with excitement and a flurry of activity, and I fear like many online writing groups as that initial burst of enthusiasm faded and life outside of writing intruded on the participants time, posts dried up and the group unfortunately died.

At present in the fantasy genre the king of the subgenres is epic fantasy. This isn't anything new, it's always been the king as long as I can remember. Epic or high fantasy refers to things like Lord of the Rings or The Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire. Big fat books that can do duty as a door stop if needed.

Of late there's been a shift to writing low magic, gritty epics that feature fairly graphic descriptions of violence and lashings of profanity that take place in what TV Tropes refers to as 'sad crapsack' worlds, and they must feature at least one or more morally ambiguous anti hero. If said hero is a thief or an assassin, well so much the better.

When I looked around the group I was a member of it seemed that many of the offerings were of this type. The current term that many use is 'grimdark'. That's all well and good and it makes sense, there's a lot of that on the market and it's obviously quite popular, I read a lot of it myself and at this time my work in progress was along those lines (in fact one of my three main characters was an ageing, alcoholic, warrior mage full of self loathing. The other two were a thief with a smart mouth and a hidden talent and a member of an elite warrior race). The problem with this is that if you're going to enter a crowded market then what you write has to be superlative. I didn't get that from my own work. It had it's moments, but I just wasn't feeling comfortable with it and at times it was a struggle to write.

As I said the group died and later on another one formed. This was smaller and less formal. Again a lot of what the participants were working on was in the 'grimdark' format. I'd kept plugging away at my thing, but I didn't want to necessarily trot that out again. What to do?

I'd had a number of thoughts floating about in my head for some time about a group of loosely connected worlds or Realms. I called the concept Realmspace, and at about this time the ideas seemed to come together and coalesce into something coherent, so that was what I wrote.

The group again seemed to die, but this time I kept working on Realmspace. I feel it more than anything else I've ever written, and while I've not been published, I have written a number of complete novels (I'll talk about that tomorrow). It seems to come alive for me as I write and it never runs short on ideas.

One idea that works, is all it takes.