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I love Abercrombie's stuff and he's even better in person, but I can definitely see the complaint about his work being too dark. I accepted it because I loved the characters so much, but there was a distinct sense of unease throughout Best Served Cold in that it felt like everyone was taking the low road not out of a sense of practicality or comfort, as was the case in The First Law, but just out of a desire to be dark. The whole fact that people do not always make the right decision and do not always act in the best interest of themselves, their goals or the world is what gave rise to the style of dark fantasy that Martin and friends made possible. It almost feels that Abercrombie goes a little too far in certain cases, though; at the end of the day, people do make the right choice once in awhile. That said, though, he remains one of my favorite authors. His style is outstanding and his characters are more than enough to make up for aspects I might usually not agree with.
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Apr 22, 2010 04:25
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Unkempt posted:Mmmmm. Gah, you stupid fucker. I was expecting an ARC this week and had a whole sarcastic "oh hay whats this maybe I'll read it I.D.K." post planned. I would have been King of the Book Barn. Who gave you yours?
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Sep 9, 2010 18:58
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Well, well! Look what arrived today! Along with this note from his editor...  Ha ha. Now I am cool, too! Right guys? RIGHT?! Just opened the prologue. It is great.
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Sep 26, 2010 01:47
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Hughmoris posted:I don't have much knowledge of the literary world but how do you assholes get these advance copies? We share a publisher.
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Sep 28, 2010 00:12
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Unkempt posted:I don't, my girlfriend just runs the SF department of a largish bookshop. There are a couple of copies on EBay (not mine) if anyone wants one that bad. Independent? British?
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Sep 28, 2010 10:23
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A Nice Boy posted:Meh, it's not stupid. Writing is a marriage of amazing ideas and style, so if one of those falters it's noticeable. You can read an author who has an amazing loving world built, but is a lovely writer, or vice versa. Worldbuilding is just something people complain about. How many authors build immense worlds, societies, cultures, monsters and magics that never have anything to do with the story? Every bit of the First Law world has a role to play and a function to serve. ...well, except the Shanka. Never really figured out what their deal was.
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Oct 15, 2010 01:18
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syphon posted:Disagree wholeheartedly. It's not as important as the story or characters, but it's a very important part of storytelling that a lot of people get a lot of enjoyment out of. It's great when it works, to be sure, and there are a lot of stories that have memorable worlds that become as big a part as anything. But it can't carry the story and the lack of it doesn't diminish a story that can stand without it.
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Oct 15, 2010 03:35
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John Charity Spring posted:I think Abercrombie gets the balance right. He's clearly got a lot of stuff figured out for his own use, and that includes his own maps so he can plot out the events, but he only gives the reader as much as is necessary for the story. That was my point, yes. The Chekov's gun principle should be applied to worldbuilding: if a detail is revealed, it should be relevant to the plot. Abercrombie does this well.
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Oct 15, 2010 17:40
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Flatscan posted:Whereas with Robert Jordan you get 800 pages of what dresses and coats everyone is wearing and then 10 pages of stuff happening. Precisely. You have to strike a nice balance between encyclopedia and Hemingway.
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Oct 16, 2010 02:35
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Finish the bottle whenever Glokta talks about his own penis and/or making GBS threads himself. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen, and you'll need a drink afterward.
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Oct 19, 2010 03:42
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Decius posted:It's not bad at all in my opinion, but it's quite a bit below his Takeshi Kovacs stuff. He tries a bit too hard to subvert the genre conventions and it shows. It seems a bit forced at times, which is too bad, because the premise is quite good. I like it overall, but it's not a "would sacrifice my firstborn to get an ARC" like Abercrombie, Erikson, Butcher or Bakker (or even his Takeshi Kovacs books) for me. I dug it, but I'd be hard-pressed to deny the charge of juvenile dialogue. "Look, son, maybe you could just be gay without sleeping with everyone in town?" "Why, dad, can't you deal with it? GAWD!"
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Nov 16, 2010 21:53
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Bizob posted:Didn't his Dad have his lover slowly and publicly impaled through the rectum in the city square? I didn't think it was just juvenile bitchery. I can't even remember that part. That might say something about me more than the writing. Someone else pointed out that it fell into the common fantasy trap of too much information, such as when the Dragonslayer was going to ram a bunch of ghouls with his lance and took awhile to stop and think about the history of it.
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Nov 16, 2010 23:37
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My brain has shut down and I can't remember, but was it ever explained what Fenris the Feared was? Not an Eater?
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Dec 30, 2010 21:03
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I'd really like to see a "dark" fantasy thread, but haven't really read enough for a solid OP. I can only think of three, and they've already been posted here: GRRM, Superior Joey, and Mieville. I'd really like to expand my knowledge of this subgenre. Does Jack Vance count? His Dying Earth stories can get pretty grim, but he leans towards wordiness. What about Harold Lamb? He wrote adventure fiction in the teens and twenties, but a lot of it was semi-fantastical and the samples that I've read seem about as hardboiled as Abercrombie. Mieville is dark fantasy? Isn't he New Weird?
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Jan 2, 2011 07:36
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Yadoppsi posted:The Steel Remains is another good suggestion. I got into it so much at the end I was disappointed to learn that it's the only book of the series to have come out yet. Mark Charan Newton's Nights of Villjamur deals with a gay protagonist fairly realistically. He's sort in the vein of Mieville (though a little more ancient). His series deals with a world entering an eternal ice age as their sun begins to die.
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Jan 3, 2011 01:48
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A fantasy author is judged by his beard. It is a testament to his success.
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Jan 7, 2011 21:51
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A lot of the actors we're thinking of wouldn't work because Bayaz doesn't really come out as wicked until the very end. You see Christopher Lee on the screen and you know he's a bad dude.
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Jan 12, 2011 02:43
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So, our friend Abercrombie gets a mention in this blog by scared old people as a fallen, bankrupt nihilist. He's got a point or two (in that Abercrombie tends to be needlessly negative at points) that are quickly overwhelmed by various old school fanboy wank. The comments are pretty golden, though. See how long it takes you to find the Islamophobe and the conversation praising Gor for its "unabashed political incorrectness" and "turning Women's Suffrage on its head."
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Feb 13, 2011 22:50
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John Charity Spring posted:I enjoyed the comment extolling the Randian virtues of Goodkind's books. I missed that. The comments section is a rabbit hole of conservative extremist wank resembling an overlong rant from a crotchety old man, going from "kids these days" to "women tryin' to take away my freedom."
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Feb 14, 2011 01:55
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Keep in mind that Abercrombie's marketing budget is probably 1/6th of what's thrown behind Rothfuss, too. As cynical as it might be to suggest, the very fact that you'll see ROTHFUSS, ROTHFUSS, ROTHFUSS everywhere and abercrombie once in a while suggests that more people will probably pick up Rothfuss.
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Mar 28, 2011 22:54
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Chamberk posted:Awesome - the library near me has a copy, so I'll probably pick it up soon. I think, if it were something like R.A. Salvatore's battles and their page-long descriptions of footwork, you'd be justified in being worried. What I especially like about Abercrombie is that he recognizes everything drives character, even fighting. So his battles aren't so much a break from characterization, but merely a continuation. I mean, remember when Shivers went nuts at the end of BSC?
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May 11, 2011 04:30
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I saw Bayaz as the perfect summation of Abercrombie's theme: the self always wins out over the collective. Hence why Logen goes back to being the Bloody Nine, Shivers can't be a good man, Monza gets her revenge, Jezal becomes a lazy poo poo and Bayaz ruins everyone's lives because he really hates a guy.
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Jul 31, 2011 12:05
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I think the best possible thing he did was decide to not give a poo poo about "the genre" and just wrote what he wanted to write.
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Sep 30, 2011 06:12
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