Awesome, congrats. Looks great.
I want to read it. I like the cover too. Congrats!
Congrats! This looks great.
I read Blitz by Daniel O’Malley, the third after Rook and Stiletto. Most impressively unlike almost every other example, I loved it even though it brought back almost no previous characters, it may be better than the first two because it was just as enjoyable despite the overall novelty factor being gone. It’s hard to world build in the first book and then match that experience in subsequent installments, in my experience.
Anyway, no spoilers but I’ll say that this dives even harder into the wacky powers and has even a bit more dry humor. Highly recommended.
Oh nice, been waiting what feels like forever for it to come out, didn’t realize it had. Will have to read it next. Glad to hear its recommended because I definitely enjoyed the first two.
Thanks for the heads up! Loved the first two, now I know to put Blitz on my reading list.
So is your last name Brothers or are you two siblings?
— Alan
Picked up the First Law trilogy (Abercrombie) since I’ve been looking at it for ages and it’s been recommended here. Unfortunately, this time the QT3 hivemind failed me.
I am happy that I bought a collection of the three books, because this is one of those trilogies which is really a single book, and I would have been annoyed to have to wait between books. But it was a slow read, and I didn’t have any problem putting it down while reading.
Good stuff: plot (though IMO let down a little by the last few chapters) and good world-building - probably one of the best fantasy worlds I’ve encountered in recent times (although I found the Orcs - i.e., Shanka - very lame). Love the core premise of the series (Gandalf is evil). Effective writing with some excellent scenes along the way. Great action. A satisfactory ending all-in-all, though I’m not fond of the “wink, wink” type of writing that the last paragraphs represent.
Things I had issues with: Crapsack Grimdark. I enjoy grimdark fantasy, and something like this which aims for a more realistic fantasy world would usually be something I love, but this way overshoots the target into caricature. Best exemplified by a scene where Glokta looks at a board containing 320 names and muses how every one fo them has nasty little secrets to exploit. It feels like a teenage goths idea of grimdark: there is no good, everyone has an agenda, everyone carries an evil or sad secret. It says a lot for how absurd this gets when one reads comments about “the most decent/good character in the book” referring to a person who falls into murderous, violent rages (no, not Logen Ninefingers)…
The other problem I had was the characters. Interesting to get to know (Abercrombie’s strength, I guess), but one’s I found increasingly boring to follow. Near-zero character development. Characters talk about how they change (but don’t really), or how they changed from how they were before the book (but again - little evidence to suggest this is true, and in any case, that does not count as character development). We leave the characters after ~2000 pages with them being as dumb, cowardly or evil as when we first met them. One of the key POV characters is told this directly by his big enemy “you’re nothing but a leaf in the wind”. But this goes for every POV character in the book - none of them have any actual agency; they’re all just following orders and doing what they’re told. For all the internal monologues (“are we the baddies?”), they’re always just reacting and any tiny flcker of agency is immediately extringuished by events (Grimdaaaark!!!). All very nihilistic, but I’m old enough to know that life isn’t actually like that - and to me it slowly leeched the interest of these books out of me. Why should I care about any of these characters, when every one is various levels of despicable, and they clearly don’t care themselves?
Doesn’t help that this is rather padded out. Points repeated ad nauseum. Lots of irrelevant story. I suspect one could easily skip the second book entirely (just a little exposition inserted into the first and third) without losing anything from the story.
This probably comes of a lot more negative than I really feel about these books, because I’m trying to explain to myself as well why this didn’t work for me even though it is such a highly regarded series. I can easily understand why a lot of people enjoy reading these books, and I don’t regret having read these books, even if I doubt I’ll pick up Abercrombie again. I have a sneaking suspicion that I would have mostly loved this series 30 years ago - nowadays, I guess I just can’t suspend disbelief enough to buy into this extreme levels of nihilism.
Thanks @strategy, that was very thorough and I especially think that I would probably have the same issues with it as you did. At least I certainly know not to pick it up when I’m not in the mood for grimdark!
I don’t remember the source of the recommendation (probably ACOUP) but I recently finished With Zeal and Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775–1783. It’s the publication of someone’s (well, Matthew H. Spring’s, to be precise) rewritten PhD thesis, and it kind of reads like it, but I think it was definitely a bit of worthwhile military history for a layman like me, for a couple of reasons.
As an American, I got the childhood version of the Revolutionary War growing up, of course, and while you don’t expect that to be terribly accurate, it does form the basis for how you view it the rest of your life. This is written from a British perspective: “How did our redcoats do in that forgotten little war a couple hundred years ago?” The Americans were called “the rebels” throughout (contrasted with “the British” or just “the redcoats” or “the Navy”), in an effort to (supposedly) avoid anachronism, which I found amusing. And it really was not about the Americans. They were discussed as antagonists, of course, but there wasn’t any effort to make statements about them beyond how they reflected on the British. And the focus was very much on the army, and specifically the infantry. He discusses how much trouble it was to procure horses and cannon in these backwoods colonies as an explanation for why cavalry and artillery had really quite minor roles in the war, and spends probably 90% of the book on the poor bloody infantry, as they say.
The organization is by subject, rather than chronological. So it’s “this is the army’s task throughout the war”, “this is how they marched”, “this is how the officers were”, “this is how they used the bayonet charge”, and so on, and there’s essentially no chronology, though the battles and operations are used as supporting evidence for the various discussions. (The phrase “the disaster at Cowpens” comes up probably a dozen times, at least.) With that in mind, I do recommend reading, say, the Wikipedia summary of some of the main battles that are mentioned, because he does not walk you through them at all, and kind of assumes that you know (for example) that Tarleton force-marched his troops for a week (or whatever) right into a charge through three lines of intentionally-retreating rebels until they got surrounded and annihilated at Cowpens.
That said, once you do get a grasp on the background it’s a truly informative look at why things played out the way they did, the structure of the army, and what the redcoats had to deal with and how they did it. Strong recommendation.
My one complaint is that it’s a bit too British-focused. Partly this goes into the assumed background knowledge–the first chapter is about what the British needed to do, and thought they needed to do, to win the war. Why they couldn’t win the war is kind of a key point, I think, and the reasons that the rebels had for, you know, not surrendering is fundamental to that and underdeveloped, IMHO. (I’m not talking about Boston Tea Party rah-rah stuff, either–he talks about how the rebel leaders could disperse and regroup their forces, and win (or force) the support of the local population, and I think those points could have been more developed, for example.) That said, it is about the British, not the rebels, so fair enough.
A smaller offshoot of this point that really bothered me is how atrocities are discussed. He talks about the bad things (i.e. what we would call war crimes) the British did with a fairly neutral tone–there are explanations of some of the motivating causes, but there are also a lot of "allegedly"s floating around all of a sudden, whereas in the rest of the book the unreliability of the sources is much less apparent. However in the next chapter, when he spends a paragraph on the rebels’ killing of surrendering troops, there’s not an “allegedly” to be found and it’s all of a sudden “murdering” instead of “killing” or “shooting”. It was kind of glaring, at least to this American. Though to be fair the focus of the book is, again, on the British, and American atrocities aren’t really discussed beyond that one bit. A minor complaint in a great work, overall.
I’ve seen this book and was interested in it previously, so thanks for sharing your review. Actually I think the issue of using “allegedly” from a historian’s point of view is extremely problematic. Writers and journalists use it in a modern fashion to avoid lawsuits when it hasn’t been proven in a court of law. To use it in such a way versus how revolutionary forces are described is extemely troublesome and such an obvious bias is a huge step down.
So on the plus side, explaining the rigors, mechanics and day-to-day life of being in the British Army in the Americas is one thing, but the nuances of its realities in war is another.
— Alan
I’m one of those people who recommended it. Interestingly, your points of dissatisfaction parallel some of my favorite things about the books.
That’s one of the things I like best about his writing. Everyone has shades of gray, there’s no black or white (though some are very dark gray). It’s true that those on the lighter gray side tend not to last too long, which is what I expect from the “grim” side of things.
Again, this is one of the things I liked best. Abercrombie brings these characters to the reader from one perspective, and then gradually reveals more facets as the story progresses. I guess I don’t really draw a distinction between “character development” and “learning more about a character through the story”. It didn’t bother me that many of the formative events for some character happened in the past from a storyline perspective - I’m still seeing them differently as more is revealed.
It’s interesting how different readers get completely opposite reactions from the exact same writing. Good thing there’s plenty of variety in the library!
I never have thought of anything Abercrombie has written as being a “slow read”. But to each to his own.
Strategy seems to have gone into all of this not realizing that Abercrombie’s Twitter handle is @LordGrimdark.
Seriously though, I actually think his stuff is vastly less nihilistic than, say, George R.R. Martin’s work. As you say, everything’s a shade of gray.
Weirdly it took me two attempts and a lot of time to get through the very first book (sometimes you’re just in the wrong mood for what a particular book is doing). Everything after that read progressively faster. I like the original trilogy but from my perspective he just keeps getting better and better.
Eh… there are plenty of unabashed, pure black, evil characters in the book. There are plenty of acts which are banally evil. It’s a lot harder to find even “light grey” characters. And I can’t think of even a single selfless act in the book. It’s not shades of gray, it’s just black and gray.
I agree Abercrombie does character discovery well Very well, actually. The problem I have with those “formative events” in the past, though, is that they’re not actually formative. Personality-wise, there is little to chose between Colonel Glokta and Inquisitor Glokta - both are arrogant, nasty people who cause pain, just using different means (he even comments on this himself). Ninefingers talks and internal monologues a lot about how he tries to be a better man (almost interminably so) and maintains that illusion for a while, but especially in the third book it becomes abundantly clear that it’s all a sham. He’s an unreliable narrator - an evil man who thinks of himself as “good but forced to do evil” - and really no different from his past self.
The problem with the substituting character discovery for actual character development, is that at some point you’ve realized who the character is. Once you’ve reached that point - and once you realize that no character will chose to change… ever… the story beats become extremely predictable. To paraphrase one review which I think hits the nail on the head, the whole trilogy could be summarized as: “Here are the characters (300 pages). Nothing changes. The End”. Harsh - but not entirely inaccurate. And also a bit amusing given the derision Longfoot receives in-book for his constant prattle about how “the journey is its own reward”.
But that’s just how I experienced the books - of course. As you say; one text - as many interpretations as there are readers.
I’ve read every Moorcock book. I waxed lyrical about the Black Company in last year’s thread. I love the first three books of ASOIF (I gave up on the rest, but only because I refuse to read half a book at a tme with 10+ years between installments). I don’t have a problem with grimdark. Abercrombie’s just not my type of grimdark.
After reading Blitz and then going back to read the other two, I’m reading PF Kaung’s The Poppy War. Man, I really like this. There’s an argument for the jaded it’s yet another Hero’s Journey, but it’s set in a kinda historic mostly fictitious China, and I just hit a point about a quarter in where it charmed me a bunch. Story beats aren’t anything new but the writing is very solid and there’s a certain charm underneath that is missing from many of these.
I can see how it feels that way right now. But I don’t think you’ll see that argument by the end. Be warned, there is some seriously rough content in that trilogy.
Interesting. There was a slightly jarring menstruation bit so far that seemed to be a bit tougher than expected, I’m curious where it goes.
Interesting, I had no problem with this in the written medium with this series, but it totally turned me off the TV show Yellowstone after about 4 episodes.
FYI, I thought the 2nd trilogy was such a step down, it requires a leap. The 3rd book has been sitting unread on my TBR pile for months. I suspect I’ll get around to it sooner or later.
I didn’t care for the second trilogy as much either, although I do think the third book may have been the best of the three.
The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
This is a follow up to what I thought was an excellent book in Hyperion. I guess there are some other books based in the same world after this but I think I will stop here based on what I have heard. As I said I really liked the first book. I liked this book but not as much. It is a continuation of the Hyperion story but is is a much less personal book. War comes to Hyperion and the book follows new characters as well as the original ones. The themes now are larger, and I think the book can be confusing at times. We get times travel. rogue AI’s and galactic war. Politics are a thing. There is just a lot going on, especially for the last third of the book.
I did still like the book, just not enough to keep going in this world. Maybe Simmons tried to do to much. But the trip was a good one.