Joe Abercrombie

Joe Abercrombie is interviewed by John Joseph Adams on SciFi Wire today. Discussing his hit fantasy The Blade Itself,Joe says he was aiming to write, “Something with the action and adventure, the magic and mystery, that readers look for in a fantasy, but focused very much on the characters rather than the world. I tried to make those characters as surprising, as morally ambiguous, as funny and horrible as I’ve found real people to be. I wanted to write something that was really capable of surprising the reader, and above all I wanted it to have a sense of humor without being all-out pastiche.”

Author, editor and blogger Jeff Vandermeer offers a round-robin interview of four new faces in fantasy on the Amazon Editor’s Blog, Omnivoracious. In Heroic Fantasy Part I, he talks with our own Joe Abercrombie, author of The Blade Itself,as well as new writers Karen Miller, Brian Ruckley, and Brandon Sanderson. Additional interview material, which didn’t make it into the Amazon Blog, is available on Jeff’s website, Ecstatic Days.

Joe says: “I try to write fantasy…with all the grit, and cruelty, and humour of real life, where good and evil are a matter of where you stand, just like in the real world.”

Update 10/26/07: Jeff informs me that Heroic Fantasy Part II is now online. Here is Joe Abercrombie on his literary influences: “Off the top of my head and trying not to get too pretentious–Charles Dickens (for weird and wonderful characters and dialogue), Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (for how people really behave under pressure), James Ellroy (for shocks and surprises in both plot and character), Philip Larkin (for fearlessness, brevity, and withering cynicism). Okay, so that was pretty pretentious, but hey, I’d stick J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, and George RR Martin in there with ’em. That’s quite a dinner party, thinking about it. Then a lot of writers of history as well–let’s pick out Shelby Foote for his Narrative History of the Civil War. But I’m a film editor by trade, and so I tend to find a lot of inspiration in film and television as well–everything from Manga, to Westerns, to Film Noir, to Cop Shows.”

Joe Abercrombie is interviewed today on Fantasy Book Critic. They talk about The Blade Itself, the whole of the First Law trilogy and beyond, movies, books, video games and much more. Many words of wisdom and mirth.

Words of wisdom: “What’s more important to you? Your family and friends or your house? One’s your life. The other’s the setting for it. That’s a no contest in my book. Worldbuilding’s great, in its place, I just don’t feel that it should ever cramp the characters or the story. It should always be revealed in passing, as the background for the action, never be the focus of anything.”

Words of mirth: “You’ve got to change and develop, even if that’s going to mean some wrong steps along the way. But never say never. Dead horse flogging can be a surprisingly profitable business and daddy needs a swimming pool…”