IN THIS ISSUE
June 2014 • Issue 641 • Vol. 72 • No. 6
47th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman
Interviews
Joe Abercrombie: Fiction on the Edge
Eileen Gunn: Other Lands
Main Stories
2013 Nebula Awards Winners • Spectrum 21 Awards Winners • Leckie Wins Clarke • 2013 Stoker Awards Winners • Vinge Wins Special Prometheus Award • Asimov’s Readers’ & Analog AnLab Awards • Amazon vs. Hachette
People and Publishing
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Nnedi Okorafor, Charles Gannon, Octavia E. Butler, Terry Pratchett, Lois Lowry, Richard K. Morgan, and many others
The Data File
HarperCollins Buys Harlequin • Daily Mail Pays Rowling • Hugo Voter Packet News • NEA Literature Grants • 2014 Campbell and Sturgeon Awards Finalists • Awards News • Publishing News • Legal News • World Conventions News • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights • Publications Received • Catalogs Received
Special Features
Kameron Hurley: Busting Down the Romantic Myth of Writing Fiction, and Mitigating Author Burnout
Conventions
14th Science Fiction Conference in India • World Horror Convention, 2014
Locus Looks at Books
Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois
Interzone 3-4/14; Asimov’s 3/14; Tor.com 1/29/14; Tor.com 2/4/14; Tor.com 2/12/14; Tor.com 2/26/14; Space Opera, Rich Horton, ed.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton
Robot Uprising, Daniel H. Wilson & John Joseph Adams, eds.; Sleep Donation, Karen Russell; Interzone 3-4/14, Asimov’s 6/14; Analog 6/14; Strange Horizons 4/14; Lightspeed 5/14.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight, Jonathan Strahan, ed.; The Madonna and the Starship, James Morrow; Sergeant Chip and Other Novellas, Bradley Denton; Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century: Volume 2, 1948-1988: The Man Who Learned Better, William H. Patterson, Jr.; The Heritage of Heinlein: A Critical Reading of the Fiction, Thomas D. Clareson & Joe Sanders.
Reviews by Faren Miller
Queen of the Dark Things, C. Robert Cargill; The Quick, Lauren Owen; Valour and Vanity, Mary Robinette Kowal; Butcher’s Road, Lee Thomas.
Reviews by Russell Letson
The Greatship, Robert Reed.
Reviews by Adrienne Martini
Beautiful Wreck, Larissa Brown; Heirs of Grace, Tim Pratt; Koko Takes a Holiday, Kieran Shea; California Bones, Greg van Eekhout; Rogues, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds.
Forthcoming Books
US Forthcoming Books by Author • US Forthcoming Books by Publisher • UK Forthcoming Books by Author • UK Forthcoming Books by Publisher
Listings
Magazines Received: April • Books Received: April • British Books Received: March • Bestsellers
New and Notable
Terry Bisson: This Month in History
Obituaries
Mary Stewart • Appreciation by Diana Gill • H.R. Giger • Appreciation by Jason V Brock • William H. Patterson, Jr. • Al Feldstein • Hilbert Schenk • George C. Willick
Editorial Matters
Nebula Awards Weekend • Visitors • Staff • This Issue/Next Issue
Corrections
Photo List and Ad List
Masthead
Return to In This Issue listing.
Joseph Edward Abercrombie was born on New Year’s Eve 1974 in Lancaster England and lived there until going to the University of Manchester, where he studied psychology. He moved to London and worked in television until taking up prose writing in his mid-twenties.
Though he sometimes publishes short fiction, Abercrombie is best known for his gritty, complex ‘‘grimdark’’ epic fantasy novels. His debut The Blade Itself (2006) was shortlisted for the Compton Crook Award for best first novel, and launched The First Law trilogy, which continued with Before They Are Hanged (2007) and Legend Award finalist Last Argument of Kings (2008). His next books were standalones set in the same world: revenge fantasy Best Served Cold (2009), war novel The Heroes (2011), and fantasy western Red Country (2012); all three were British Fantasy Award finalists and Legend Award finalists.
He recently embarked on a new young-adult fantasy series, set in a new Viking-inspired fictional universe. The first volume, Half a King, is out in July.
Abercrombie was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008. He lives in Bath with his wife and their three children.
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‘‘I was a big reader as a kid, very much into fantasy. Tolkien was the gateway. But I also read widely all around, all sorts of books as a kid. Played a lot of roleplaying games – that was the main thing I did with my time between about ten and 15 probably. My mum was an English teacher, so we were always exposed to a level of literary criticism and thinking about books, and she kept us reading widely. I never really thought about being a writer myself particularly. as I got older I started to feel a deficiency within the stuff I was reading. I wasn’t a part of fandom in any way, so I didn’t have people pointing me towards more interesting books. I ended up reading what was most commercial and most obvious, so I read a lot of Dragonlance, David Eddings, those kind of things. I found the same motifs repeated a lot and started to get bored with what I was reading. Especially because I was also reading James Ellroy and Tolstoy and people like that, all sorts of different things at the same time, and thinking, you could do more with fantasy than it seemed like was happening. I drifted out of reading fantasy gradually. I moved away from home, moved to university, and was doing required reading and also just reading general fiction. I didn’t think about writing until much later.
‘‘When I finished university, I had ideas for writing something myself, partly cribbed from things I’d read and partly things I was disappointed I hadn’t read – the things I’d wanted to see in fantasy. I started writing after I left university, mostly as a touch-typing exercise. I was teaching myself to type because I had no useful skills after doing a psychology degree. I had a first stab at doing what I would later do, but it didn’t have a sense of humor. It was taking itself much more seriously, much more pompous and self-regarding. One of the things I don’t like about some fantasy is that it can be quite pompous. I put that aside until, in my late twenties, I was working as a freelance editor for TV, and that meant I had time on my hands. I spent a lot of time playing computer games and gradually feeling like I needed a worthwhile personal project to do. TV editing’s a great job, but it’s limited to that little role and you never have ownership of anything you’re working on.
‘‘I thought I’d have a go at writing again, just out of curiosity, around 2001. I was straightaway much more interested in what came out. It seemed to have a different tone to it, and a voice of its own that it hadn’t had before. I was excited to experiment. A whole load of things were very serendipitous. It seemed to me I was doing something strange and unusual in writing something quite gritty, violent, and morally ambiguous. Just before that, someone bought me Game of Thrones and said, ‘You used to read this fantasy stuff, didn’t you? You should give this a go.’ I said, ‘Oh, God. I know exactly what’s going to happen. The noble guy will save the kingdom and then blah, blah, blah.’ So that book was surprising, and I saw expressed in it a lot of things I felt were missing from commercial fantasy, from epic fantasy. It demonstrated that you could do something recognizable as epic fantasy but still be dark and challenging and gritty. Game of Thrones was a big inspiration, making me think this mi
ght work. At the same time I wasn’t that familiar with the landscape of what was going on in the field as a whole. When I finished The Blade Itself and started thinking about trying to sell it, I felt it was too dark, too strange, too mixed in its tone. But actually fantasy had been moving in that direction for some time without me realizing it.
‘‘I hadn’t read things like Fritz Leiber or Jack Vance, that were always dark and darkly humorous, and that I love now. That was the road not taken by commercial fantasy when I was a kid. Things were much more Tolkienesque. I thought what I was doing was weird and not like things done before. Not that I necessarily thought it was original, but I thought it might be a hard sell.
‘‘I started sending The Blade Itself to agents and following the usual routine. I came up with a list of six or seven agents that specialized in that area or represented authors that seemed like the similar ballpark. I collected a few rejections, as you do. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the total anonymity of that. I was prepared for a reaction. But you just get a photocopied card with a signature stamped on, saying something absolutely bland along the lines of, ‘This article of penmanship is not for us at this moment but may be for other people at some other future moment that we will not specify.’ You get no sense of whether it’s not the right thing for them, whether they consider you illiterate, or whether you’re nearly there but for one reason or another it’s a no. That is very dispiriting, because you feel like you’re in a void. Even though I’d worked on it and discussed it with my parents, and my parents are quite a brutal and educated audience for this kind of thing. We felt there was something publishable there, but there’s part of you that totally doubts whether you’ll ever get published.
‘‘In the end you’ve got to go off on your own to an extent. There’s a degree of blandness that can creep in if you’re trying to tell a lie and produce something that is going to hit the right beats. Write from an authentic place of honesty: it comes from within. I was lucky because a friend of mine who worked for Heinemann, an educational publisher in the UK, knew what I was working on. I was very secretive about the book initially, but over time I started to tell people I was doing it. He met Gillian Redfearn, who was just starting out as an assistant at Gollancz. When he found out that she was working for a SF and fantasy imprint, he said, ‘A friend of mine’s written this thing. Do you want to look at the thing?’ She said, ‘I’ll look at the thing’ – I think because she was young and starting out and excited, and hadn’t reached the point of being utterly jaded towards this stuff. She looked at the thing and liked the thing. I got an offer a week later. This business always needs a little stroke of luck. I don’t necessarily recommend this as a formula. In general I’d recommend submitting a book as widely as you can. If it goes out 100 times maybe one of those is the one it strikes sparks with.
‘‘I read a lot of American noir, old school stuff like Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, and also James Ellroy and more modern interpretations. I liked the grittiness and the unpredictable savagery of the worlds they present, where heroic actions don’t always pay off. Any journey’s dull if you know where it’s going. There’s got to be doubt, and something interesting about the way you get there. I’ve always been very interested in film as well, probably as much influenced by that as by books. I like revisionist westerns, and the way they stand in contrast to traditional westerns. Looking back I was trying to do something similar with fantasy to what a film like Unforgiven does with westerns – that was the dream approach.
‘‘I wrote The First Law trilogy, which is my Lord of the Rings, you might say. When you set out to write something that big as your first project, inadvisably – it was planned always to be a trilogy, roughly that shape – you never look past finishing that. The idea of finishing one book seems inconceivable, and you’ve still got two more to write, so you never look past the end. As I was writing the third one, my editor Gillian said, ‘So what’s your next one?’ I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ It suddenly occurred to me that I might have to write 30 more books. What was left? I’d done torture, swords, axes, maces, spears. I’d mined that world. I thought I’d do some single books and I started thinking about films that I liked, and I thought I’d combine the fantasy thing with some more filmic ideas.
‘‘I thought about Point Blank, the Lee Marvin film. I like that a lot because it has this twist in the plot, and it’s a weird, interesting gangster revenge thriller. So I thought, that’s one plot line, and it became Best Served Cold. Then A Bridge Too Far was another. Fantasy’s always fascinated by war, but it’s often a very unrealistic, heroic faux version of warfare. It doesn’t show both sides. These war films that cover a single battle often cover both sides, and sort of analyse how warfare works and how these little twists of fate ripple out and have profound consequences. That was The Heroes. And Red Country was my attempt to do a western within a fantasy setting.
‘‘I could probably sell a hundred books about Logen Ninefingers. There’d certainly be readers who’d be happy to continue reading those. But I think what happens is, you get into a death of a thousand cuts that way. It becomes a burden both for writers and readers. If I went out and did something radically new, wrote a paranormal romance for the next thing, people would be upset straightaway. If I write the same thing endlessly, people will gradually get bored and walk away. It’s not the way to grow your readership. It’s not the way to keep yourself interested, and it’s not the way to write good books. I think a huge series can become a burden to a writer. You get tired. You get uninspired. And readers first get a bit bored, but feel they’ve got to continue, and by the time they get to the end, there’s no way they’re going to buy your next thing. There’s also the problem where you decide to give a writer a go, and you go down to the bookshop, and they’ve got book five, book nine, and book 13 in the series, but you can’t get the first one, so you buy something else. If you see they’re up to book 14, and you’re looking at the first one, there’s this temptation to read something shorter. It certainly locks you into a specific type of reader. I wanted to write those standalone books so it’d be possible for people to just jump on at any point and read them on their own, and go back and read the earlier stuff if they wanted to. I didn’t want it to be too prescriptive, that everyone had to read that first book first.
‘‘All my previous novels were interlinked, but the YA series beginning with Half a King is in a totally different world. I wrote six books all in one world and felt I needed to try something different in order to keep the batteries charged. Also, although it’s great to have this wealth of backstory and characters that are established that you can reach for to fill slots in the book, it also becomes a burden as well, because there are all these old stories and relationships. You put two characters together and suddenly think, ‘Oh, well, they’ve met before. They met in that other book, didn’t they?’ There’s kind of a weight to drag with that stuff and I wanted to try something quick, very focused, very fast. I was interested in writing something for younger readers, as my kids are getting older. My children are seven, four, and two. I felt like it would be nice to have something to share with them. Doing stuff that’s very gritty and very adult, that was what felt natural at the time, but it’s not the only way to go. I’m not massively familiar with YA, so I wasn’t aiming to write a book that was in that category necessarily. I was just aiming to write a book of mine that might appeal to young adults.
‘‘I’ve written the first one in the series, and I’m halfway through the second one. It’s much shorter than some of the things I’ve written. It’s got a single young-adult point of view, which is a different thing for me. I’ve tended to have old, experienced, used-up characters. It’s set in a slightly Viking-influenced world, and it follows a character called Prince Yarvi, who was born with a crippled hand, so he can’t hold a shield or tie a knot or draw a bow, or do any of the things that are expected of a man in his society. He ends up training for a minister’s position, a sort of advisor and he
aler and diplomat, which is traditionally more a woman’s role. Then his brother and father are killed, and he’s thrust into becoming king himself. He doesn’t necessarily have the tools to make it happen, and has to use what he has, which are the tools he’s learned in order to be a minister, rather than a warrior. He has some hardships to negotiate, let’s put it that way – I won’t spoil anything.
‘‘I think it’s not hugely different from my earlier books in the way that it’s written. There’s less swearing, the violence is maybe less vivid, and there’s not as much sex. But it’s the same approach, basically. It’s not necessarily up the street of a lot of children’s publishers. We pitched it to children’s publishers, to mainstream publishers, and to fantasy lists as well. It’s at the top end of YA anyway, between YA and adult. Crossover is what people tend to call it. Some young-adult publishers were interested. Others found it didn’t really suit what else was on their list. If you compare it to what people think of as adult fantasy, like David Eddings or Robert Jordan, it’s still more unpleasant and challenging than some of those. I don’t know if you can call it gritty, but it’s certainly not easy and it’s not morally simple. It’s not flowerbuds and niceness. It has some darkness in it. The children’s fiction that I read as a kid, things like Rosemary Sutcliffe and John Christopher, those things, they were all quite dark and difficult and challenging; there weren’t simple answers in those books. I want to write something that would still be liked by the readers I have already, and by a wider adult readership who’d like to try fantasy but might be intimidated by the size of my other books, and would like something short and quick. They’re much shorter, about 80,000 words, at least the first one. That’s nearly a third the length of my longest book; so I was ready to do something a little shorter. Most of my books have six points of view, and with this book, it’s one thread pulled out on its own. For me it doesn’t feel like a small story, just one story, rather than lots interwoven.
‘‘They’re going to come out within a year: July, January, July. They’re short. I did the classic thing of saying to my agent, ‘I think I’ll have these finished by July. Then I’ll have all this time on my hands to get the next thing planned, because the books will be coming out yearly.’ As soon as we got into the meeting, he said, ‘How do you feel about publishing these every six months?’ I think that’s a healthy thing if you can do it, especially for a younger readership who haven’t got the patience to wait.
Locus, June 2014 Page 1
