Rated G for Gritty: Joe Abercrombie and Modern Fantasy

By Blake Tan, Editor

Photo by Lou Abercrombie.

The twiggy, deep-voiced Ent Treebeard once said, “The world is changing; I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.” Could J.R.R. have expected he would be so right even when it came to the genre he laboriously birthed? Did he expect fantasy to have grown the way it has, spreading its roots in numberless directions, permutations resulting in a half-dozen sub-genres that make up modern fantasy?

While The Lord of the Rings and its direct successors focused on the heroic struggle between good and evil, dominated by picturesque kingdoms and gallant protagonists fighting to overthrow an evil overlord, some stories stood apart. In these tales, the “good” was often not too different from the “evil,” (unless the “evil” was some sort of unspeakably alien, Lovecraftian god) and the “good” usually ranged from morally questionable to morally repugnant. Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories and Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser dealt with characters who live in worlds more cynical than idealistic, where the line between good and evil is drawn by the edges of their swords, and the plot revolves around their personal struggles rather than a world-ending threat. 

Joe Abercrombie’s fiction belongs firmly to this latter camp – with the gritty realism dialed all the way up.

The First Law trilogy -- Welcome to gritty, hard-hitting modern fantasy.

On his personal site, Abercrombie describes his life’s adventure. Born in Lancaster, England, he spent his boyhood “playing computer games, rolling dice, and drawing maps of places that don’t exist.” He attended Manchester University and, around that time, worked on an early draft of what would become his First Law trilogy. Abercrombie lived in London, starting out as a minimum wage tea-maker at a TV post-production company. Eventually, he went on to become a freelance film editor, working on documentaries, award shows, music videos, and concerts. In 2002, Abercrombie decided to sit down with his trilogy once again and, “having learned not to take himself too seriously,” was a great deal more pleased with the results. The Blade Itself, the first book of The First Law trilogy, was published in 2005, with the sequels, Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings, following in 2007 and 2008. Abercrombie wrote three more standalone books in The First Law setting: Best Served Cold in 2009, The Heroes in 2011, which reached the number three spot on the Sunday Times Hardcover Bestseller List, and Red Country in 2012.

For fantasy readers, a myriad of options are open for them whenever they browse their section of the bookstore, a veritable platform with portals to a hundred different worlds. Some prefer the escapism of a perceived simpler time, when good and evil are clearly defined. These novels remain readily available, but a movement within the genre itself has brought fantasy more towards the gritty realism championed by authors like George R.R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie. Indeed, in a 2008 interview with Juliet Marillier on Writer Unboxed, Abercrombie cited Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, their “grittiness, moral ambivalence, and unpredictability,” as an inspiration for his own work.

The First Law graphic novel is being
serialized for free on FirstLawComic.com

The similarities between the two authors’ styles doesn’t stop at their characters or literary themes. Both writers have a tendency to take the conventions of the fantasy genre and turn them on their heads. The hero may struggle valiantly in what seems to be a hopeless cause, and often, this hero is stabbed in the back; a far cry from the usual karmic rewards (or retribution, in the case of the antagonists) found in other fantasy. You could almost say Abercrombie, like Martin, enjoys it when he can twist the knife in the reader’s gut as the novel’s plot develops. But, in a strange way, the reader relishes this when it happens.

We should make the distinction between the sub-genres of fantasy. There’s high fantasy, which are the stories on the epic scale with a great evil, usually calling himself a Dark Lord, who cannot be defeated except for when the heroes embark on a quest to do exactly that. The Lord of the Rings essentially defines this sub-genre. By contrast, low fantasy is more cynical, with a darker tone, in more mundane settings – the villain is often more concerned with conquering a rival neighbor rather than the whole world. Heroic fantasy, or sword and sorcery, focuses on a single protagonist, or group of protagonists, and, like low fantasy, tends towards smaller scale conflicts and personal struggles rather than world-ending threats. Dark fantasy takes the grittiness to another level and is sometimes described as “horror meets fantasy.”

Most fantasy novels can fall into any one of these sub-genres, and usually can be classified in multiple sub-genres. A Song of Ice and Fire, for example, starts out seemingly low fantasy, but as the series unfolds, it’s tending more towards high fantasy, but with dark fantasy scattered throughout. Abercrombie’s style follows Martin’s “gritty realistic epic fantasy” closely, yet he does so with a creative panache and dark humor that sets his stories apart.

One of Abercrombie’s strengths as a fantasy author is his ability to create a compelling and detailed world, unveiled bit by bit in each novel. The First Law setting features the Union, a nation resembling the Holy Roman Empire, nominally ruled by a High King. External threats, such as the barbaric Northmen on the Union’s northern frontier and the Gurkish in the south, and internal pressures, the nobility, the peasantry, give his world a life and character of its own, one just as compelling as his characters.

Another feather in Abercrombie’s hat is his knack for giving each of his characters a unique and recognizable voice. Despite writing from a third-person perspective, he deftly puts his readers into each character’s head, working in certain phrases distinctive to them and other personality quirks. Logen Ninefingers, one of the leads in The First Law trilogy, can be counted on to say, “You have to be realistic about things,” in each of his chapters.

His characters also grow, in a way that can endear them to his readers, or at the very least help his readers understand them more intimately. Some characters grow more likable as the series progresses, others become more easily reviled, but each one is dynamic, changing as the plot develops – none but the most minor background characters are static cardboard cutouts.

Abercrombie's latest book is set in the same
universe, but with distinctly Western overtones

And, as an added bonus to his readers, Abercrombie is consistent in putting out books. His work ethic is to be admired, especially by his peers and hopeful, would-be authors. In an Ask Me Anything thread on the r/Fantasy subreddit, he described a typical day to consist of “two or three uninterrupted blocks of an hour and a half each” writing, emailing, blogging, and interviewing.

His successes haven’t dulled his edge either; after he finished The First Law, he continued to work in the world he had created, but kept pushing himself as a writer and challenging himself to tackle his stories in innovative ways. Best Served Cold starred a female protagonist in a revenge story that easily could have been mishandled; instead, we get a suspenseful page-turner with gratuitous violence that would have made Tarantino grin. The Heroes is a war story, right up Bernard Cornwell’s alley, but with a fantasy twist. Red Country fuses fantasy with the Western genre. Indeed, Abercrombie doesn’t have any qualms with mixing it up every now and then.

If Tolkien were to rise up from his grave, brush the dirt from his eyes, and immerse himself in modern fantasy, he might be appalled to discover the violence, the sex, and mature themes blatantly exhibited in many fantasy novels. But, like television and cinema, fantasy – and all novels – has grown up.

Perhaps, after the shock wore off, Tolkien might smile wearily, extend a wrinkled hand to Abercrombie and his fellow authors, and thank them for their efforts in keeping the spirit of fantasy alive and well.

If Abercrombie’s anything like his characters, he’d take the Father of Fantasy’s hand, draw him close, drive a dagger into his belly, and put him back in the ground. After all, if Tolkien miraculously returned from the dead, the old man might put Abercrombie out of a job. You have to be realistic about these things.