EPICALLY GRIM
Sometimes fantasy mirrors, if not reflects, reality. As we shape up for a Winter of Discontent in real life, bestselling fantasy author Joe Abercrombie has published the final instalment of his Age of Madness trilogy, The Wisdom of Crowds. As dark and grim as Joe’s fans expect, his last visit to the world of The First Law is packed with dissent, civil unrest, insurrection and unstable and unfit rulers.
Rather than using fantasy’s more usual medieval tropes, Joe has drawn on the Industrial Revolution to evoke, with his characteristic black humour and cynicism, a dramatic scenario where conflict and fanaticism exist hand-in-hand with new technology and the impact it has on the lives of workers. ‘I like a world that is changing and shifting and moving and conflict emerges out of technology and changing ways of doing things,’ says Joe. ‘There are so many fault lines – it’s not just a battle of good versus evil.’
Joe’s aware that he’s treading new creative ground in moving away from the more familiar fantastic realms. ‘With the rise of merchant class, the industrial revolution was the next step, but it’s not a period covered by epic fantasy, and readers and writers are a bit nervous about that,’ says Joe. ‘But there is such a natural drama, a dynamic. A ripping up of the social rules, people stripped of their social status, natural conflicts. Rich against poor, people at loggerheads. I’ve got frustrated with the mediaeval fantasy – it felt like it was developing into a mediaeval theme park, a Victorian theme park of what mediaevalism felt like.’
The world is violent, brutal, and sadistic. ‘It can get pretty nasty,’ says Joe unrepentantly. I’ve written nasty stuff before but with this book it’s not so much the violence per se but the scale and banality of it. I’m sure there’ll be readers who get a bit unnerved by it but my decision was always to show the violence in a pretty unflinching way. The heroes of classic 1980s fantasy were often warrior figures, and if the corpses were piled up, it would be terrifying because the victims were people.’
