Joe Abercrombie

Note: this article should be considered a feeble attempt at humour. We hope you read it in the spirit in which it was intended.

Dear Joe,

I’m only halfway through through your newest masterpiece, Best Served Cold, and I already know you consider yourself a badass in the best tradition of Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone.

What do I mean? Come on, man. The first thing that tipped me off to your tough guy ambitions was the ‘blue steel’ photo I found on your website (see right) when the publicity circus for Best Served Cold started recently and frenzied fantasy bloggers who got free copies started begging to have your children because of its “gritty, hard-edged style”.

Those burning eyes, tilted towards the right, with half of the face in shadow, like Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, the little half-smile designed to cut through the ladies like a hot knife through butter. And then there’s the manly beard — a required factor for good sci-fi/fantasy writers; it shows the readers your soul is too tortured for you to pay much attention to the little details … like shaving.

You even went so far as to open the neck of your shirt slightly so we could all see how masculine your chest hair is. The whole act reminds me of a young Bruce Willis; before Die Hard took off all the polish.

Then there’s your unorthodox approach to book critics. Not content to rest safely, surrounded by the traditional author code of stoic silence, you use your own site and the power of the internet to take potshots at these poor souls, innocently reviewing your work, sometimes as part of their hard-won paid employment. Crushing their dreams.

I refer you to your post which mentions the gentle Ken, a humble American engineer who put long hours in slaving over a hot Best Served Cold. This is how you rewarded him:

“One might almost be tempted to say something like — “the more-of-same approach of Ken’s reviews entertains, yet becomes tedious at times and unfortunately left me wanting more of that special something that I’m convinced he can give.”"

Harsh words from a man who is undoubtedly one of his heroes.

Then was the poor Jason Henninger from the illustrious Tor.com, who was so shocked by your rebuttal of his review of The First Law trilogy that he was scared to go back:

“Given that, in the author’s view, I completely and utterly misunderstood the ending of The First Law, I’m almost hesitant to make any statements about the ending of Best Served Cold. I mean, if I get it wrong, I might find my coffee poisoned. Or he might just very well fly out to Los Angeles kick me in the fruits.”

But wait; the evidence of your bravado goes on. Your supposed fight with half a dozen hoodlums in real life, where you not only braved your way through being hit with a lump of wood, but then took it off your would-be robber and hit his mate with it … so hard that it broke in half? The fact that you have a whole section of your site devoted to discussing swearing in fantasy?

The fact that a photo recently popped up of you on the internet, wearing a suit, holding a battle axe and grinning devilishly?

But there’s just one problem with all of these efforts. I’m on to you. And I’m one of the few reviewers left who hasn’t published my thoughts on your latest opus.

I’m halfway through Best Served Cold, and yes, it is satisfyingly brutal (although not quite up to GRRM standards; for starters there’s no dwarf and nobody important has been speared while taking a dump), but what do I come across, but a soppy love scene on page 230? This is my impression of it so far.

“Oh Monza, my dear,” whispered the tall, rakishly handsome Shivers, as he glanced back from the window to where his paramour waited, her body artfully arranged on the bed across the tower room, bathed in soft siege-fire light and with her eyes glinting with a hint of the passion yet to come.

He continued, his sorrowful eyes seeking out her own. “I want, I need, my heart cries out to be a good man, to do the right thing, as I’ve been going on about for at least a hundred pages. I just want to love you gently and settle down to be some sort of harmless farmer, away from the cares of the world with you. I can’t bear the guilt of constantly slaying people just to please you, and for money.”

“Oh Shivers,” sighed Monza. “I want that too, more than anything in the world. I want to hold you tightly forever, with your broad, hard shoulders pressed against mine. I want to look up into your eyes and never let you go, except when I have to slay someone.”

“But wait,” he cries. “It can never be. We must needs pursue your vengeance.”

“But wait,” she cries. “Our ultimate fate where you will undoubtedly be torn away from me in some slow-motion scene that will destroy our slowly building feelings for each other is not until page four hundred and something. In the meantime, hold my crippled hand and stroke it, ever so softly.”

What the hell is this, something out of Twilight???

In short, Joe, I believe I have discovered your secret. I know that at heart you are really a softie. You secretly yearn to write “urban fantasy” in the style of Stephanie Meyers and Charlaine Harris, where characters sigh wistfully as they gaze out upon the approaching form of their darkly mysterious loved one.

Hidden beneath the pages of Best Served Cold is a touching romantic tale in the best tradition of Mills and Boon. I know that is the book, in your heart of hearts, you truly want to write. And next time you probably will. Nobody will blame you. We’ll all understand.

With this in mind, Joe, don’t expect me to go easy on you.

I know that my eventual review of Best Served Cold will suffer at your hands and be eviscerated with a series of witty remarks on your blog unless I take drastic action.

So, for self-protection, but also out of the goodness of my heart, I’m going for a pre-emptive strike and do you a favour.

I’m going to expose all of the book’s fallacies in such a way that will free you.

You’ll be so embarassed you will remove all traces of your gritty past from the internet and retire to the south of France, there, in its sun-drenched terraces, finally, free to write the book you want to write. Free to admit that the novel which most influenced your writing was not A Game of Thrones, but in fact, Wuthering Heights.

You pansy.

Kind regards,

Renai LeMay

Writers in general are just not sane, according to Karen Miller, Australian author of the 2005 novel The Innocent Mage and a whole host of other science fiction and fantasy works.

Writing as a guest blogger on the Babel Clash, the science fiction blog of book retailer Borders to coincide with the launch of her new book The Prodigal Mage, Miller says writers simply have a kink in the brain:

“It’s a kink that means we are at the same time deeply and intimately involved in the process of being human while standing outside that process watching it happen. It means that we can never truly be at one with our own lives because we can’t ever totally lose ourselves in the unconscious moment. A part of us is always conscious, always watching, analysing, pulling the moment apart so we can put it back together again as fiction.”

To illustrate her point, Miller says her first thought during a car accident during her university years wasn’t of whether she could die or what was going to happen next. Instead, her brain went straight to Star Wars. “Wow,” she thought. “This is what it was like when Luke crashed on Dagobah.”

“In what could’ve been my last moments of life, I was thinking about Star Wars,” Miller added. “And by the way, if that doesn’t make me a fan then I don’t know what would.”

Commentary
Setting aside Miller’s more general argument about writers and going onto a slightly tangential track, the idea that science fiction and fantasy writers in particular may be a few bottles short of a six pack in places is one that has probably been bandied about for as long as the genres have existed.

It likely has its basis in the fact that sci-fi/fantasy writers’ work is, of course, rooted in speculative worlds, be they worlds based on our own or completely different realities where concepts like magic exist. The idea goes that the creators of such worlds must be slightly nuts to be able to imagine them, and all their rules of physics and so on that don’t exist in our own world.

I can’t keep track of the number of people that have told me in my life that they couldn’t be bothered reading science fiction or fantasy books because they had “nothing to do with the real world” and were thus irrelevant and boring.

However, personally, I disagree with Miller. I feel that in writers in general are in fact the sanest people in human society. And furthermore, I believe science fiction and fantasy writers are among the best examples to prove that theory.

My reason for stating this is that the observing ability that Miller comments on means that writers are often the first people in society to notice and start to critique the reality that underpins what is often the deceitful surface of human society. When it comes to sci-fi/fantasy writers, I feel their ability to envision speculative worlds heightens their ability to impartially observe their own reality.

A prime example of this observation would be the famous science fiction author Robert Heinlein, who passed away in 1988 at the age of 80, after writing a series of enlightening books that also happened to shed light on and critique American and world society of the day.

Robert Heinlein

In Stranger in a Strange Land, perhaps Heinlein’s most famous work, he pre-empted or perhaps even caused much of the sexual enfranchisement of the 1960′s and 1970′s through depicting the revolutionary sexual mores of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised on Mars by Martians.

In the 1959 book, Starship Troopers, Heinlein arguably makes a case for individual responsibility and sacrifice for society’s common good; the book has been seen as anti-communist and also as a lightning rod for those who wish to debate the role of the military in society; both positive and negative sides.

And of course, who could forget I Will Fear No Evil, the gender-bending novel which explores human sexuality (from both sides at once and everything in between) and its connection with emotional love, spirituality and more.

Was Heinlein insane? Many people in the late 1950′s society in which he first achieved recognition for his works would certainly have thought so after reading his books. How could any rational person come up with so many crazy ideas at once? There are sections in all of these three books which will make even very open-minded readers a little uncomfortable as they readjust their worldviews.

But in hindsight, and of course many people realised this at the time Heinlein’s books were published, his work also constituted an intense and powerful critique of current human behaviour and societal structures … in a way that revealed Heinlein had a phenomenal understanding of them. Ultimately, Heinlein was probably more sane and clear in his knowledge of the world than most of those around him.

What’s your opinion? Are writers in general sane, or insane?

commentary If there is one thing I love about Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami‘s books, it is the ease in which they effortless capture the sense of disassociation that pervades modern society.

It is exactly that sense, ironically, which I feel as I learn from The Guardian newspaper in the UK and other sources such as neojaponisme, that many, many readers in the Land of the Rising Sun are currently fervently turning the pages (from right to left) in Murakami’s latest novel, 1Q84.

The cause of that disassociation, of course, is that I can’t read the damn book. It hasn’t been translated yet into English.

In other words, there are people, somewhere, who are feeling passionate about what is no doubt a masterpiece from one of my favourite authors. But like so many of the characters in Murakami’s books, I am emotionally divorced from the object of my affection and must only gradually find my way back to them, wrestling gently with many fantastic and surreal occurrences in my everyday life to do so.

I remember perfectly the first time I read a Murakami novel.

It was about five years ago, I had graduated from university and was revelling in the sense of being financial enough, with a new-found job, that I could finally buy the books I wanted to buy, without being constrained by a tight student budget.

It was in such an indulgent mood that I happened upon Murakami’s 1985 book, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, in Galaxy Bookshop in Sydney’s central business district.

It was the unusual cover — with its striking cover photograph of birds in flight by Pavel Banka (no doubt extensively Photoshopped) that first drew me in. As RobAroundBooks.com notes, the cover, and the associated set of covers from publisher Vintage UK for the other Murakami books, feels quite fresh:

“Most of that freshness undoubtedly comes from the minimalist, uncluttered simplicity of the covers. They possess a zen-like quality that seems to solicit the same feeling of calmness and serenity that one gets from sitting in front of a Japanese rock garden; no doubt a purposeful implementation to mirror the cultural identity of both the content of the novels and their author.”

But it was, of course, the description of the book on the back cover which sealed the deal and led me to buying it. It states:

“Science fiction, detective story and postmodern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami’s international following. Tracking one man’s descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy. The result is a wildly inventive fantasy and a meditation on the many uses of the mind.”

And thus I fell in love with Murakami’s light, everyday, fantasy.

Of course, the pinnacle of his work is his 1995 book The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. I’ve read the book cover to cover several times and felt stunned afterwards each time.

You might think that Murakami is an unusual author to be featured on Keeping the Door. Certainly his works would not fit into the stereotypical science fiction (in 2009, read: space opera) or fantasy (swords and magic) visions. He doesn’t even write urban (read: vampire) fantasy.

However there is no doubt that Murakami is a fantasy author.

Most of his works gradually introduce elements of the fantastic into the everyday, even mundane, world of his protagonists. Usually his main character is a late 20′s male, disassociated with the society around him and from his emotions and love interest.

It is the fantastic elements in Murakami’s writing — be it cats who talk, magically seductive ears, or a deep well which helps one sitting in it to blur the boundaries between worlds — that allow his protagonists to bridge the division within themselves, and the reader to, I believe, sometimes perceive similar divisions in their own lives.

It’s this symbiosis of the real and the fantastic, and the way Murakami uses that division as a metaphor for psychological change, which makes his works so stunning and poetic.

I’m a bit scared to read neojaponisme‘s perhaps overly comprehensive review of Murakami’s newest work, 1Q84. I want to be fresh for my next Murakami voyage.

But The Guardian says 1Q84 is ‘classic Murakami’:

It is described as a “complex and surreal narrative” that “shifts back and forth between tales of two characters, a man and a woman, who are searching for each other”. The novel “explores social and emotional issues such as cult religions, violence, family ties and love.”

Let’s hope the translation goes speedily and well.