A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie

Another book review here, and another sequel to a well-loved fantasy trilogy from decades past. This time it's A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie, his first foray into the world of the First Law since Red Country, and his first trilogy in that world since Last Argument of Kings, the book that wrapped up that trilogy. Another similarity to Empire of Grass and the Lost King of Osten Ard trilogy is that this book picks up around thirty years after the previous trilogy ended, allowing readers to catch up with the characters from the previous books, as well as their offspring.

Unlike Tad Williams's trilogy, I haven't re-read the First Law, or the three standalone novels Abercrombie wrote after those (Best Served Cold, The Heroes and Red Country). This shouldn't imply any judgement on the quality, incidentally - Memory Sorrow and Thorn may rank as one of my favorite series ever, but I've long extolled the virtues of Joe Abercrombie, and I've eagerly snapped up every one of his books as they've come out, apart from the short story collection Sharp Ends.

The reason I bring it up, though, is that this lack of familiarity affected my reading of the book, to an extent. The First Law trilogy can be thought of as analogous to the original Star Wars trilogy, while the three standalones are like Rogue One, Solo and the Mandalorian - outrigger novels that take place in the same world but don't exactly advance the plot or require much prior knowledge. Rather, these more recent books allowed Abercrombie to shift pieces around to prepare for this latest trilogy, entitled The Age of Madness.

However, by not re-reading the previous books I'm a little at sea about who certain characters are. There are callbacks to The Heroes or Best Served Cold, but I'm left wondering if most of the characters whose POVs I'm reading were in those earlier ones (other than Caul Shivers, of course). If you're getting ready to read A Little Hatred, I'd recommend skimming through the previous ones.

Fitting for a writer who epitomizes the "grimdark" sub-genre, to the extent that his Twitter handle is Lord Grimdark (even if he's a little bemused by all the fuss and the epithet attaching to him), the book starts out dark. There's violence, swearing, dodgy sex scenes - everything that characterized his previous books, so if that's what you're after you'll be pleased. It started out a little tough to read, perhaps because I knew I'd be lending my copy to my dad after I finished, but as the book goes on the plot takes shape, allowing Abercrombie to go into more than eviscerations and heads being crushed (lots of those, btw).

Other reviewers have singled out the setting, so I'll do that too, and note that it's fun to see a sort of industrial revolution type of backdrop. The wizard Bayaz, central to the First Law, seems to be involved in a great leap forward to an industrial society and the resulting human misery. This is another area where Abercrombie pulls no punches, depicting not only the horrors of completely untrammeled capitalism but also the madness of the uprising that occurs when one city's workers are pushed too far.

Ignoring the speed with which his secondary world moves from invading "vikings" to dark satanic mills, it allows Abercrombie to tell a story that feels a lot more relevant to the world we're living in than one where we're expected to continue rooting for hereditary government and the divine right of kings. I'd even go so far as to say that perhaps this is a story only a British writer (and a northern English one, at that) could write, since the excesses of the industrial revolution are ingrained into the British soul much more than they are here in the US.

I called Empire of Grass an almost perfect sequel, since it expanded upon the previous trilogy in intriguing ways. It's maybe a little early to say whether The Age of Madness does the same, because I've read just one of the books so far, compared with the two from Tad Williams. It is however, a very good re-entry to the world of the First Law - I may have felt a bit at sea with identifying the characters, but that also made it a good introduction for completely new readers, and the really important stuff is alluded to in ways that make me remember what happened before.

More to the point, there's the feeling of a great big world that Abercrombie can't wait to introduce us to, when we get to Book 2 and Book 3. I just hope we'll get to find out more about what's going on with Bayaz and the infernal bankers of Valint and Balk.

The other thing I'd like to point to is the characterizations. None of the main POV characters is completely great, but nor are they completely awful. Savine dan Glokta's reaction to the uprising is not shocking or overly cliche, and Crown Prince Orso's motivations when he's sent to deal with the uprising are fascinating - he'll be a fun character to watch as we get to the sequels.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Joe Abercrombie is probably one of the best stylists in fantasy fiction at the moment. If he's not quite as lyrical as Guy Gavriel Kay or Neil Gaiman, he's certainly one of the best at putting you in the scene. That it's rarely a pleasant scene is beside the point - we'd be lucky if half the writers of fantasy were as good as him.

Election 2020: Don't Lose Sight of the Big Picture

I've touched on my worries about the US pulling out of this death spiral it's currently in, but as that was in the context of seeing how likely it was to follow the example of the UK, I thought it would be worthwhile to write a post on what's happening right now, with the primaries.

Specifically I'm worried about how divided the Democrats are. Despite worries in the media of social media echo chambers, I'd say I have a pretty diverse range of Democratic viewpoints among my Facebook friends and Tweeps (defined here as the people I follow and/or who follow me). There are some who are dyed-in-the-wool for Pete Buttigieg–

OK, I can't finish that sentence without laughing, because who can actually be viciously partisan for Mayor Pete? But it's undeniable that some of my social networks are at least not entirely repelled by him or the centrist/establishment wing of the Democratic Party. At least they're calling into question the whole "Republican-lite" narrative that the more left wing of the party is lobbing at anybody who dares to question the orthodoxy of Medicare-for-all (which, incidentally, I think is a pretty good idea - Medicare for all, I mean, not the questioning).

Then there's that cohort, which considers Bernie Sanders the only candidate who can actually beat Donald Trump and who considers it a bit offensive that anybody should doubt that. Luckily they're cool with Elizabeth Warren, who's my preferred candidate, though I wish she'd go back to talking about corruption and being a wonk, which is, I believe, what let her ride the crest to where she is. Though she's doing so badly in the primaries at the moment that I don't think she'll make it to Super Tuesday.

I have some very close friends and family members in this cohort, so I don't want to be mean, but I do suspect they're the ones who are going to cost us the election, if Sanders fails to get the nomination and they decide not to vote at all. This isn't an idle threat: one such FB friend posted something recently calling Buttigieg a fascist and suggesting he's as bad as Donald Trump. While this is plainly laughable, the comment thread was full of people agreeing with him. One person questioned that narrative, but I fear that questioning will fall on deaf ears.

The plain truth is this, as elucidated by my girlfriend: this is not an election of Joe Biden vs Pete Buttigieg vs Bernie Sanders vs whoever else. This is an election of a Republican incumbent controlled by Russia, vs Democratic challengers who are not. Let me repeat that:

ONE PARTY'S CANDIDATE IS CONTROLLED BY RUSSIA. THOSE FROM THE OTHER PARTY ARE NOT.

This is the single most important consideration. If you think of it in terms of emergency room triage, the Democrats (all wings) are arguing about whether or not to treat the patient's broken leg, while ignoring that the patient is bleeding to death. And yes, I'm targeting my criticism at so-called moderate or centrist Democrats too, because they're also threatening to stay home if Sanders or Warren get nominated.

If this isn't enough to get you to vote for whoever the Democrats choose, then at least these partisans, whichever side they're on, need to vote down-ticket, to ensure that as many Senate and House seats (not to mention judiciary and state-level positions) go to the Democrats, because even if, by some miracle, the Democrat wins the electoral college, they will be hamstrung by a Senate majority that represents a small minority of Americans.

We can argue all we want about Medicare-for-all or Medicare-for-all-who-want it, but if the Democrats don't carry the executive and legislative branches, then there will be Medicare for none. No Medicaid. No Social Security.

If it feels like I'm targeting the left wing of the party here, then it's because I want this wing - which I consider my own wing - to build better arguments for its policies than they've been doing so far. I worry - nay, I shit bricks - when I read that trade unions are against Sanders's healthcare policy. Why hasn't he explained it to them better? Why is the default position that the policy is right but the voters are wrong?

I want single-payer healthcare not because of some ideological need to get closer to socialist utopia, but because I think it has better outcomes, a more fair system of rationing and because it's good for everyone - families, workers and even businesses. But my worry is that the idea gets tainted by being explained badly - or have we already forgotten how Hillary Clinton's attempt to rejig healthcare foundered in the 90s when her husband was president?

Now, when it comes to Mike Bloomberg, I remain slightly skeptical that I want to vote for him - after all, he literally is a Republican (at least, he was while mayor of New York City). More than that, he oversaw the dramatic widening of NYC's income inequality, to a level similar to that in Sierra Leone, and still (STILL) champions stop-and-frisk, a system that not only entrenches racial profiling in policing, but DOES NOT FUCKING WORK.

And yet.

He's not controlled by Russia, is he?

In the unlikely event he gets the nomination, I might just vote down-ticket.

But that's the point: vote. FUCKING VOTE. IN NOVEMBER. Even if the Democrats lose their damn minds and nominate Biden or Klobuchar or that guy from Starbucks. If you live in a safely blue state, like I do, VOTE DOWN TICKET. If you don't live in a blue state, then vote for the fucking Democrat, whether that's Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg or Bloomberg.

Vote for the Democrat whether they're black or white, straight or gay, male or female, rich or poor, left-wing or moderate. But vote for them - because four more years of Trump will make it harder to get healthcare or economic justice or racial justice for anyone.

Don't hand the Republicans another victory like 1972 (520 electoral votes for Nixon to 17 for George McGovern) or like 1984 (525 for Reagan vs 13 for Mondale). Don't hand them that victory because your preferred candidate, whether Sanders or Buttigieg or whoever, didn't win the nomination.

Empire of Grass by Tad Williams is an Almost Perfect Sequel

Just finished Empire of Grass a week or so ago, the latest book in The Last King of Osten Ard, Tad Williams's sequel trilogy to Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. MST has long been one of my favorite fantasy series, and I've re-read the books several times, always with great enjoyment. Indeed, my paperback copies are jealously hoarded, especially now that I've had Tad himself sign almost all of the volumes, each at a different author event where I met him.

I always appreciated the conversation that MST tried to have with JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings - a conversation it has more successfully than other series like Terry Brooks's Shannara or Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. Like many of those books MST is based on the search for a magical maguffin, this time in the shape of three powerful swords - though I've always loved the unexpected way he approached that trope.

Last King of Osten Ard looks like it's aiming to have that same conversation, but with its own predecessor trilogy. Instead of the happy(ish) ending holding through, we see how the actual governance of the realm has panned out in the thirty years since To Green Angel Tower ended. A lot of the reviews I've read of the books so far laud this aspect, how Simon's turned out to be not actually that good a ruler after all, and I have to agree it makes for good drama.

But I think my favorite part of this new trilogy is how it expands on the concepts we saw in the earlier books, especially the culture of the Norns. Beginning in the prequel novella The Heart of What Was Lost, Williams fleshed their culture out beyond the "evil elves" we saw in MST, depicting a culture of casual cruelty, rigid caste and paranoia at every level. In some ways it reminds me of his depiction of Hell in the Bobby Dollar series, where life was a daily grind of ever-more horrible things being done by whoever was in power to whoever was below them.

Norn culture is a little less chaotic than that, but it feels like a continuation of the same ideas, especially the casual way the Norns treat human and non-human life.

This is why in my title I call it "almost perfect" - it doesn't ignore what happened before, doesn't retcon it, but rather fills in the gaps very well. Another example is his description of the Tinukeda'ya, the delvers and niskies of MST: here they're depicted as a race so malleable that we realize we've been seeing versions of them in previous stories that we didn't even recognize as such. The giants, kilpa and ghants of MST turn out to be Tinukeda'ya as well, which is a neat idea.

I do have a small criticism. Certain threads and storylines verge on the predictable, like Miriamele's time in the snake pit of Nabban, where you can tell that there's going to be a tragedy of some kind. When it climaxes it's different than expected, but there's still a lingering frustration that the characters haven't cottoned on to what's going on when it's so clear to us, the readers.

Another example is the storyline of Unver, and the coming war of his grasslander tribes against the settled peoples of Osten Ard - though there it's more a feeling of suspense at knowing where Williams has placed all this characters and wanting to see how things play out.

But if you can tell where broad strokes of the story are going, Williams still manages to surprise in the particulars. For example he resolves the question of where Prince Josua's children, Derra and Deornoth, are in the first volume, The Witchwood Crown, and does so in very satisfying ways. He doesn't resolve the question of Josua's whereabouts in this volume, but the search illuminates the intervening span of years between trilogies in interesting ways.

Another example is the way he resolves the storyline in Nabban, which sets up a greater tragedy to befall the characters in the next volume - and after all, over the whole trilogy hangs that name, the "last" king of Osten Ard. You sense that it's all building to a crescendo that won't be as happy or neatly tied up as Memory, Sorrow and Thorn - but I trust Tad Williams enough that I know it'll be entertaining.