Joe Abercrombie

That would be hilarious.

Or, like I've said from the beginning, one of my favorite authors is Joe Abercrombie, and he has an incredible, incredible series of books, the First Law Trilogy.

And one of those characters in the book is an Inquisitor named Sandan Glockta.

And the dude is an absolute savage.

I mean, right up there with Tyrion Lannister.

And the dude is an absolute savage when it comes to questioning prisoners.

So maybe Joe Abercrombie, who is a subject of the Queen, maybe he could lend us Mr. Glock to old sticks to go and have a conversation with Prince Andrew.

Since, you know, the UK courts are getting involved and all.

Yeah.

The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie did that as well.

That's sort of.

Yeah.

Um, there's, uh, one of the sisters has, um, a learning disability or some kind of neurodivergence and that eventually gets treated like her entire voice and personality changes.

Um, um in like and that comes through the prose as well um it's also just like a master class in elegant literary prose um so yeah that's one of my favorite books of all time

uh i've i've i had mentioned before malazan book of the fallen it's like an extreme version of a multi-pov story that really inspired me joe abercrombie i think is in that same category of books i enjoy obviously chris ferracchio sun eater uh robin hobb playing with first person and getting into multi POV inside of first person and the, a cool use of a magic system, I think is very cool.

Uh, and then come with me by Ronald Malfi, which I also mentioned at the top of a second person story where you're speaking to a dead spouse and, and, the you comes out and I think it's a very interesting emotional hit every time he says you and then the name of his wife.

I'm not going to lie.

Um, but upon further research, you know, this is a different, the devils, um, written by, uh, Joe Abercrombie.

Yeah.

So yeah, uh, that, that's what we have in the works for James Cameron.

And that's definitely true.

And Joe Abercrombie takes big inspiration with this, especially the character Merlin in here is what partially inspired Baez in the first Lost series.

So you have all of that.

So if you're already into it, trust those authors.

And the way the battles are described with the hundreds or a thousand at most-ish, maybe a couple thousand soldiers... you get the movement of the battlefield extremely well, and you get to feel like you are...

The tides are turning back and forth.

It puts you in that zone, which is why authors like Joe Abercrombie, George R. R. Martin, on top of them, amongst other reasons, why they like it a lot.

Also, a great back-and-forth play with magic, where...

And he goes on and on.

But that is a much more erudite way of saying pretty much everything I said about The Devils by Joe Abercrombie last summer when we were reading it and talking about the way religion, the church, priest characters are portrayed.

And I talked about how Again, like going to his point here about like it's there's this sensation of like, oh, we're we're the counterculture, we're the rebels, except they're not the counterculture.

And with Joe Abercrombie writing like he he became popular because he was the counterculture like George R.R. Martin.

He was one who was defying genre expectations.

Except he's still trying to defy those same genre expectations 20 years later, and the expectation now is exactly what he's doing.

but I hope they're written in a way that is effective.

I recently was on a podcast and they put a clip of it up talking about these scenes in Ninth House and some of the controversy that surrounded the book, which is wild given some of the things you will find in authors like Joe Abercrombie or Stephen King.

However, somebody wrote in the comments, I found this scene, who knows which scene they were talking about.

Honestly, there's a whole list of them.

To completely over it.

Right, because that is the visceral, unforgiving reality of Joe Abercrombie's novel, The Heroes, which is what we're getting into today.

And it's such a fascinating shift because, you know, we usually talk about war in these really clean binary terms.

One side wins, the other side loses.

When we synthesize all these sources, the primary takeaway is incredibly cohesive.

It really is.

Joe Abercrombie's The Heroes completely and utterly dismantles the romantic illusion of war.

The sources argue that the heroes aren't shining knights charging for righteous causes.

I mean, y- you do, in a good way.

You know, Robert E. Howard's the obvious one, but, you know, a lot of Joe Abercrombie in there.

You had, like, an, an, an exact line like, "Let it be said that..." And, and I don't know how you pronounce your, the character's name.

Lackmannen? Lackmannen?

Yeah, Lack- L- Lockmanen or Lackmannen, I think, uh, I'm fine with either.

"Let it be said that Lackmannen can find the humor in any instance." I'm like, "That is a Joe Abercrombie-ism." It's, it's-

Yeah.

[laughs]