I’m Joe Abercrombie, author of the First Law, Age of Madness, and Shattered Sea Trilogies, along with Best Served Cold, the Heroes, Red Country, and The Devils, which came out in May this year.

Most recently I’ve partnered up with Lit Escalates to do a special hardcover edition of the First Law trilogy via Kickstarter, with art by Joel Daniel Phillips, which will look something like this:

https://preview.redd.it/4lwq0lsd7m4g1.jpg?width=2231&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=872c0b6d52d1a7873328922a761c4fe989829ab8

The original plan was just to provide signed hardcovers for readers in the US, but since there’s never actually been a proper US hardcover release outside of some book club editions and some long ago sold out limiteds from Subterranean Press, the ambition expanded and we thought we’d try and make one ourselves.

PLEASE NOTE: I usually get quite a lot of questions, so I’m putting this up 24 hours beforehand, and I’ll return at 16.00 GMT …

I hope this is not an abuse of the scope. I personally consider SW to be fantasy.

I finished Andor last night. The whole of season 2 I kept thinking that this is what all of Star Wars could have been, if not from the beginning, since the Disney take over. Well written adult stories with something to say, real world relevance, proper characters properly developed, villains that are more than cartoon characters, heroes of ambiguous character, regular action scenes that are more than just rule of cool.

I imagine what it would look like if Disney had treated the movies and shows with this much care and sophistication from day one. What the sequels could have been. What spinoffs we could have gotten over dross like Solo. I like the Mandalorian, but the rest of the IP is in a sorry state.

Turns out when people who care come at a project with ambition and ideas they can manage better than “Somehow Palpatine returned.”.

I didn’t cancel my subscription immediately after finishing Blood Over Bright Haven. More like the morning after, when I have time to start feeling a bit uncomfortable with the comfort of my daily life. What impact is it doing to the environment and other people?

I’ve always wanted to cancel Prime subscription but I couldn’t. It was so convenient… I did reduced my purchase frequency and tried to google search better deal before buying but I couldn’t get to the end of the cancellation screen. I forgave myself that this problem is with the government for allowing monopoly.

To be fair, my subscription continues until the end of the billing cycle. So maybe I need to reread this book to brace the inconvenience.

What other books do you recommend that make you feel uncomfortable (but in a good way)? I want to feel uncomfortable. It’s not right to take these comforts for granted.

[Edit] I’m not just buying books from Amazon. Some people in the …

Tor Books have - in my view unwisely - decided not to publish the last two volumes of J.V. Jones’s long-gestating Sword of Shadows series. Jones completed the penultimate novel, Endlords, early this year and has since been working on the final book, A Sword Named Loss.

The decision is not altogether surprising, as the first three books in the series - *A Cavern of Black Ice* (1999), *A Fortress of Grey Ice* (2002), *A Sword from Red Ice* (2007) and *Watcher of the Dead* (2010) - had been published a significant amount of time ago and the series had gone on hiatus whilst the author battled a large number of problems that had destroyed her writing time. Work on the series resumed several years ago, but at a slow pace as the author had a day job. Once she was able to work on the book full-time, *Endlords* was concluded relatively quickly, and she hosted an AMA here on r/fantasy earlier this year.

However, Tor themselves have form for resuming series that had spent many years on …

In A Practical Guide to Evil a battle is preemptively won by teleporting a lake and dropping it on the enemy army. I’ve been wondering if there are other creative magic ways battle have been won in fantasy fiction.

I’m probably biased because I’ve been a Critical Role fan for a long time, but they really knocked it out of the park with The Mighty Nein. It’s less goofy and much more character-focused than The Legend of Vox Machina, and the longer episodes really make a difference.

Episode 5 was easily the best episode they’ve done, I highly recommend it! Even my fiance, who normally dislikes animated shows and fantasy, is loving it so far.

By Omar El Akkad

I just finished listening to the audiobook that is narrated by the author. I would recommend listening to the book as you can hear exactly how the author felt as he was writing the book and listen to his emotions come through.

This was a difficult read in terms of subject matter. I felt devastated by his descriptions of the violence and death experienced by the Palestinians that he saw in the war. He talks about how he wishes he could un-see these tragedies and I felt the same after hearing about them. He also criticizes the western world for supporting the Israelis and turning a blind eye to the atrocities.

I also think this book does a great job of criticizing the western world for its hypocrisy in that it says all are entitled to freedom and justice, but it really only means a privileged few. In fact, the book argues that the western world is by design meant to leave out many groups of people in its ideals.

Alongside describing the reporting he did as a …

I’m in a weird rut. I used to be a die hard kindle girl - but lately I’ve found myself buying more and more books. I’m mostly thrifting books and going to my local library whenever I can cause I guess .. I missed the smell of books which was why I fell in love with reading in my early teens in the first place. Sitting with a book in hand till your fingers start to hurt but you can’t put it down because you’re so immersed in the story. My love for reading developed from watching people around me REALLY loving books, where you could open any one of the books from their library and you’d find little notes all around which weren’t aesthetically appealing but it was raw.

Ive started enjoying reading again but I also can’t help being sucked into overconsumption content my algorithm has been pushing me into. “This is what you need, this is what you must read”

I’m looking for creators to follow ( if any) who talk about reading in the anti-overconsumption sense( idk if it makes sense but …

Granted, I’m only like 200 pages in, but I don’t get why Consider Phlebas is considered a lesser Banks work. I described it as it, kind of starts out as Firefly but becomes Star Trek as the series goes on. I know that’s reductive and I’ve got much more to go to know if that’s accurate, but I’m loving the world-building so far. It seems like Bank’s stuff is more an episode in a shared universe and not really an arcing story, right?

The author Qntm recently published an edited version of his book “There Is No Antimemetics Division”; he says it’s been reworded and rewritten to flow better. I saw a couple of posts talking about that issue, so I thought people might want to know! I’m hoping to get it soon and can leave a review later.

It’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than what comes after, Mark Fisher has famously said. I am looking for science fiction imagining life after capitalism. I have read most of the Culture series by Iain M. Banks and Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, but can’t think of anything else at the moment. Maybe you have some suggestions?

Exactly what the post says, I guess. I’ve been in the mood for some good cyberpunk and have been fascinated with the concept of guerrilla warfare in the context of revolution for a while now, and I can’t think of a better combination than to place an underequipped rebellion into a world run by corrupt fascist megacorporations with absurd amounts of money and power. Something where our heroes are always under the gun, desperate, operating in a morally gray, thin line between rebel and terrorist. The more left-leaning and anticapitalist, the better in this case.

I wonder if anyone in the community has recommendations for science fiction stories set in the ocean. I have had the TV show SeaQuest DSV on my mind a bit lately, and it occurs to me that I don’t think I have ready anything that brings in both the speculative setting and themes of that show, and I would really enjoy that.

Any ideas?

I saw in the news today that Tarantino said There Will Be Blood isn’t his favorite film of the 21st century because “It’s supposed to be a 2-hander, but Dano is weak sauce, man… He’s just such a weak, weak, uninteresting guy. The weakest fucking actor in SAG.”

Honestly, I thought this was an incredibly classless thing for Tarantino to say. First of all, I actually thought Dano was great in the film he genuinely made me hate the character, and when an actor manages that, it usually means they’re doing a damn good job. And from what I’ve read, Dano barely had any time to prepare for the role anyway.

Tarantino was one of my favorite directors from the 90s Pulp Fiction is in my top 25 movies ever but the truth is, as an actor he’s pretty weak himself. Whenever he shows up on screen, he sticks out in all the wrong ways. Even in Django, every line he delivers feels forced and unnatural.

Today I lost a lot of respect for Tarantino.