“The first couple of cheques were little drips and then they started to get more and more significant, and I went from being shocked at how little writers earn to thinking, ‘oh, you could make a living from this’,” he says. Abercrombie continued his day job as a television editor, but he began cutting back as the royalties came in. People maybe read it and thought, ‘is this Game of Thrones or Terry Pratchett?’ Maybe there was a disconnect there.”Ī friend in publishing passed the manuscript to Gollancz, and he was finally signed for a trilogy. “I think the combination of violence and humour wasn’t an immediate easy sell. So you have no idea if the book is unfashionable, weird, very bad, almost there … that total lack of any guidance was quite tough to deal with,” he says. You’re expecting to make an impact somehow, even if it’s negative – ‘I despise this book because it’s so powerful!’ – but what you get is the little photocopied slip saying ‘thanks, but no thanks’. “Criticism of that first book is hard to take. He couldn’t find an agent, sending out his manuscript to no avail. So I’ve always been interested in worlds that move on and shift,” Abercrombie says. “The fantasy I read as a kid did often take place in this medieval sandbox where nothing really developed or changed, where conflict comes from a battle between an objective good and evil rather than rising out of social forces and changes as it does in the real world. Unusually for epic fantasy, the story takes place at a time when money is becoming the new power and the middle classes are rising mercantile forces are afoot. In trying to do the opposite, it becomes quite pessimistic and grim.” It’s a reaction against the shiny and optimistic heroic fantasy I read as a teenager. Gritty, violent, cynical and redolent with dark humour, “it was my take on Lord of the Rings, but bringing in all my weird preoccupations about how people work, the nature of violence. That something was 2006’s The Blade Itself, following the adventures of torturer Inquisitor Glokta, barbarian warrior Logen Ninefingers, and the dashing but vain swordsman Jezal dan Luthar.
“I can remember my mother saying – she denies this – ‘This is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be’. Abercrombie spent months refining every paragraph, even “taking it seriously enough” to show it to his parents, who are still his first readers and biggest critics. “I was taking myself, and the fantasy genre, much less seriously.”
He kept the same characters, the same storyline, but “straight away it had this much more world-weary, humorous voice,” he says.
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