The First Law Series, and Why You Should Read It!

 

Well, figures that I would start a blog, get two posts done, and then have work and life eat up all my time for more than a week and not get anything written. But, now I’ve got a bit of free time, and I can get some stuff posted, starting with this, a little review of Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law series, or at least the first trilogy. 

If you haven’t read these books and you are in to dark, low-fantasy settings, then I can heartily recommend them. I just finished the last of the first trilogy the other week, and I had been hooked from the first chapter of the first book. Abercrombie is an amazing character writer, and his world is grim while still feeling realistic, and not verging into the eye-rolling levels of over the top violence that overly-dark fantasy and sci-fi can stray into often. In fact, at the end, without giving away too much, I was left with the feeling that the true grimdarkness of it all was the relatively mundane situations that characters were trapped in.

Another thing Abercrombie does (or doesn’t do really) is lay all his cards out on the table for the reader from the very beginning. The First Law series does vagueness and mystery better than a lot of other fantasy I’ve read. There were until recently no official maps of the world, and the history of the setting is often explained through unreliable narrators. Countries, religions, cultures, etc. are often mentioned but not necessarily explained. The way magic works is abstract, and while there are demons and non-human creatures, don’t expect elves, dragons or dwarves. I know that means some folks will be turned off reading them, but if so, hey, at least I warned you!

Anyway, check them out. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from them, and will definitely be diving into the second trilogy later. But for now, I’m reading Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, and I’ll definitely be posting about that later.

Cheers y’all!