Mag-log in bilang miyembro
Nakapanayam namin si Joe Abercrombie sa Avilés upang talakayin ang ebolusyon ng modernong pantasya, ang kanyang kahanga-hangang galing sa pag-anticipate ng mga uso sa genre, kung bakit maaaring labis na pinahahalagahan ang pagtubos, kung paano hinubog ng mga video game ang kanyang pagsusulat, ang hinaharap ng The Devils sa screen, ang paparating na The Heretics, at kahit kaunting tungkol sa susunod na alon ng Pag-ibig, Kamatayan at mga Robot.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, this is the second day for me at the Celsius 232 and I'm here joined by one of the stars.
Everybody wants to talk with you, I don't know how or why."
"And you're very close to the festival, you've been here for a few years now.
How are you enjoying it this year?
I'm loving it as I do every year. I was at the first one 15 years ago or so and I think I've now been to 11 altogether."
"Which, when I was at about 5, I think it seemed quite cool.
Now I'm at 11, possibly it feels like part of the furniture, I'm not sure.
That's a lot of books in those years, I guess.
I want to ask you about the format for trilogies."
"You have a bunch of them, you have The First Law, Age of Madness, now The Devils.
So how do you approach that? How do you split your creative work from the get-go so that it can become or grow to a full trilogy?
A trilogy has always seemed the natural length for a multi-part story to me."
"There's a beginning, a middle and an end.
A first book where you set things up, a final book you pay things off and a middle one where you can spin the wheels and develop the characters.
Everything I read as a kid, Lord of the Rings, Wizard of Earthsea, the big books for me were trilogies."
"So it's always felt very natural to write in that style.
I guess fantasy tends to be big, long stories, big worlds, lots of characters.
So once you get into several books, three seems the right number.
Those characters that you mentioned, many of them do terrible things."
"And yet people grow attached to them.
What's the line between a character that is flawed but we can end up relating to and one that you would give up on?
I don't know that there is a line."
"I think my position tends to be there's no line.
If you're writing from inside the head of the character, if you're understanding their motivations and those make sense, if there's an appeal to the way the character thinks, most of all a sense of humour that is kind of individual and appealing, then in a way a character can get away with anything."
"I think of books like American Psycho, say, where the behaviour is absolutely beyond abysmal, the worst of the worst, most appalling person you can imagine.
But there's still a wit there and a humour that makes that person interesting to read about."
"You don't have to like them as a reader, but you have to find them interesting.
So I think it's all about getting into the point of view of that person and giving them a kind of personal wit and a voice that is appealing.
Do you think then that redemption is overrated in fantasy?
I think it can be. It's not the only important thing."
"I think a character can be redeemed, but there's also an interest in a character who seems to reach for redemption, who almost gets there, but who fails at the last minute.
To me that feels very real and very natural."
"We're often locked in these patterns of behaviour that are very hard to break as people.
We can leave the familiar settings, find new people to be around, new ways to behave, but often when we return to the familiar, we return to familiar patterns of behaviour."
"So those kind of smooth patterns of change and development you often get in fiction and in heroic fantasy fiction, I don't know that always reflects the real world, and I like writing that feels real and authentic."
"And sometimes people fail.
Let me ask you about Half-A-King.
It was almost 20 years ago, if I'm correct?
Yeah, so The Blade Itself was my first book, and that was just over 20 years ago."
"2007.
That's right.
Half-A-King I think maybe three or four years later.
How do you think that book, that story, that message clicks with today's audiences?
I mean, I think it still seems to work."
"I mean, I'm lucky in that I seem to have always, probably by chance, I don't know, but I seem to have always caught a wave of things about the right moment.
So I was writing kind of gritty, nasty, slightly amoral fantasy fiction at a time before it was necessarily the centre of the market."
"But as I was writing it, the market shifted very much in that direction.
It was kind of ready when I arrived, in a way I wasn't expecting and kind of never prepared for.
And so generally over time, if I've had one thing in my publishing career, it's been good luck, I think."
"The market has moved to anticipate me, which is a nice, nice thing.
That's really nice, of course.
And I also wanted to ask you about video games.
I know you are very interested in video games."
"We are mostly, or we were mostly, a video game insight, right?
Sure, yeah.
So the two ways, one way, how do they inspire you?
When you play, you can see their narrative things differently."
"For example, from interactive narrative, you see things that you can do in your static books.
And then I will ask you the other way around.
Yeah, I mean, video games have always been a kind of huge part of what I've done."
"I mean, in a way, I'm the right age, late 20s, very late 20s, let's be fair, the right age to have really grown up alongside video games.
So when I was four or five, we first got a computer, which was, I think, an Acorn Atom, 2K."
"Very impressive.
We later expanded it to an amazing 12K.
Blowing the doors off.
And so I can remember a lot of early video game experiences."
"Elite on the BBC long ago.
Dungeon Master on the Atari ST as I grew up.
So these were all like informative years for me as a teenager.
You know, fascinating stuff."
"And it was when, I suppose, when young people would be reacting to books.
I was reacting to books, but also to video games.
And in that era, I guess you had to fill in a lot of the blanks for yourself and in a way to kind of have your own backstories to characters."
"And so they were very, I think, powerful for stimulating the imagination.
And so those are my first kind of writing experiences, in a sense, fleshing out the background to the games that I was playing when it was just a few pixels on the screen."
"Like sparking your imagination and filling the hole.
So that's interesting.
And the other way around, would you like to try your hand at video games?
I can picture a morally ambiguous RPG experience based on your writing."
"Sure.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's something that's come up now and again.
And it's a fascinating area.
Obviously, that business is becoming so huge, so much bigger than film and TV, bigger than books."
"And over time, I'm sure it will become bigger yet.
And so it is undoubtedly a fertile field for writing.
But I think there's still a degree to which writers are somewhat at the mercy of the design and the programming and the kind of commercial elements."
"And so it's a tough space to kind of slot into as a book writer.
As an author, you have this total authority over what you do, which can be a pressure, but at the same time is a great deal of freedom.
And so I'm not sure how I would now, as someone who's used to getting his way, respond to having to do as I'm told."
"Perhaps something that you've done already that you think fits as a video game, as an adaptation?
Sure. I mean, that's always a possibility.
I suppose that relies on the right team, the right people, the right guy with the right kind of approach and the right background to come to you and say, I want to do this and this is how."
"And in a sense, that's what you look for in a film or TV adaptation as well.
That person who's going to not come to you and say, I love your stuff.
Let's do what you've done.
But say, I have this vision for what I could do with your material."
"Let's kind of take that trip together.
And so certainly if that opportunity came along with the right people, I'd jump at it, but it hasn't quite been the right fit so far.
So my ears are always open."
"Yeah. And now that you mention adaptations, of course, I have to ask you, and I think the audience asked you yesterday about The Devils.
Sure.
If there is anything new that you can share, anything on its status?
Sure."
"Yeah. So James Cameron bought the rights to The Devils a year or two ago when the book first came out.
And so all I can really say is we're working on it.
These things always move very, very slowly."
"And when you're involved with someone like him, it's amazing to have that kind of weight behind it and that creative power behind it.
But at the same time, it has to move at his pace, and he has lots of other things going on."
"And so it moves in fits and starts when the eye of Sauron returns to your project, you know?
And so it is moving, but never hold your breath with these things.
Of course."
"I've learned over time, you know, there's no guarantees.
You just have to do the best you can at each stage and hope that it all comes together.
But in the meantime, you keep working on the world and setting it on the trilogy, and we just learned about the title of the sequel, which is The Heretics."
"Yeah.
What can you tell us, or what can you tell fans they can expect from this second entry?
Well, in a way, I mean, I'm always trying to offer some of the same."
"You know, you want to give people the kind of thing they liked in your writing in the first place.
I think, for me, that's a combination of action and some humor and some vivid characters that go in directions you don't expect."
"So that, I think, is always universal in what I do.
The Devils was intended to be a kind of more fun, more fast, more kind of quick read, in a way, than some of my other stuff had been."
"Yes.
And so The Heretics continues that, expands the scale slightly, brings in some new characters and some new ideas.
Mostly takes place in Germany and has a lot of witches in it."
"That is basically it.
A lot of witches in Germany.
All right.
All right.
Interesting."
"I mentioned the first law before, and this is a question by my colleague Alex.
Sure.
He says, which character would you bring from The First Law to the team of The Devils?
Oh, that's an interesting question."
"I mean, there's a lot of unpleasant characters in The First Law who I think would probably slot right in.
You need the kind of slightly supernatural feel to fit in with The Devils, though."
"So I think maybe a character like Shenkt, who is mysterious and has a taste for human meat, might fit in well to that team.
All right, that's a good one."
"Okay, and final one.
I completely love Love, Death & Robots.
Oh, sure, yeah.
You wrote three of the episodes, if I'm correct."
"Yeah.
Interestingly, those episodes are adaptations of stories by other authors.
Yeah, of course.
And also, of course, they are much shorter."
"They are brief compared to your trilogies or your books.
So how did you feel about this, about adapting the work by others and also going very short, very punchy?
Yeah, I mean, a really interesting exercise altogether."
"So I've worked quite a lot, both on adapting my own stuff for screen, with very little success, I should point out.
And also I've worked with some other writers adapting their books for the screen as well, so a much longer format, kind of hour-long formats or film kind of formats."
"And so this was kind of, in a way, a natural step to work on Love, Death and Robots, where pretty much all the stories are based on a short story or adapted from something."
"And it's kind of, it can be a frustration to have the story there, but generally I find it's a really nice change because you're able to come into something that is largely established, you have the structure there, you have a shape that people already like and enjoy, and it's about trying to just bring it out in the most effective way for the format and also to often bring it right down to a focus point, because some of those are five minutes, some are 15 or 10, but some are very, very short, and so it's all about trying to boil it down to the most efficient shape, and that's actually quite an exciting kind of opportunity."
"And you work with great directors, great animators, who have amazing ideas, and that's fun as an author who's generally working on his own to come into a team of people, sometimes with bad ideas, and sometimes with great ideas, and you kind of work your way through the bad ideas and hopefully find the kind of best form of the story."
"Would you like to have an original there in the future?
Can we expect a Joe Abercrombie original in Love, Death and Robots?
I mean, it's always possible, so I think I'm doing a couple in the next series again, a few episodes which are all adapted from people's stuff."
"Adapted as well?
Yes, absolutely.
Maybe one day an original.
I suppose you're waiting for that kind of, that diamond of an idea that fits the format, and I'm not generally a short story guy."
"I'm kind of a long story guy, so hopefully one day that will happen.
That will come to me.
A diamond bullet of a story to do."
"Perhaps here in Avilés, as you're so acquainted here, and I know you mention Avilés in some of your works, so that's really nice.
I love this."
"Thank you so much for your time, Joe.
Enjoy the rest of the Celsius.
Pleasure, you too.
You too.
Cheers."
"Cheers."
