Orbit-Jack Womack Interviews Joe Abercrombie Live

The Orbit Podcast: Episode 1, with Joe Abercrombie

You can listen streaming, which I just did while preparing the chicken etc. to bake in the oven. In view of the faddles and fuddles over his The Heroes, most of which seemingly conducted by people who have not read any of the author's books! due to this -- JA's response here -- and a round-up of others' droppings here.  Earlier droppings on the same site.  And even earlier there as well.

Over on Live Journal some women attempted to enter the discussion with the question as to why it is assumed that women don't write gritty, neo or otherwise.  This is interesting because, as you see from the discussions linked to above, women have no role in this disucssion in any way at all.  For the discussants, women are invisible.

However, the author in question, does see women.  There's a woman among The Heroes' protagonists.  But she isn't part of the discussants' discussion either.

I have read Abercrombie's books. I think he got very good with Best Served Cold, so I am looking forward very much to reading The Heroes.  However, as we are writing a narrative history of the United States and slavery, from the earliest colonial era to the threshold of the Blood Atonement, a/k/a the American Civil War, I can't do that right now.  My entertainment reading is on the order of the constitution of the Confederate States of America, which is the darkest of dark fantasy, if you think about it.

It is interesting though me being me, I disagreed with parts of what he thinks, and some parts very much.