Latest news with #JoeAbercrombie
Geek Tyrant
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
George R.R. Martin Slams Hollywood Screenwriters For Changing Source Material and "Making it Their Own" — GeekTyrant
If there's one thing George R.R. Martin doesn't have time for, beside writing The WInds of Winter , it's screenwriters rewriting the very stories that made them want to adapt the work in the first place. During a recent event with fellow fantasy author Joe Abercrombie, Martin opened up about what really frustrates him about the adaptation process, saying: 'Television and film are ultimately collaborative. You always have the director and the actors and of course the studio will have executives, they will give notes and all that, and you have to deal with all that, which some people do better than others.' But then he cut to the core of his rant. 'The hard part about collaborating is not so much them, but, I find – speaking only for myself here, not for Joe – is dealing with the other writers. 'They're adapting your book or your story, and they hire someone else to do it, and there's a phrase that they empower this writer to – okay, take The Great Gatsby, but make it your own. And I don't want anyone to make The Great Gatsby their own.' This must've been weighing on Martin's mind for a while. He went on to say: 'I think I may be a minority in this case here that other people don't mind that and all, but I don't think in most of the cases where a Hollywood screenwriter makes something their own that they improve it. I think [in] the majority of cases it's the opposite.' Martin's comments aren't coming out of nowhere. He's previously voiced concerns about HBO's House of the Dragon deviating from his book Fire & Blood , at one point posting on his Blog: 'There are larger and more toxic butterflies to come, if House of the Dragon goes ahead with some of the changes being contemplated for seasons 3 and 4…' It's a familiar tension: writers who create intricate, layered worlds often see those worlds or stories reshaped and rewritten when they enter the Hollywood mashine. Adaptation is one thing, but turning someone else's work into a sandbox for your own ideas isn't collaboration? Martin isn't a fan. You can catch Martin's full remarks in the event video, starting at the 35:19 mark below.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The new George RR Martin? How Joe Abercrombie became the dark lord of fantasy
James Cameron fans are blue in the face begging the director of Terminator and Aliens to do something other than churn out new Avatar films – as he has been doing remorselessly since 2008. It appears they may at last have their wish. While he is to revisit Avatar's world of elongated Smurf-like aliens with – groan – a further three sequels, Cameron has also announced he is scripting an adaptation of The Devils by Lancaster fantasy writer Joe Abercrombie. To quote another fantasy author, the road goes ever on and on – but in the case of Cameron, it has finally veered in a more interesting direction. Cameron's swerve into epic fantasy is a thrilling development and, not only because it potentially means less Avatar in our lives. Described only half-jokingly by its author as 'medieval Suicide Squad ', Abercrombie's The Devils is set in a semi-fantastical medieval Europe in which a 10-year-old girl is Pope, and an Elven army is about to invade. Our hero, Brother Diaz, is a man of the cloth who must work with a group of monsters – among them a vampire, a werewolf and a necromancer – to save humanity. As Abercrombie says, Suicide Squad is a reference, but the book could also be thought of as Game of Thrones meets The A-Team or The Dirty Dozen as scripted by a blood-thirsty JRR Tolkien. A Devils movie scripted by an figure of the calibre of James Cameron would be a crowning achievement for Abercrombie, who, since publishing his first novel in 2006, has quietly become a leading voice in British speculative writing. Not that he needs Hollywood's blessing: The Devils topped this year's bestseller list and was also a success in the United States, where it reached number five in the New York Times hard-cover bestseller charts – adding to the estimated five million books he has already shifted. Want to hear more about @LordGrimdark 's upcoming fantasy sensation #TheDevils? Who better to tell you than the man himself? Shop now: — Gollancz (@gollancz) March 31, 2025 Those are blockbusting figures for an author operating in the relatively stodgy field of epic fantasy – which has lately been eclipsed by more voguish genres such as ' Romantasy ' (think Mother of Dragons meet Mills & Boon) and authors such as Sarah J Maas (who has sold 40 million books and counting). 'His writing has a charisma to it. There's a cynical wit and a bit of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness. So many of his characters have colourful and iconic internal monologues that lend some levity to whatever horrible atrocity is currently taking place,' says Hiu Gregg, the fantasy blogger behind the website The Fantasy Inn, who says that a Devils movie would need to be in the roguish, semi-jokey vein of films such as James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy. 'That's where I think the challenge will be in adapting something like The Devils. You need the casting to be spot-on. You need to take the text only as seriously as it takes itself. You can't play it 100 per cent straight, or it will flop. The three-word pitch for this book is 'Papal Suicide Squad', but if James Cameron is going make this movie, he needs to understand that we're talking the James Gunn version.' Abercrombie is often compared to George RR Martin and, speaking to the Telegraph in 2022, revealed that reading Martin's A Game Of Thrones in his early 20s had a huge impact. Both he and Martin had grown up on Tolkien's vision of fantastical worlds defined by a battle between good and evil. Martin turned the concept on its head by suggesting true evil was not a dark lord in a shadowy tower – but a rival noble prepared to shiv you in the back if it meant advancing their own position. 'I found expressed in that book, what I felt had been missing in epic fantasy,' said Abercrombie. 'It had that scale and depth [familiar from Tolkien], but it also had the sort of arresting, surprising characters. It had shocks, the surprises: the good guys don't always win. And suddenly everything felt dangerous and unpredictable. It was the kind of things that I'd seen in other genres. But I've never seen it applied to classic epic fantasy in that way. And it really made me think, 'Wow, you can do something shocking and exciting and character-focused within epic fantasy'.' He put those ideas into practice with his first novel, The Blade Itself. Written while he was working as a freelance film editor, the book was rejected by multiple publishers and agents. But then a friend happened to be on a course with a woman who worked for fantasy publisher Gollancz: she agreed to throw an eye over the novel, and a few weeks later, Abercrombie had his first book deal. The Blade Itself didn't set the world alight in 2006, but the story of a down-on-his-luck barbarian named Logen Ninefingers and a former torturer named Inquisitor Glokta earned a following over the following years. It had arrived at the perfect time: with the success of George RR Martin and other authors such as Robin Hobb, gritty, violent storytelling had become the hot new trend in fantasy – a milieu that came to be known as 'grimdark'. 'Grimdark' was initially used as an insult – but Abercrombie jokingly embraced the term by taking the Twitter handle 'Lord Grimdark'. 'At that time, when people use the word grimdark, they were taking the piss,' he would explain. 'They were saying something was bad. They were using it in as a pejorative: risible, ridiculous, over the top, too much violence, too much cynicism, too much nihilism. I was taking the piss out of myself.' Beyond the humour, he will have known that his writing had too much flair and inventiveness to be corralled into any one genre. 'A large part of Abercrombie's success is that his books are not just grimdark. He was of course a huge part of the mid-noughties to mid-tens peak of grimdark fantasy popularity, but he broke a lot of rules within that sub-genre,' says the Fantasy Inn's Hiu Gregg. 'He dared to be funny. He could make a character death or a betrayal feel like a punchline. Rather than extinguishing hope completely, he understood how to use it for dramatic or comedic contrast. And for me, that gives his books a longevity beyond being just another set of grimdark stories.' Did my biggest US event yet with @BrandSanderson in Salt Lake City last night. 450 people including a gate crashing @Pierce_Brown . On to Seattle with @robinhobb tonight… — Joe Abercrombie (@LordGrimdark) May 21, 2025 Abercrombie's work also wrestles with big ideas – but in a way that feels organic rather than preachy. For instance, his Age of Madness trilogy – which began with A Little Hatred in 2019 – is set in a fantasy world in the midst of an Industrial Revolution. It has wizards and warriors, but also explores the tension between capitalism and workers, between those who want to defend the status quo and those eager to burn it to the ground. It is Middle-earth meets Les Misérables. 'I try to stay in characters' heads. It's the story of those people. And so you don't want to make it 'message-y', if you can avoid it,' he said in 2022. 'You don't want it to be too on the nose. At the same time, you're living in the modern era, and you're writing for an audience of people who are living in the modern age. So everyone brings their current day to the reading of it and you can't avoid what's going on in the world around you while you're writing it. And nor would you want to. Part of the fun of fantasy, as opposed to historical fiction, is that it is really about now. People in fantasy don't tend to be people with a medieval mindset. Generally, they're quite modern in their thinking and their talk and so on – that allows you to hold up a glass darkly if you like, and investigate some things that might feel a little bit much in a modern setting.' The big difference between Abercrombie and George RR Martin is obviously that Abercrombie has finished what he started. In the 14 years since Martin's most recent Game of Thrones novel, A Dance with Dragons, the Englishman has published six novels and two short-story collections. Martin says it will take another two books to conclude his A Song of Ice and Fire saga, but at age 76, there are question marks about those volumes ever seeing the light of day. There is precedent in fantasy for authors leaving audiences hanging on. When Martin's friend Robert Jordan died with his Wheel of Time series unfinished, author Brandon Sanderson completed the tale working from Jordan's notes. It has been suggested Abercrombie would be the perfect writer to do likewise with A Song of Ice and Fire. But while he admires what Sanderson did with Wheel of Time, he has always poured cold water on the idea that he might carry on Martin's work for him. 'It's flattering in the sense that it's a series I really love,' he said in 2022. 'It's [also] weird and macabre. It's so personal, writing a book. The thing that makes a book great is that authorial voice that cannot be imitated, that no one else has. The task of trying to imitate that would be both extremely difficult. Probably quite frustrating. And maybe in the end a bit disappointing because you'd never quite do it. And you'd be suppressing your own voice a little bit in order to get there.' So no Game of Thrones sequels from Abercrombie. Instead, he is working on the next book in the Devils series. Which can only be good news for fans of beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy. Five essential Joe Abercrombie novels 1. The Heroes, 2011 A gritty tale of courage, betrayal and redemption taking place against the background of a three-day battle between the 'civilized' Union from the South and the wild and lawless warriors of the North and centred on a group of ancient standing stones referred to as 'The Heroes'. Set in the same universe as the author's First Law trilogy, Abercrombie's ability to conjure action and violence without tipping into sadism is on full display while characters such as noble barbarian warrior Curnden Craw are fully realized and brimming with human flaws. 2. The Devils, 2025 It's Medieval Europe as we've never seen it before. The Church consists of female clergy, headed by a 10 year old Pope, while in the lands beyond, hordes of cruel elves are massing and planning an invasion. The only way to save civilization is for a rag bag crew of freaks and outlaws – led by mild-mannered Brother Diaz – to travel to the equivalent of ancient Troy to return a princess to her throne. The Middle Ages filtered through Abercrombie's Quentin Tarantino-does-fantasy sensibility, The Devils is a pure thrill ride. No wonder James Cameron is so keen on it. 3. The Blade Itself, 2006 Abercrombie's debut combined Games of Thrones grimdark sensibility with a very British sense of humour that owed a little to Terry Pratchett and a lot to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It was fantasy – with all the po-facedness stripped away. 4. A Little Hatred, 2019 Fantasy novels can often feel trapped in an eternal stasis: why after thousands of years has nobody in Middle-earth or Westeros invented the flintlock pistol, for instance? Abercrombie however pushes onwards with A Little Hatred, a thrilling novel of intrigue and backstabbing set in a fantasy universe experiencing the first aftershocks of an Industrial Revolution. 5. Red Country, 2012 Doing for fantasy what Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven did for the Western, Red Country is the third standalone novel set in the author's First Law world (as debuted in The Blade Itself). It introduces Shy South, a former brigand who sets out to find her missing brother and sister.
Geek Tyrant
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
James Cameron Confirms His Next Movie Will Be a Fantasy Epic THE DEVILS — GeekTyrant
James Cameron has been burined deep in the world of Pandora for years, but he's announced what his next film project will be. The filmmaker behind Aliens , Titanic , and Avatar announced on Facebook that his next movie after Avatar: Fire and Ash will be an adaptation of The Devils . The Devil's is a brand-new fantasy novel by British author Joe Abercrombie, and Cameron is producing and co-writing the script with Abercrombie himself. The director said: 'I've loved Joe's writing for years, cherishing each new read, throughout the epic cycle of the First Law books, especially Best Served Cold (LOVE IT!), and the Age of Madness trilogy. 'But the freshness of the world and the characters in The Devils finally got me off my butt to buy one of his books and partner with him to bring it to the screen. 'I can't wait to dig into this as I wind down on Avatar: Fire and Ash. It will be a joyful new challenge for me to bring these indelible characters to life.' Abercrombie has built a loyal following in the grimdark fantasy space. His First Law series redefined the genre with its morally compromised antiheroes and sharp, self-aware writing. But, The Devils , which just hit shelves last month via Tor, kicks off a new trilogy, one with a very different premise. Set in a warped version of our own world, The Devils imagines a Europe crawling with unspeakable monsters and under siege by flesh-eating elves. The story centers on Brother Diaz, a weary soldier-priest tasked with assembling a team of both men and monsters to fight back the rising tide of horror. Abercrombie seems just as excited about the team-up, saying: 'I can't think of anyone better to bring this weird and wonderful monster of a book to the screen,' he said in a statement. This isn't the only Abercrombie film adaptation in the works. Best Served Cold , one of his most beloved standalone novels, is currently being developed as a feature film with Rebecca Ferguson set to play the deadly Monza Murcatto. That project is being directed by Deadpool's Tim Miller and is currently in pre-production. Cameron, meanwhile, still has a few stops left on the Avatar train. Fire and Ash , the third installment in his sprawling sci-fi epic, is scheduled to open on December 19th. Two more sequels are planned after that, with tentative release dates in 2029 and 2031. But clearly, the filmmaker is already mapping out his next creative obsession. If The Devils lands with the scope and visual intensity we associate with Cameron, and given the source material, this could be a great new chapter for both the director and modern fantasy cinema. The Devils is available now in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.
Gizmodo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
James Cameron Will Take a Break From ‘Avatar'… in Hell
After 'Avatar: Fire and Ash,' the 'Terminator' creator will co-write the script to 'The Devils' by Joe Abercrombie. Everyone knows that James Cameron gets super excited about ocean exploration. But for his next project, he's going even lower than that. Cameron just announced that his company, Lightstorm, has acquired the rights to The Devils, a new book by Joe Abercrombie that follows a high-ranking demon who takes a group of evil beings on a mission in Hell. 'How do I describe The Devils?' Cameron wrote in a press release via his social media. 'A sharply witty horror adventure? An epic battle between good and evil except most of the time you can't tell which is which? A twisted, stylish, alt-universe middle-ages romp, where your best hope of survival is the monsters themselves? This is Joe Abercrombie in absolute peak form, opening up a whole new world and an ensemble of delicious new characters. The twists and turns come at a rollercoaster pace, and with Joe's signature acerbic wit and style. The Devils showcases Joe's jaundiced view of human nature, in all its dark, selfish glory, as told through some decidedly un-human characters. But of course, Joe always teases with the flickers of redemption that make it all worthwhile—and ultimately quite heartwrenching.' Cameron goes on to talk about his love of Abercrombie's work before revealing that he'll co-write the script with Abercrombie just as soon as he gets some other movie he's working on into theaters. 'I'm looking forward to the writing process with him, though I'm certain this adaptation will practically write itself because Joe writes very visually, almost in scenes, and with a very cinematic structure,' Cameron said. 'I can't wait to dig into this as I wind down on Avatar: Fire and Ash. It will be a joyful new challenge for me to bring these indelible characters to life.' That third Avatar film, Fire and Ash, is scheduled for release December 19, and while most of us probably assume that means Cameron would jump right into the fourth film, he's got some time. Avatar 4 is not scheduled for release until December 2029. Whether or not he'll direct or pass those duties—for either Avatar or The Devils—to someone else remains to be seen. Either way, though, he certainly seems very excited about making his way to Hell. And you would be too if you now owned the rights to this… 'Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him,' the official description of The Devils reads. 'But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters. The mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends. Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions and comfort. With a hellish journey before him, it's a good thing Brother Diaz has the devils on his side.' Here's Cameron's original post.
Forbes
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘The Devils' Review: Joe Abercrombie's Gothic Suicide Squad Doesn't Quite Work
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (Review) Vampires, werewolves and necromancers, oh my! Joe Abercrombie's new fantasy novel The Devils has all the hallmarks of the fantasy author's past books – bloody action, wry humor, rich world-building and a breathless pace – while delving into entirely new territory. And yet, despite all that, this is a rare misfire from one of my favorite fantasy authors. The world of The Devils is a mirror of our own, an alt-universe where the Catholic Church has all female priests, a female (child) pope and a plethora of magical creatures, including dark and mysterious elves to the East, which humankind has been at war with for generations. In this fiction, the Crusades were not waged against Moors, but against elves – a race said to devour the flesh of humans, among other atrocities that are neither confirmed nor denied by the end of the story. This, we must assume, is being saved for the rest of the trilogy. There is still a Schism between the Western and Eastern churches, though the Eastern church is headquartered not in Constantinople, but rather a reimagined Troy. There are lots of little touches like this throughout the novel, making the world of The Devils at once familiar and utterly distinct from our own. The Europe of Abercrombie's story is in upheaval. The mad sorceress Eudoxia, Empress of Troy, has died, leaving the Serpent Throne empty. Her five sons have scattered across the land, vying for power. But the Western Church has a plan. They have discovered the long-lost heir of the Eastern Empire, a young waif named Alex who grew up in the streets as an urchin and thief. The young Pope Bendicta the First and her advisors hand Alex over to the Chapel of the Holy Expediency, a special operations outfit that handles the dirtiest church business with the help of a few monsters. Their task: Bring Alex to Troy and seat her on the throne. Naturally, it's neither that easy or that straightforward in the end. We meet young Brother Diaz, a country bumpkin monk who has come to the Holy City with big ambitions, only to find himself the nominal head of the Chapel, both his nerve and his faith put to the test as he's plunged in way over his head. Diaz is accompanied by an immortal knight, a resourceful swashbuckler, an elderly vampire, a horny werewolf and an elf who can turn invisible (using a power that reminded me of Doli from The Prydain Chronicles). There's a solid balance of male and female representation here, and it's clear that Abercrombie made a concerted effort at this, though I believe his First Law books have lots of great female characters as well. Still, this is a much more female-driven story, with lots more sex, queer representation and so forth. This is Abercrombie's Suicide Squad, essentially. Jakob of Thorn and Baptiste work for the church of their own accord, handlers for the rest of the titular Devils. The rest are conscripts – sentenced to work for the Chapel of the Holy Expediency for their various crimes. Baron Rikard is a geriatric vampire whose most frightening power is his magical voice and ability to persuade even large crowds to do whatever he wants. The more he feeds on humans, the younger he becomes; the more he expends his powers, the older. He has other more traditional vampiric powers, but it is his oratory that makes him dangerous. The necromancer Balthazar is a powerful animator of the dead, but his arrogance renders him blind to many truths. His many attempts to free himself from the holy seal placed upon the Devils becomes a running gag involving various unpleasant bodily functions. Sunny the elf is perhaps the most out-of-place in the bunch, both because she's the lone elf in a realm of humans, and because she's so selfless and kind. She and Alex strike up a romance somewhere along the way. Vigga the Swedish werewolf is, in some ways, the female version of Logen Ninefingers, if the barbarian had been much less lucid and far, far more obsessed with rutting at every possible opportunity. This band of ne'erdowells is sent by Pope Benedicta and Alex's uncle to bring her to Troy and seat her on the Serpent Throne. Naturally, of course, things go sideways. They are set upon by one of Eudoxia's five sons and his warband of mutant creatures – half-man, half-animal abominations created by the former Empress as part of her many diabolical experiments. Overcoming the first son, the group continues their journey only to face down one after another, each with his own gimmick: The pirate son with his sea-creature half-men minions, for instance; a band of hunters with their own, even deadlier werewolf. Four, in total, attempt to assassinate their niece and her oddball wards. There's a fifth, but we won't spoil his roll in the story. Toward the end, the novel takes on some more traditionally Abercrombian twists and turns as hard truths are revealed and new threats emerge. There's lots of terrific action, some fun side characters, and plenty of surprises along the way. The chapters rotate between a handful of the characters in POV chapters: Alex, Brother Diaz, Jakob of Thorn, Sunny, Balthazar and even Vigga become the narrators of this tale. Only Balthazar and Baptiste are left out. The Devils is a fun read, but it struggles in three ways. First, the plot is too straightforward and repetitive for the vast bulk of the read. The journey from the Holy City to Troy and the various encounters with Eudoxia's sons along the way quickly starts to feel stale. While each of these is entertaining enough, it becomes predictable in a hurry. Our heroes face dire odds time and again, but invariably their various superpowers (resurrection, invisibility, summoning the dead, etc.) excise them from each pickle, a little worse for wear but mostly intact. There's no urgency, no real stakes. When you start to realize this, the tension evaporates. It starts to feel a bit like a game of Dungeons & Dragons, with repetitive player encounters designed to bang up the party but not kill anyone off too soon – though it rallies considerably in its final act, even if it never quite reaches the glorious level of politicking and betrayal we find in The First Law. Then there is the humor. I have always loved Abercrombie's ability to infuse his fiction with comic relief. It's often subtle, a dry gallows humor that crops up just enough to keep things prickly without falling too far into camp. The Devils barrels headlong into campy, often overbearing jokiness, with too many catchphrases and one-liners repeated too often that never quite land the way Logen's do in The First Law, or Glokta's for that matter. I found myself preferring Baron Rikard to the other Devils, simply because we didn't spend as much time in his head. It feels wildly more juvenile than Abercrombie's other books, almost as if it's being written with an entirely different audience in mind rather than serious readers of genre fiction. Ironically, the constant attempts at humor here make it much less funny than his previous books. I hate to call anything cringe-inducing, but alas, much of The Devils is just that. Which is a shame, because much of it is also quite well-written and engaging. These two issues bring us to our third. While I genuinely like the characters, and while each certainly has his or her distinct flare, they're universally underdeveloped. Sure, Balthazar is arrogant and full of himself and Jakob has a dark past and Vigga is horny and can't control her wolf persona, but I never feel as connected to any of these people as I was to Logen Ninefingers or the Dogman or Sand dan Glokta or Jezal dan Luthar or countless other characters from The First Law books. The Devils never slows down enough to really give us the opportunity to connect, and the humor starts to make a lot of the characters feel a bit one-note or boxed-in. They are caricatures, almost, or the bare bones of characters who never really blossom into anything beyond their stat blocks and super powers. Many felt weirdly derivative of characters from Abercrombie's earlier works. None of this is to say that The Devils is a bad fantasy novel. It's a fun page-turner at times and Abercrombie gets as much right as he gets wrong. But The First Law's nine-book arc is a tough act to follow. And while this plays to some of his authorial strengths, it just as often leaves us thinking about how much better Abercrombie has been in the past. The prose veers between delightful and sloppy, the dialogue between sharp and repetitive, and Abercrombie continues to give us some of the most imaginative battles and descriptive language in the genre . . . before swerving into pithy observations and weird asides that make the writing feel oddly puerile. The entire thing is at once undercooked and trying too hard: at quippy humor, at crass edginess, at shock value. It's all far more tiresome than a swashbuckling adventure story like this ought to be. Beyond all of this, something is missing here. I think it's a reason to really care about these characters and their fates in the first place, or the broader fate of the world they inhabit. Hopefully the next books in the series can convince me otherwise.
