Author: thomasmdbrooke

Half a King by Joe Abercrombie, a different kind of hero

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In most fantasy novels we have become quite accustomed to heroes with impressive physiques, great with a blade or bow, probably good looking too.  There is nothing wrong with that, one of the great things about fantasy writing is that we can escape to other worlds, where an early grave is often only avoided by our heroes’ physical prowess.  However, there are other ways to be remarkable, and sometimes it’s refreshing to find someone who survives through their wit rather than their brawn. That’s the case with Joe Abercrombie’s new ‘Shattered Sea’ series, which starts with the novel ‘Half a King’.  The lead character, a prince of a ruling family, has been born with one withered arm and a malformed hand.  As he lives in a warrior society, where a man’s worth is judged by how adept they are with their weapons, he suffers the scorn of his peers and his stern father.  But our character has assets that the others don’t, a sharp mind and resourceful spirit. I won’t go into the plot in …

Borderlands and frontiers part 2: Historical

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Last week I looked at the borderlands in the fantasy genre, the contested boundaries that have been immortalised by writers.  This week I want to look at the borderlands in our own world, and look back into history to find the lands along borders that can be a great place to set a historical novel. picture: thewardrobedoor.com Greece – Asia Minor. 1200 BC to AD 334 Some of the most famous settings for the great scenes of classical world took place on Greece’s border with her neighbour.  Agamemnon’s siege of Troy, when the King of Kings led all the nations of Greece against the great city to its ultimate downfall.  Then a few hundred years later, you have the Persians being held up at the pass of Thermopylae by Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans, before Xerses can lay ruin to the Greek mainland.  Finally you have Alexander the Great going back the other way and landing in Asia Minor and defeating the Persian Satraps at the battle of Granicus.  Literally thousands of books have been …

A final walk along the Wall and then home…

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Just a short post today, as I’ll be driving back from Northumberland today as it’s the end of my holiday.  It’s been a fantastic trip, staying in my old cottage, surrounded by history and the beautiful countryside of the area.  I even made it back to Hadrian’s Wall on Friday, after my first trip needed to be aborted due a heavy downpour of rain.  This time the weather was much kinder I had a fantastic walk between Steel Rigg and Housesteads. This section of the Wall shows the remains of a few of the mile-castles that were evenly spaced along the Wall, and each housed around thirty men.  I know it doesn’t appear that that much is left of the mile-castle in the picture, but when the Wall was in active use it would have stood at fifteen feet high, with battlements and a walkway all along the Wall, with three turrets or watchtowers interspersed between each mile-castle.  As you can see from the rocky and craggy countryside, that was no small building achievement along …

Not an ordinary fantasy trilogy – Robin Hobb, The Soldier Son Series

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I mentioned this series when I wrote my post on Wednesday, and since then I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot.  The Soldier son trilogy isn’t for everyone, and I know some people who were never keen on it as it was a big departure from Robin Hobb’s other books set in the Three-Kingdoms, or those on the Live Ships and Dragons of Bingtown.  The Soldier Son novels, despite being works of fantasy, are set in a relatively modern world with rifles and guns, and Hobb develops an unorthodox main character from that which you’d normally expect from a fantasy series.  However, these novels strengths are that they cover a lot of issues that we would recognise from our own world, and really make you think about our own perceptions to those same issues. I don’t want to give too much away, but the conflicting issues in these novels are between the progress and development of the modern world on the one-side, and the traditions and magical beliefs of a land that is coming …

Great Borderlands and frontiers in novels – Part 1 : Fantasy

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For the past week and a half I’ve been staying in a small cottage up in the wild hills of Northumberland, one of England’s two counties that lie on the border with Scotland.  Evidence of previous animosity between the two countries are all around, not just with Hadrian’s Wall that runs through the borderlands, but in the number of castles and fortified buildings that lie festooned over the countryside.  My own cottage that I am staying in still has arrow slits in the outbuildings, a relic from its past when the inhabitants needed to defend themselves from the periodic raiding parties from the Scottish North. This has made me think about borderlands in literature, and what a great location they are to set any novel.  Obviously history is full of hostile frontiers, and next week I will go through a few of those and show some examples.  But equally this works well for fantasy novels, and here are just a few great examples of fantasy novelists that have used this topic so well. Mordor, Middle …

A great review for Roman Mask in the Daily Mail

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I’m writing this from a small cottage, nestled in the Cheviot Hills in Northumberland, and even though it is late July, the weather has been disappointing and chilly, so I have a fire blazing in the fireplace.  It is a beautiful part of the world and I was hoping on showing you some great pictures of Hadrian’s Wall that runs through this county, unfortunately when I visited the Wall yesterday it was absolutely pouring with rain and I had to halt the exhibition – even the dog wasn’t too keen on going out in it as it was so heavy.  Still, never mind, I’m up here for another week, so there should be ample opportunity to re-visit the Wall. The week hasn’t been a total loss anyway, because I received my first review in a national newspaper (The Daily Mail) for my novel Roman Mask. Unfortunately, I had no idea the review was coming out in the newspaper and because I was in the wild hills of Northumberland, by the time I heard about in the late …

The City – Stella Gemmell

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It had taken me a while to purchase this novel, and get around to reading it.  David Gemmell, Stella’s late departed husband was one of my favourite authors, so I’m not sure why it had taken me so long, surely I should have been eager to buy it as soon as it came out…but I didn’t. I think the reason why was in case I was disappointed, and then the final link to her husband’s great writing would be gone.  But I shouldn’t have been so reticent, Stella Gemmell has proved with her first solo novel, The City, that she is a writer in her own right now, and I won’t hesitate to purchase more novels from her in the future. Stella Gemmell has previously worked with her husband on many different projects, and finished David Gemmell’s last trilogy on Troy posthumously, so I knew I wasn’t dealing with a novice when I picked up her novel.  However, with her previous work I was never quite sure where her influence started and his ended, but …

Ancient Roman sites to inspire you…

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Whilst writing my novel Roman Mask, I was inspired by many of the great ancient sites that can be found all around Europe and the Mediterranean basin.  This is by no means a complete list of all the wonderful sites that are in existence, but here are a few that inspired me… Rome, Italy.  How could I start anywhere else?  The ancient city that was at the heart of her Empire has to be on everyone’s list of places to visit if they are interested in Ancient Rome.  So much still remains and is easily accessible in this fantastic city.  The Colosseum was incredible, but as it was built later than my novel was set I couldn’t use it for research, but it still gives an amazing perspective on the sheer power and dominance that Rome held over the world at the time.  The Augustan palace on the top of the Palatine Hill nearby was very useful for me, and stretches all the way to the ancient forum at the centre of Ancient Rome.  But …

C J Sansom, Sovereign

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I don’t often read crime novels, I’m not sure why, my grandmother used to love them, but I could never generate the necessary enthusiasm for finding out whodunit.  Maybe my mind just doesn’t work that way, or I have too much sympathy for the bad guys, either way, I’d have made a terrible detective. So it’s an unusual choice of novel this week that I write about – C J Sansom’s Sovereign that features her sleuth Matthew Shardlake.  I was drawn to it because of the period of history, Tudor England in all its pomp and splendour; a court full of intrigue and danger, the land in a flux of great change and upheaval, yet beginning to erect the pillars of society that we now identify with as forever English. As this is a crime novel I don’t want to give away the plot by discussing the characters too much, because as with any crime novel, they are key to the storyline.  I’ll just say that Shardlake is an interesting and unusual investigator, hunchbacked and often …

Five types of Battle!

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There are many different ways to write a fantasy or a historical novel, but if you’re looking for a climatic finish, a great battle at the end is hard to beat, and it fits in nicely to both genres.  Here are five types… The Siege.  I love castles, great fortresses of stone with arrow slits and murder holes, battlements festooned with banners.  A great setting for a defiant group of defenders to hold out against overwhelming odds – and for an added bonus you can arm your attackers with a whole arsenal of siege engines: Huge trebuchets, deadly bolt throwers, fearsome battering rams, crafty siege towers. The Set-piece. Rows of soldiers, resplendent in their burnished armour, lined up rank upon rank, the pride of a nations strength standing proudly in the sun awaiting the enemy to approach.  Only for them all to lie dead by the end of that same day – the tragic loss that comes from man’s ambition.  To successfully describe a set-piece well will require the author to have a grasp of …