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Week-end update

Posted by Phil on Sunday, February 20, 2011

I finished reading The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie and I will try to post my review this week. Pretty amazing book, Abercrombie is still at the top of his craft! So, while still waiting for The Crippled God, I picked up Peter Orullian's The Unremembered. I'm not so far into it but it already shows some promise. I will have to stop working if I want to go through those two books and Daniel Abraham's The Dragon's Path and Rothfuss' The Wise Man's Fear...

On the audiobook front, I started listening to The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin. I'm half way through it now and I'm a little disappointed. Keeping my fingers crossed.

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Cover art

Au-delà des ombres (Beyond the Shadows, Night Angel trilogy book 3) by Brent Weeks

The cover art was posted by Brent this week and it's features the work of Frederic Perrin. Nice!


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Author update

The Wise Man's Fear March 1st release date is coming up fast and Tor.com posted this week an excerpt form the novel featuring mostly Elodin (complete excerpt here) :

Interesting Fact

ELODIN STRODE INTO THE lecture hall almost an hour late. His clothes were covered in grass stains, and there were dried leaves tangled in his hair. He was grinning.

Today there were only six of us waiting for him. Jarret hadn’t shown up for the last two classes. Given the scathing comments he’d made before disappearing, I doubted he’d be coming back.

“Now!” Elodin shouted without preamble. “Tell me things!”

This was his newest way to waste our time. At the beginning of every lecture he demanded an interesting fact he had never heard before. Of course, Elodin himself was the sole arbiter of what was interesting, and if the first fact you provided didn’t measure up, or if he already knew it, he would demand another, and another, until you finally came up with something that amused him.

He pointed at Brean. “Go!”

“Spiders can breathe underwater,” she said promptly.

Elodin nodded. “Good.” He looked at Fenton.


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Talk of the town

If you follow only sightly the fantasy literature scene, you're probably already aware that Big Hollywood's Leo Grin created quite the debate when he posted that aside from Tolkien and Robert Howard, pretty much all of contemporary fantasy authors are a sad expression of nihilism (this is a hugely condensed summary, the controversial post is here).

Then the reactions stacked up. If you have some time, you should take a peak at the refreshing responses from the following people that took time to analyze the text and write quite an essay. Since Grin's post was quite provocative toward the new main stream fantasy, his arguments could not compete for long.

Adam's at the Wertzone (mentioned in the article)
R. Scott Bakker (inventing a new fantasy readers "tribe")
Joe Abercrombie (the example quoted in Grin's text)
Floor to ceiling books (adding the women to the argument)

All in all, I hope that Leo Grin didn't expect to go far with his tirade, expressing that the popular fantasy authors of our days tend too much toward pessimism, skepticism and the importance of death, destruction and nothingness... WTF?

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On a lighter note, Tor.com posted "The Fantasy World Map" by artist Dan Meth. This map renders many fantasy kingdoms and although it's just for fun, if you look at the comments concerning the map, people are mostly asking why their favorite world is missing :)

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