Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where I’m delighted to welcome fantasy author Peter McLean to the site. Author of the incredible War for the Rose Throne series (one of my absolute favourites of recent years), not to mention the brilliant Burned Man trilogy and a bunch of excellent Warhammer 40k short stories, Peter is here today to talk a bit about the current state of play for fantasy authors and the changes that 2022 might bring when it comes to fantasy fiction of the darker variety. This is a fascinating examination of what it’s like to be a fantasy author right now, along with some intriguing recommendations for fantasy books and series (and I should point out that Peter’s recommendations have never let me down)!
Without further ado, over to Peter…
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I don’t think anyone would disagree that the last couple of years have been difficult, to say the least. I don’t need to go into why, and the why of it is probably different for different people anyway, but here we all are somehow staring down the barrel of 2022. The world has changed, and there’s no getting away from that fact. And publishing has changed with it. For one thing, there is no paper.
That’s not entirely true, to be fair. There is not enough paper, of the sort that is used to print books anyway. I’m seeing release after release being pushed back months in next year’s publishing schedules. Not because authors are late or editors are behind, but simply because there’s nothing to print them on. Obviously the big books, the celebrity memoirs and guaranteed bestsellers get precedence. That’s just business. But where does it leave the rest of us?
Well, still plugging away. Still writing, but is what we’re writing beginning to change? I think it is. I get the sense, from what I’ve seen and heard at events and on Social Media, that people are beginning to suffer from bleakness fatigue. The real world is bad enough that people are starting to turn to their fiction to cheer them up rather than to depress them even more, and I think that’s going to lead to a pendulum swing away from the “grimdark” that’s been so prevalent over the last ten plus years.
I hate that term, by the way. For one thing absolutely no one can agree what it means, and for another we’ve got to the point where it’s applied to everything that isn’t kittens and sparkle ponies. It’s daft. Warhammer 40k is grimdark, and even that’s satirical with it (or should be anyway, but that’s a whole other column). Anna Smith Spark’s superb Empires of Dust is grimdark, as is R. Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse and pretty much everything by Michael R. Fletcher. That’s about it, that I can think of.
Joe Abercrombie is flat out dark comedy most of the time. Ed McDonald and I both write what I’d think of as dark heroic fantasy, not grimdark. Ditto Anna Stephens and RJ Barker and a lot of other authors who get saddled with that mantle. Maybe it was a marketing thing at one point, but I don’t think it is anymore. In fact I think we’ve reached the point where it actively puts people off. Ed McDonald has a new series starting next year, with Daughter of Redwinter which I’ve had the privilege of reading an early proof of. It’s excellent. It’s also hopeful, with a positive ending. I think the days of the “everything is awful and all the characters you like are going to die” fantasy novel are coming to an end, for now at least.
Established properties like Warhammer aren’t going anywhere, obviously, but even they are starting to put out some comic relief books. Orks are funny, right? Other than that, I think dark epic fantasy is going to be the next big thing. Dark is still cool; I don’t think most people want sparkle ponies anyway, but I also think the claustrophobic despair of true grimdark has probably had its day. Look at something like RJ Barker’s Tide Child Trilogy, starting with The Bone Ships. Yes it’s quite dark, and that world isn’t somewhere you’d want to live, but it’s grand and sweeping and epic and in the end, there is hope. I think that’s what people want to hear at the moment, that in the end there is hope.
Authors want to hear that too. We want to know our series will be completed, and these days that’s by no means a given. The time was that your agent pitched the first in a series, and if the publisher wanted it they’d sign the whole trilogy or quartet or whatever it may be in a multi-book deal. That doesn’t happen so often these days, especially not for debut authors. It’s becoming far more common to hear “we’ll take the first two and see how it goes”, and of course if the first two don’t meet sales expectations then they don’t buy the rest and the series doesn’t get finished. Once potential readers know the series has been dropped they understandably don’t buy the first one, sales tank and the prophecy fulfils itself. It’s depressing. It’s business and I get it, but that doesn’t make it any less depressing. And this too is driving a change in the market.
You’re seeing a lot more duologies these days, and think this is exactly why. If an author is only offered a two book deal, they’re probably only going to write a two book series. It just makes sense. The stand-alone is making a comeback too, and I think that’s a good thing. Not every story wants or needs to be a trilogy, for all that the trilogy has been a mainstay of the fantasy genre for decades. Things like Song of the Sycamore by Ed Cox and Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky are superb in their own right, and tell the story they want to tell perfectly in one volume. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
For me, I’m finishing up War for the Rose Throne with Priest of Crowns next year, then we’ll see. I’m not sure what I’m writing next, although I have a few ideas on the go. It won’t be full-on grimdark though, and it might even be a stand alone.
We all want the world to get less terrifying, and the genre is reflecting that. Because that’s what genre does. However fantastical it may be, one way or another genre fiction reflects reality at the time it is written. That’s its job, and these are the times we live in.
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Peter McLean was born in London and went to school in the shadow of Norwich Cathedral, where he spent most of his time making up stories. He grew up alternating dingy nightclubs with studying martial arts and practical magic before settling to a career in corporate IT. The noir urban fantasy Burned Man series was followed by the highly acclaimed grimdark fantasy quartet War for the Rose Throne, starting with Priest of Bones, Priest of Lies and Priest of Gallows. The final book about Tomas Piety will be Priest of Crowns.
You can find Peter on Twitter, on Facebook and at his website.
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Huge thanks to Peter for taking the time to contribute such a brilliant article! I don’t know about you, but I simply can’t wait to read Priest of Crowns next year, and I’ve got plenty more great-sounding books to check out off the back of Peter’s recommendations here.
Click here to read all of my interviews with Peter about his War for the Rose Throne series.
Click here to read all of my reviews of Peter’s stories.
Priest of Crowns is available to pre-order now, ahead of its release in August 2022. Check out the links below if you’d like to pre-order a copy*!
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Happy to see Peter’s post here. I’ve read most of his books and never disappointed.
Personally, I have to say I’m glad the business/market is moving away from the trilogies. I believe the majority of the modern fantasy/sci-fi novels suffer from lack of editing and drag. Most of the times there’s absolutely no reason to drag the novel to 160K words. Half the book is filler, it doesn’t add anything to the story, doesn’t expand on the world/lore. Most of these modern trilogies would have been perfect duology, and in some cases even standalone novels. It feels like the publisher/writer is trying to milk it as much as they can.