Ringil is a character of color in a world urbane enough that it rarely matters. There's no such thing as a kingdom united: Every place holds potential for civil war, veterans from the last war still wander the streets, forgotten, and language barriers crop up regularly. There are signs everywhere that Morgan is trying to move beyond traditional epic fantasy. And despite the time Morgan dedicates to his protagonists, they're so knee-deep in plot that they occasionally take on a badass-soldier sameness - though he makes clear that those are the only types who live for very long somebody draws serious blood every few chapters. Steppe clanmaster Egar struggles to keep his cultural traditions in the face of colonization that, in some ways, is better than what it replaced. Archeth is an adviser to the sadistic Emperor, and an alien - abandoned by the rest of her race when they traveled to some other star - who walks a knife's edge to avoid being killed for either reason. Faded military hero and current outcast Ringil is on a slow slide to the bottom from the very beginning, where a hardboiled missing-persons case leads him to the dwenda, a race of half-unreal magicians determined to remake the world in their image. In some ways, the structure of the books allows for nothing else. However, it straddles no lines about some of its tropes: the Land Fit for Heroes is as grim and as dark as it gets.

He's the author of the Land Fit for Heroes series (2008's The Steel Remains, 2011's The Cold Commands, and last year's The Dark Defiles), which casually straddles the lines between quest fantasy, political thriller and science fiction. Some, like Joe Abercrombie, have embraced the term (his Twitter handle is Others see it as a dismissive term for fantasy that's dismantling tropes, a stamp unfairly applied. Martin? Kameron Hurley? Shakespeare? - and whether the nickname is a useful genre marker or just a needle.

But there are arguments over who fits the definition - George R.R. It's become shorthand for a subgenre of fantasy fiction that claims to trade on the psychology of those sword-toting heroes, and the dark realism behind all those kingdom politics. 'Well, irony really does better unelaborated, but if you insist.'Īh, grimdark. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Dark Defiles Author Richard K.

The steel remains by richard k morgan