Guest Blogger Joe Abercrombie, Author of Best Served Cold, on Machiavelli's The Prince

Joe Abercrombie, a 2008 finalist for the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer, has seen his popular the First Law trilogy published in 13 countries. His most recent novel, Best Served Cold, is a standalone book set in the same world. He and his family live in North London. 

         

 

I talked a little last time about my inspiration for plot coming from the thriller Point Blank. But I write edgy yet humorous fantasy, so over-saturated, blinding bright, slick 70s LA wouldn’t quite work for me in the setting department. I needed somewhere more . . . old to serve as inspiration. Somewhere with swords.

 

My interest in renaissance Italy goes all the way back to playing strategy games on my PC such as Europa Universalis and Medieval Total War. It was always such a patchwork of different coloured little bits and pieces, clustered on such rich ground and surrounded by so many greedy and powerful neighbours. Ah, the idea of uniting those diverse cities under a single armoured heel and forcing them all to march one way. My way.  

I’m joking, of course, Partly. But there’s undoubtedly something fascinating about the melting pot of wildly varying city states that covered the peninsula during the 14th-16th centuries.  

Feuding families, poisonous popes, constant warfare and the threat of invasion by more powerful neighbours, alliances coming and going with the tide, rampaging mercenaries, realpolitik, money and betrayal. The strange mixture of awful destruction and explosive creativity that persisted for a couple of centuries.               

One book that was particularly inspiring to me, and has come to define that period, at least from a political standpoint, is the book that I have made the veritable North Star in all my interpersonal dealings, Machiavelli’s The Prince. It’s intended as a manual for the successful ruler, and it’s so very dark, so very realistic, so very unheroic:  

“since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared”   

No, not originally from Robert de Niro’s Bronx Tale, straight from Machiavelli.   

“those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word.”   

The antithesis of the classic ideas of honourable leadership that seemed to permeate so much of epic fantasy in its 80s heyday.   

“men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”   

There’s more, so much more. It’s the sort of stuff the villains would usually say to justify themselves.  And those are my kind of characters. Borgias and Sforzas, Medicis and Viscontis. There’s also, of course, a grand tradition of Italianate revenge tragedies, like, well, The Revenger’s Tragedy (no, really?) and The Duchess of Malfi. So, all in all, renaissance Italy seemed the ideal inspiration for the setting of a fantasy revenge tale...