At the same time, those pesky bellicose Northmen are invading, armed with names that sound like someone won a late-night drinking contest for grimdark monikers – Stour Nightfall, Black Calder, Scale Ironhand. The growth of industry has threatened small farmers, generated shifts in population, including immigration and urbanization, provided new opportunities for the concentration of wealth, and given rise to both a Luddite-like anti-machine movement and more broadly based labor unrest. Set a few decades after the action of the earlier novels and featuring the offspring of some characters from those novels, A Little Hatred begins with the fragile, vaguely Europe-like Union under siege from without and within. As is usual with Abercrombie, what moves that plot along are not magical interventions and heroic quests but rather greed, pride, malevolence, cowardice, rebellion, political calculations and miscalculations, a series of bumbling or impulsive decisions, and – maybe a bit surprising in this muddy, smoky, violent world – a bit of star-crossed romance. In fact Rikke, the daughter of the famous warrior Dogman from the earlier novels, is gifted with the Long Eye, a kind of second sight that she can’t willfully control, and it’s about the only magical power that functions in a meaningful way in Abercrombie’s rather tangled plot. It is a bank.” That exchange not only encapsulates the central historical tension of the novel – the rise of industry and commerce in a world whose social structures are still largely feudal – but also the distance between Abercrombie’s brand of minimalist fantasy and the promiscuous deployment of magic in the commercialized, Harry Pottery Barn tradition he alludes to. Toward the end of Joe Abercombie’s A Little Hatred, the beginning of a new trilogy set in the world of his First Law novels and stories, one of the main characters, Rikke, comes across an imposing, temple-like building and asks “What is this?… A school for wizards?” The mage accompanying her explains, “Not quite….
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