Joe Abercrombie Joins Brandon Sanderson to Talk Leaving ‘First Law’ For ‘The Devils’: ‘I Wanted to Recharge the Batteries’

For nearly 20 years, Joe Abercrombie returned again and again to the fantasy world of The First Law, expanding it through trilogies, standalone novels and short fiction. When it came time to begin his next major fantasy series, however, he decided not to revisit that familiar landscape, creating an entirely new one instead.

So after nine novels in that universe, why walk away? For Abercrombie, the answer wasn’t that he’d run out of stories, but instead that he wanted to surprise himself again. “I suppose I wanted to do something somewhat different really,” Abercrombie explained during an onstage conversation with Brandon Sanderson in Salt Lake City. “You know, I’d written nine First Law books. I mean, they’re excellent books. I really loved writing those books. But I felt like I wanted to recharge the batteries, try something slightly different. Slightly different in format. Something a bit more focused. Something that was not quite such a big and complicated tapestry.”

That fresh start became 2025’s The Devils, the opening novel in a planned trilogy set not in The First Law universe, but in an alternate medieval Europe populated by monsters, magic and political intrigue. Asked how he’d describe the novel to longtime readers, Abercrombie suggested they shouldn’t expect something completely unfamiliar.

“I’d say that the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree,” he concurred with Winter Is Coming. “Though it’s set in an alternate Europe rather than an entirely invented world, it’s still quite cynical, quite a dark fantasy with some vivid characters, a lot of crunching action and a thick vein of gallows humor. But it’s also more self-contained, more focused, perhaps a bit faster-paced, a bit less cynical and a bit more comedic in tone.” 

Ironically, the idea itself had been sitting on a shelf for years. “It’s often tough to pin down where an idea first appeared,” the author noted. “Maybe 15 years ago I was approached about writing a young adult series, and one idea I had was about a set of monsters employed by the pope. In the end it felt like more of an adult concept, really, and I settled on the idea that became the Shattered Sea books instead. But the idea of the Pope’s monsters hung around, and when I finished The Age of Madness and was thinking about what to do next, it was the thing that floated to the surface of the fetid pool that is my mind.”

Alternate history

The resulting novel imagines an alternate Europe where history has taken some unexpected turns. “The idea for this book,” added Abercrombie, “was for the setting to feel like a weird fever dream, close enough to medieval Europe to seem vaguely familiar, and for references and jokes to land, but blurred and unspecific enough that the characters would stand out more strongly. So I reversed a few key historical moments—Carthage beat Rome in the Punic wars, Troy beat Greece in the Trojan wars, there was a female messiah and hence a female priesthood, Atlantis never sank and, oh, the world is threatened with invasion by elves whose holy mission is to eat all mankind. It’s Europe, but it’s also much higher fantasy than my secondary world stuff. Monsters and magic under every rock.” 

Insofar as he’s concerned, elaborate world building has always taken a back seat to something else. “Characters are vital for me,” he emphasizes.  They’re really the heart and soul of what I do. I generally find, as a reader, the most tedious plot can be fascinating if I’m interested in the characters. Whereas if the characters are not interesting, then no amount of wham, bam action and plotting is going to necessarily salvage the book for me. It’s about people, and it’s about feelings and about the reader’s relationship with the people in the book. So designing the cast is the first big task of a book generally. I have the basic notion of the Pope keeps a set of monsters in the basement. That’s basically the idea. So then the question became who are the monsters, and what is the particular adventure they’re about?” 

That philosophy shaped every member of The Devils’ unlikely cast of characters. “You’ve got to have a werewolf and a vampire, obviously,” he laughs. “A kind of frenemy pairing. Because you often get sexy female vampires, I thought I’d go for a sexy male vampire. I mean, it’s not the most original idea ever, I will concede. But then female werewolves seem a little bit more unusual, anyway. So that seemed like a kind of interesting pairing to start with. Obviously an invisible elf, because every group needs one of those.” 

He expanded on that thinking by explaining that he has always been drawn to familiar archetypes rather than trying to reinvent fantasy from scratch. “I used to watch a lot of Westerns. The joy of Westerns is not seeing something different each time; it’s seeing the iteration of the same stuff each time. Seeing the expectation, and how your expectation might be changed one time or another. When you don’t get quite what you expect, how does that feel? A film like [Clint Eastwood’s] Unforgiven works so well, not because it’s radically original, but because it’s hardly original at all, and it’s the familiar that makes it exciting. No one ever watches a Western and says, ‘Oh, a standoff on a windswept street. Rubbish.’ You’re waiting for that moment. That’s what makes it good. Likewise, a fantasy—you know wizards, and boys with special destinies, and magic swords and all that stuff—this is the good stuff. This is the stuff you want to work with.” 

Which likely explains just why Abercrombie enjoyed writing The Devils as much as he did. Rather than following scattered storylines across an enormous world, he found himself returning to one of his favorite storytelling traditions: throwing an unlikely group of strangers together and seeing how things unfold.

“One thing I’ve always enjoyed, and has come reasonably naturally to me as a writer, is the interplay between a small group, often on the road,” he told Winter Is Coming. “So I think the most fun was just the fireside conversations between this mismatched group of odd and intense characters, and the strange and surprising directions their relationships take.” 

Book two of the trilogy, The Heretics, will be published in May of 2027. Of its plot, Abercrombie has offered, “The cast changes some with each book, so there’s a new priest taking charge; a priest of a much more dangerous and driven variety, and a very different plot involving an inquisition, a mysterious inheritance, a set of ancient tombs and some witches.”