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What it argues
A Little Hatred is the first book in Abercrombie's The Age of Madness trilogy, set in the same world as his First Law trilogy but a generation later. The Circle of the World is experiencing something like an industrial revolution: factories are replacing craftsmen, machines are displacing workers, and the tensions between an entrenched aristocracy and an emerging working class are hardening into violence. The novel follows a large ensemble — soldiers, nobles, workers, scheming politicians, and the next generation of the First Law's key families — as the old world order begins to crack.
What Abercrombie is doing here is bringing grimdark fantasy into contact with recognizable historical dynamics. The Breakers are proto-revolutionary labor agitators. The Great Change is what happens when systems of power refuse to accommodate the people they're grinding up. The Union is Britain at the start of the 19th century: prosperous on paper, deeply unjust underneath. The familiar fantasy trappings — magic, swords, war — exist in a world where the defining question is who controls the new power of machines and capital, not who sits on the throne.
What it gets right
- 1.
Abercrombie maps the Industrial Revolution onto secondary-world fantasy with genuine historical engagement — the class conflict, the displacement of workers, and the revolutionary response feel researched rather than borrowed.
- 2.
Savine dan Glokta is one of the more interesting figures Abercrombie has written: a woman who plays the aristocratic game better than anyone while being fully aware of its costs.
- 3.
The novel's treatment of violence is consistent with the First Law but more politically located — the brutality here has a structural cause, not just a human one.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Joe Abercrombie is a British fantasy author and former television editor who is one of the defining voices in grimdark fantasy. His First Law trilogy — The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings — introduced his morally corrosive secondary world. The Age of Madness trilogy, beginning with A Little Hatred (2019), continues in A Terrible Fate (2020) and The Wisdom of Crowds (2021). He has also written standalone novels including Best Served Cold and Red Country. He lives in Bath, England, with his family.
