Richard K. Morgan has made quite a name for himself as a hard-edged, contemporary science fiction novelist, winner of a good number of the awards available after just a handful of publications. Here he tries his hand at writing a fantasy with a grim, visceral presentation and a couple of unusual, contemporary tropes.

To give due, The Steel Remains is fairly strong on narrative drive. However, it is simply horrid when it comes to dialogue. Clearly Morgan wants us to like his main characters - though he tries to make them hard to like by investing them with traits and peccadillos that I imagine he thinks will challenge some genre readers - but having them talk like hired goons from a Guy Ritchie movie utterly ruined it for me. The vulgarity of the language debased all his characters to the level of boors whenever they opened their mouths, regardless of the courageousness and nobility of their actions. Do you really want to see a fantasy world peopled by nothing but Jason Statham's and Danny Dyer's? I don't.

Worse still is Morgan's treatment of his lead character, disenchanted hero of wars past Ringil Eskiath. He is overtly gay, which I think Morgan seems to be clapping himself on the back for as a daring affront to the more conservative fantasy readers. Yet he constantly allows his other characters to refer to Ringil in the most perjorative terms imaginable whilst enjoying a good laugh at his expense; so much so that it was impossible not to consider that Morgan himself considers homosexuality as unnatural and that he only wanted to have a gay hero so he could knock some noses out of joint and stir up some blog-based controversy.

All in all the style was very similar to Iain M. Banks, with the tales of a few characters interweaving with some occasional flashbacks building a history between them. The writing was similar too, full of ventral description and foul language. Banks is an excellent writer though, he can pile it on but he can show restrain too, he creates full, rounded characters and invests them with a convincing psychological depth.
If this book is anything to go by Morgan is little more than a noisy, bovver-booted dilettante.