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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Phoning in here because this series turned Erikson into one of my fantasy authors. I notice as I skim the comments that most people didn't like the series. That's fine and perfectly valid. Erikson is not everyone's cup of tea.
Why I liked this series:
Erikson is heavily inspired by Glen Cook, one of my other favorite fantasy authors, who has a similar approach of throwing you in the middle of everything and explaining things slowly as you go along. There's magic in the series called Warrens. No one explicitly defines it until maybe the 9th book when a king asks a wizard to explain what the hell warrens are. Instead, when you get the POV of a magic user you are learning how they personally feel about their magic, but everyone seems to have their own twist on the Warrens. If you enjoy a fantasy world that gives you all the information up front, this is not one of them. Erikson likes to play with history and unreliable narrators. So you need to take all info presented to you with a grain of salt unless its a god's POV to someone who was there (and even then, the gods are fickle).
Erikson takes a lot of inspiration from classic fantasy. Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Elric. Conan. If you are familiar with these stories, you might pick up on when he's paying homage to them, and subverting their ideas.
Erikson is an archeologist and spent a ton of time developing and muddying the histories of his world. It gives the cultures a verisimilitude that I enjoyed. The cities feel lived in.
I enjoy Erikson's prose. He is a short story writer who wrote a 10 book series with short story detail. There are beautiful lines and sequences in this series.
Every fantasy author writing a series faces a dilemma of how to pace and package their novels. Tolkien wrote the full Lord of the Rings and then ripped out the superfluous chunks to put in the appendices. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time has to develop a full cast of characters, but the characters get developed unevenly so while some characters are having their moments other already developed characters are just faffing around waiting for the next book. Erikson's solution is to write 10 loosely connected books that share themes and usually characters between them. You'll meet characters, wonder if they're the main characters, then not see them for a few books. The Malazan Book of the Fallen has many protagonists. Almost every book works as a stand alone novel with its pacing and development. The one exception is the ninth book, Dust of Dreams, because its really just the first part of the last book, The Crippled God, but the final book was too long and got cut in half. Dust of Dreams felt weird to me because it didn't have a nice ribbon tying off the end of the conflict like the prior books did. Since each book is kind of stand alone, Erikson can experiment with the pacing and presentation so each book feels like its own animal with unique themes that still relate to the overall story. The downside to this is that its very often to to read one book, get interested in that continent, and then the next book switches to another continent with its own cast.
Malazan has some of my favorite fantasy characters. Over the course of 10 books, you see a lot of plot lines and characters grow and mature. For example, the fourth book, House of Chains, is controversial because it starts with the POV of a young cocky shit who is cruel and hurts others (he's a deconstruction of Conan the Barbarian). I started the book hating him, by the end of the series he was my favorite character.
There are some metal ideas floating around these novels.
No one writes a climax like Erikson. The plot lines converge, characters come together, and the results are decisive. The series climax in the final book is worth the build up.
Caveats: Besides the stuff I mentioned in what I liked that might have turned you off.