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I’m listening to the Andy Serkis audiobook right now. I agree the first bit is a slog but really enjoying it once Feanor and events get going.
I’m listening to the Andy Serkis audiobook right now. I agree the first bit is a slog but really enjoying it once Feanor and events get going.
Are you trying the audiobooks? I don’t believe Malazan is a good series for audiobook. Too many scene changes and character swapping. The audiobooks might be better if you’re rereading though.
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.
"It was a quirk of blind optimism that held that someone broken could, in time, heal, could reassemble all the pieces and emerge whole, perhaps even stronger for the ordeal. Certainly wiser, for what else could be the reward for suffering? The notion that did not sit well, with anyone, was that one so broken might remain that way - neither dying (and so removing the egregious example of failure from all mortal eyes) nor improving. A ruined soul should not be stubborn, should not cling to what was clearly a miserable existence.
“Friends recoil. Acquaintances drift away. And the one who fell finds a solitary world, a place where no refuge could be found from loneliness when loneliness was the true reward of surviving for ever maimed, for ever weakened. Yet, who would not choose that fate, when the alternative was pity?” - Toll the Hounds
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.
Yeah I’ve got the first Revelation Space book waiting for me to open it up, there’s just so much out there to read.
If we are talking sci fi dystopias, I’d say Altered Carbon and its sequels are compelling. Skip the Netflix show. We both seem to like military sci fi, and that series has that aspect in spades.
If you haven’t read Gibson’s stuff after Neuromancer, you might like that too.
His writing is very male
Lol his writing is very phallic? I think I know what you mean.
So can any fans of those books make a good sales pitch?
It depicts a “socialist” dystopia turning into the ideal libertarian dystopia. Not only does it fail the philosiphical sniff test, its just a bad novel with poor pacing. The climax is a character giving a long ~60 page(??? Read it a long time ago) speech that deflates whatever momentum the story had.
Kayel means Neuromancer, not Necromancer. Don’t want you to fall down the wrong rabbit hole.
Also I stand behind all of their points. Neuromancer is cool because its the grand daddy of cyberpunk and predicts stuff like the modern internet and what’s starting to seem like our megacorps.
Forever War is one of my favorite sci fi novels of all time. Very influential military theme that seems like a counterpoint to Starship Troopers.
Everything by Dan Abnett is great. He’s the best writer employed by Games Workshop. If you don’t know much about 40k, his Eisenhorn series is fun. A decent stand alone novel is Double Eagle which is a dark sci fi story modeled after WW2 dogfights. Even the “good guys” in 40k are aggressively dystopian.
Reynolds and Hamilton are on my to read list but haven’t gotten there. Do you guys recommend anywhere to start with them?
I always loved Tolkien growing up and still have my physical copy of this. Found it in a used book store and it feels magical. The art work is beautiful and imaginative.
Back when I was in middle school, my town flooded and my family lost a lot of their possessions. This is one of the books that survived, so I’ll always remember going over it to distract me from everything else going on.