Flights of Fantasy discussion

The Malazan Book of the Fallen is an epic fantasy series by canadian archaelogist and writer Steven Erikson, which was heavily inspired by Glen Cook's The Black Company. The saga itself contains 10 volumes with a word count of 3,325,000 and was finished in 2011. However, it seems there are still a few novellas set in the World of Malazan and a sister series called Novels of the Malazan Empire which is written by Ian Cameron Esslemont, the co-creator of the fantasy world. This series appears to be still running.

Sometimes the Malazan books are compared to A Song of Ice and Fire. While both epics deal with lots of ambiguous characters, some critics consider Malazan to be the more violent saga, and while aSoIaF has a rather low level of magic and typical fantasy elements, Malazan has them en masse. In my opinion, Erikson's/Esslemont's world is much more exotic and colorful, too.

I've only read the first two books in the series, Gardens of the Moonand Deadhouse Gates. I was quite impressed by Gardens of the Moon, since its action and pace reminded me more of cyberpunk literature than ordinary fantasy, but at the same time I found it rather difficult to figure out what exactly was going on in the book. Deadhouse Gates was much more accessible.

It is said that the order in which the books are read is almost unimportant. For example, Deadhouse Gates and the third volume, Memories of Ice, take place at the same time, but with different characters on different continents.

BTW: There's an epic black metal band (in the vein of Summoning), called Caladan Brood, which deals with Malazan exclusively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWiRM...

Erickson is the Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention this November, so he's finally moved to the top of my TBR pile. I'm finding Gardens of the Moon a little hard to get into. Usually I love sprawly epic fantasy with large casts -- that's one of the things I write -- but the viewpoint characters spend so much time confused, wondering what secrets are being kept from them and how to think about the events around them, that it's hard for me to get my bearings in their world through their perspectives.

I'll certainly finish this volume. There's a lot I enjoy. Like you, Ekel, I like the way Erickson just dives into a fantasy world full of active gods, where large-scale magic is so pervasive that bureaucracies try to manage it, and so wild that no social institution will ever be able to control it.

I'm slightly concerned that the wealth of mystery the characters experience will go the way The X-Files went, with an infinitely deferred revelation so that, by the time the creator throws the audience a clue, the audience has been put off too long to care anymore. Hope I'm wrong about that. I would love to find another gigantic epic series I can enjoy as much as I do ASOIAF.