I will join you in the shameful confession club: (maybe a SAMEful confession?): I too, have not finished all 10. I keep losing track for a couple of years and rereading the whole series to refamiliarize myself with it. Tom’s review is actually inspiring another stab at it. I can’t wait to read Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice again; they’re both so fucking excellent.
I’ll second @malkav11 and note that while GotM gives a very good example of the sort of “Here is my entire universe, deal with it” strident refusal to ever tell-not-show anything to the reader that Erikson is infamous for, and certainly does give you a taste for his excellent capacity for creating fascinating and epic convergences of events and people, Deadhouse Gates and the Chain of Dogs storyline we’ve been discussing in the thread are perhaps the best portrait of the books’ quality in my eyes, rich with goofy boots-on-the-ground army-tactical goodness, harrowing depictions of the darkness and gravity of the world of the books, and of course magi-political shenanigans pulling the strings of it all.
For @tomchick, I really appreciate you slogging through the two books my Recommendation required, especially in a genre that’s not really to your taste, and for giving them a fair shot despite all that. Your thoughts on them often did take me by surprise, to be honest, but I also can’t necessarily say that I disagree with anything you say outright (or at least, I recognize how someone with a different viewpoint, set of expectations, and history as a reader than myself might arrive at your conclusions). If nothing else, it’ll give me a chance to better hone my recommendations for the series in the future.
This one does strike me as very odd, though, but then again, anyone who’s read more than ten of my posts on here is probably all too familiar with my love affair with ludicrously purple prose. But for someone like me, bereft of the capacity to imagine any sight, sound, or smell, I find his twisting, dense passages hold a very particular and fascinating sort of beauty that I can’t get enough of. There are so many turns of phrase and descriptors and moments of clever dialogue that hold a special place in my heart from this series! Certainly it’s something that gets better with time (see above discussions around the derivation of GotM), but I never found issue with it.
But mostly,
This is what draws me back to the series again and again. I grew up with Tolkien as my first serious fantasy series, and a part of me thrilled at his flowery, unhurried descriptions of placid, foggy countrysides cloaking histories untold. Erikson seems to have read that same thing and thought to himself, “I can do you one better, old man: these histories gonna get fuckin told.”
It’s a series where the relevant timeline extends tens (maybe hundreds?) of thousands of years into the past, and events and people from the dimmest, earliest epochs of the world’s history repeatedly arise to importance and relevance during the course of the series. Truly a world where those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, at least in part because oftentimes, revenants from the past will claw their way out of an ancient crypt and ensorcell you to live out their dread ambitions at long last.
Every stone covers a mystery, every sand dune heaps overtop a long-forgotten battlement, every desert chokes an ancient sea, and every race and empire is bound by chains wrought by their forebears at the dawn of time. The ancient is alive in well in the world of Malazan, and there’s at least two enormous armies of undead avengers intent on butchering it straight into the dirt, goddammit.
As all this living, vengeful history, and all these complicated, overwhelmed people, and all these myriad, grasping empires slowly coalesce like pieces on an enormous chessboard, manipulated by gods and otherworldly powers, one might for a moment think that Erikson will stumble, reach too far, and shoot on past interesting storytelling into the decrepit art of textbook-writing. But then you remember that said history informs a vibrant and complicated present, and that said people hold convictions true in their hearts and are capable of great competence and bravery, and that said empires are lead by fallible men and women (and other things), and that most of all, those gods and otherworldly powers are themselves entirely dependent on the mortals they seek to control so utterly, and that even they are not fully outside the sword’s reach, and you realize that no, Erikson is busy laying the groundwork for a deeply human story amidst all the magical artillery and apocalyptic prophecies and continent-and-millennia-spanning convergences.
And that’s why it’s my favorite series, unfinished (for me) though it may be.
