The really pointed attack on America was the bit where all the Chained God worshippers/slaves were obsessed with oil.
Toll the Hounds, I think? I tried to skip those parts.
As I posted in the book thread, it is clear to me that Erickson had no idea how to stitch together his book. He has a peculiar talent for setting up a grand scene, or even a small scene, in a fascinating way. There were just too many pieces of the book that were wedged in with seemingly no connection to the plot. I am sure if I re-read the entire series, I would find more. I spent the last few days rethinking my way through the series and have come to the conclusion that he had planned nothing.
A fine conclusion, I think.
I really liked the “let’s get the old band together” vibe especially favorites such as Kalam, but I expect those who accepted the advice to skip Gardens of the Moon won’t like it as much.
As usual, much confusion as to what was going on(especially Heboric’s appearance), and motivations. Especially since we had been conditioned to see the Crippled God, then called the Chained God, as a bad guy and enemy of the Malazans. And didn’t Fener already die several books back?
We still don’t know who the Hell Ruthan Gudd really was, I was wrongly guessing K’rul.
My only disappointment was not having Karsa and Icarium playing bigger roles,as well as the deaths of characters I was fond of…
Guess next is the new Esslemont.
I had always assumed that Grub was the mentioned Coltaine reincarnation but it has not really come to pass.
And Sinn is Drew Barrymore in Firestarter.
Nah, the Coltaine reincarnation is a different character who already featured as a tactical genius of a young boy amongst the Wickans in Return of the Crimson Guard.
Fener was pulled from ‘God Land’ down to ‘Mortal Land’ by Heboric way back in Deadhouse Gates, however he wasn’t killed. In Erikson’s mythos gods are vulnerable to mortals only when they manifest themselves in the mortal world, the rest of the time they are super safe. I think this is why you get a lot of gods being sort of scared of or indifferent towards their own worshippers as any time they manifest their power they make themselves vulnerable. Only the badass gods are prepared to take the risks and tangle with the mortals.
So, Fener got stuck down in mortal land and being the big old coward that he is he went into hiding in the Errant’s abandoned sunken temple in Lether. Which was probably a good move as the moment he came out of hiding (summoned by the truly epic war going on) he was chopped to death through the sheer epic force of Karsa’s will. Witness.
The Crippled God being a morally ambivalent creature is entirely consistent with Erikson’s general story-telling and world view. There are no glowy paladins of righteousness and there are no satanic beings of absolute evil.
The Crippled God is an unwilling immigrant to an entirely alien planet, brought there by explosive force that tore him into pieces. He was then kept chained in agony for thousands of years by the world’s ascendants as part of their own games of power. It’s no wonder his mind is pretty warped after that kind of treatment. Basically the Crippled God is Erikson asking you to look past the obvious crimes and try to understand the causes and perhaps even have compassion for the perpetrator. I get the feeling that perhaps Erikson believes in rehabilitation for criminals rather than tossing them in a pit and losing the key.
I believe he may be an incarnation of Beru. At one point, ST is yelling at these wisps of elder gods, and at, particularly, Beru, and he says something like “You separated out the best part of yourself to go live with the mortals…” Since Gudd manifests his power similar to a storm rider, I think that’s got to be a connection.
I can’t remember that scene all that well, but did he not tell that to Dessembrae?
Yeah, that was directed as Dessembrae.
Need more Dassem Ultor!
Yeah, I found the passage again, and I see where I got confused – Beru hisses at him immediately after he says that to Dessembrae.
sigh I thought I had something there.
So, does anyone know of a longer series by word count? I can’t think of one with a semi-connected story.
Stuff like Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan, or 87th Precinct might have more words(but maybe not, those are short books) but are really a series of stand alones.
I think Janny Wurts’ Mistwrath series comes close.
Nope. Malazan is 3,300k words give or take 100k. Janny Wurts should be 1,800k
Martin 1,800k~ including Dance of Dragons.
Jordan instead has a similar wordcount in the WoT (and excluding Sanderson’s material)
just finished this… and…eh…what?
Is it just me, or are Erikson’s books terribly hard to read? Now, this could because I’m not a native english speaker/reader, but man, I have trouble following a lot of whats going on. Sometimes, I just kinda glaze over a page and read on a bit lower or on the page, since I have no clue what’s really happening.
Anyways, I don’t understand why the Chained God had to be killed by Cotillion at all, like others have mentioned. I honestly didn’t understood who, what, or how Tavore did all she did, and how she came by her knowledge of stuff.
I think the series have jumped the shark a bit with all the dead people coming back, and all the people turning into demigods. It lacks impact when it becomes mundane.
I enjoyed the series, and Reapers gale and Toll the hounds is one of the best books I ever read.
Esslemont is not very good though, and I STILL maintain Return of the Crimson Guard was written by Erikson and then just had Esslemonts name tagged to it. His last book Stonewielder was a mess, and insanely boring to me.
Anyways, still looking forward to more fun.
Oh, and now that Game of Thrones has shown its possible, I want a HBO show on this series!
I finished this and all the currently released ICE books. Fantastic. Read them all straight through since March. Most of the complaints and confusion can be chalked up to the reader forgetting things from prior books, cause I thought it tied things up rather succinctly. Of course there’s loose ends as people have mentioned, but I don’t think vagueness detracts from it at all. Then again I am also a proponent of another flawed vague ending of a show which shall not be named here…
One gem of an arc that hasn’t been mentioned: the Perish parley bloodbath. I really liked the triple slaughter of the three leaders and at least one of the wolf gods. Took the idea of their animalistic nature to a satisfying end, IMO.
I also think anything with Gesler or Stormy was awesome. Their deaths were wonderful.
A couple of things re: earlier in the thread - the Jaghut that was so thoroughly beaten up in Gardens of the Moon was a Tyrant. -Everybody- was scared of Jaghut Tyrants. (And the Finnest thing really sounds like a lich’s phylactery out of D&D to me.) Regular Jaghut could and did get killed much easier, c.f. later books depicting Imass slaughtering Jaghut, etc. Similarly, the other really badass Jaghut we see (besides Icarium, who has something unique going on) is Hood, who is at the very least a god and from what we see in Dust of Dreams/The Crippled God, probably the Elder God who ruled the Hold of Ice/Omtose Phellack. (IIRC, his decision to become the god of death was an attempt to end the threat of death, ultimately unsuccessful.) The race as a whole seems to be significantly less powerful than the Forkrul Assail, and their status vis-a-vis the K’Chain Chemalle is debatable. More powerful individually than the Imass, yes, but the Imass don’t seem to have been terrifically different from humans on an individual power continuum. It was the Ritual of Tellann that made them all into nearly unstoppable murder machines. (Hence why Fener’s death fucks them so hard in The Crippled God.)
As for the Crippled God’s death - he said himself that he couldn’t get to his followers, much less his world, incarnated like he was, without bringing them down and ending all life. I -think- what happened was Heboric connected him with his followers through the jade hand, and then Cotillion broke his connection to the mortal body he was inhabiting by killing it, thus handing him off to his own people and ensuring he’d make it back home. This would piss off the other gods because their plan had been to feed on the Crippled God’s power while he was still helpless and scattered.