Steven Erikson

Working my way through Memories of Ice, the third volume of Steven Erikson's The Malazan Book of the Fallen. I am tremendously impressed by this series. It is really "epic" on the order of The Ten Commandments or How the West Was Won -- it spans continents and hundreds of thousands of years, it is rich, dense with history and events, exciting, and thoroughly absorbing. (Well, pretty much.) The only thing I can think of in speculative fiction to compare it to is perhaps Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, or maybe Sean Russell's Initiate Brother/Gatherer of Clouds, although these last two, in spite of their scale, remain somehow intimate, much like LOTR. One doesn't get the same sense of vastness from them as from Erikson's work. Indeed, the only real comparison is with film (and now that I think of it in light of Russell's magnificent duet, think about Kurosawa's Ran, the final battle scenes), although I don't find Erikson's series particularly visual, at least no more than others. It's a sense of long views and big spaces. It's really amazing.

It's also freeing me up in my own writing in a way that no other author has done before. I'm realizing that yes, I can have a historical background for The Fantasy Novel From Hell that spans thousands of years and a geography that spans an entire world, and I can have gods walking around if I want, and my heroes can be not the nicest people in the world, and all that other good stuff, and it'll work. I'm pretty energized by it.

I'm only half way through this one, and I can hardly wait to finish so I can start the next one. I also have a new novella from Erikson sitting here waiting for me to get to it so I can review it for GMR (if I can ever tear myself away from the series for long enough). Look for that in about a month.