Sections
“The past, even dead, especially dead, could continue to work harm.” – Leslie Fielder.
“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” – William Faulkner.
The past is a restless, uneasy thing. Suffering constant historical and political revisions, it rarely remains unchanged or static, revealing a worrying tendency to extend its claws to the future and repeat itself. And if the past is the starting point, but also the one of arrival, it denies progress. In The Bonehunters, the sixth installment of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Steven Erikson works with the idea that the past is prophecy: a relentless foe that is tragically faced, materializing itself as [...]
Expanding even more the world of the series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen‘s fifth volume, Midnight Tides, is an epic about fanaticism, suffering, lack of compassion, and the intrinsic problems of the capitalist culture. Steven Erikson continues to create complex societies and tragic characters, cleverly mixing humor, drama, and action with social criticism in a narrative that is as intricate as it is engrossing.
The story of Midnight Tides takes place before the events of the first novel, Gardens of the Moon. The protagonist is Trull Sengar, a Tiste Edur who suddenly sees his tribe just one step away from war when he watches ships from the human city of Letheras [...]
The fourth installment in The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, written by Steven Erikson, House of Chains is the most problematic book so far. Although it still manages to impress the reader with its thematic complexity, its fragile structure ends up sabotaging the strength of the narrative.
The plot returns to the Seven Cities’ desert, at the time when Adjunct Tavore of the Malazan Empire arrives with her army to end Sha’ik’s rebellion. The inevitable battle between the two forces ends up generating a confluence of powers, making many other characters interested in the outcome of the event.
The novel’s first act, however, has nothing to do with Tavore and the [...]
Memories of Ice, the third volume of The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, written by Steven Erikson, further expands the scope of the main story: if the narrative is not as careful as before in relation to exposition, it makes up for it with the complexity of its storylines and character arcs.
The story of Memories of Ice returns to the main characters of Gardens of the Moon at the end of the military campaign in the city of Darujhistan. However, this time Sargent Whiskeyjack and the Malazan army must ally with their longtime foes, led by Caladan Brood and Anomander Rake, to overcome a menace to all: the advance of the Holy War perpetrated by the Panion Domin, a religious [...]
Deadhouse Gates, the second volume in Steven Erikson’s The Malazan Book of the Fallen fantasy series, is an even better book than the first one. Beautifully structured and written, the novel offers an incredibly pessimistic story, with a wide range of tragic characters, whose arcs always come back to the same question: how to face the horrors of violence?
The story in Deadhouse Gates takes place on a continent different from that presented in Gardens of the Moon, introducing new characters and environments. The focus is the Seven Cities, a region surrounded by desert, whose mythology is all sustained by the notion of rebellion. Having been conquered by the Malazan Empire [...]
One of the most recurrent problems in fantasy novels concerns the exposition of the world created by the author: sometimes the exposition is too on the nose to the detriment of the characters and the pacing of the narrative, but sometimes it is put aside, failing to capture the readers’ interest. In Gardens of the Moon, one of archaeologist Steve Rune Lundin’s greatest accomplishments (writing under the pseudonym ‘Steven Erikson’) is achieving the perfect balance, providing information to the reader in a measured but engaging way.
Gardens of the Moon is the first novel in a series of ten, entitled The Malazan Book of the Fallen. This one is centered on the process [...]