The politicking is well-done, the backstory (once you figure it out) is nice and imaginative, and the locations and individual scenes are usually interesting (and at least unique compared to generic quasi-European dragon'n'knight fantasy). The grim is more honestly done - with this much magical mayhem being tossed around, the fallout from the uncountable wars is pretty clearly shown. That's a bit too high-powered to be considered gritty in my mind. And, believe it or not, that's enough to be considered a serious threat. For instance, when an island nation of warrior-savants decides to declare war on the neighboring continent, they send three swordsmen. Technically it would be considered "grim'n'gritty", except insofar as every character is hypercompetently cranked to 11, it becomes less gritty and more grim'n'goofy.
The theme of the books is that power attracts power, which is fair enough, and how the mistakes of the past overlay the present.
Malazan forums dreks timeline series#
In fact, so many of Erikson's characters are so preposterously overpowerful that I find the series more funny than epic - this is not helped in that you often have to wait for 3,000 pages of book to go by to learn the reason Character X showed up in Location Y, as Erikson always refuses to do info exposition. I just don't feel any emotional connection to the characters (aside from Anomander Rake, whom everyone agrees is just fun because he's always allowed to make the best entrances to every scene). It's a very different fantasy world, and it's also interesting to see how well he wrapped nearly a million years of alien race conflict into what's going on in mortal human politics in his current day. It's fun to see the extent of Erikson's imagination, and, indeed, the only reason I read them now is that I love the travelogue. Now, on the other hand, the Malazan setting is incredibly rich and very detailed. Erikson starts - well, imagine you were dumped into the scene where Stannis shows up on the Wall in Book III of Martin as the first scene in the novel, but were given no backstory nor even explanation of why he was there, who Rob is, and what is going on. Martin starts with a small, simple premise (Richard visiting Ned) and expands upon that, building upon what we already know to wrap us into the story.
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