Tag Archives: Malazan

There is a note at the start of Night of Knives, written by Gardens of the Moon author Steven Erikson, stating categorically that the work of Ian C. Esslemont is not to be considered simple fanfiction for taking place in the same rich universe introduced by his series of novels: Esslemont’s “the Malazan Empire” series is a canonical, integral part …

Expanding even more the world of this already mammoth of a series, The Malazan Book of the Fallen‘s fifth volume, Midnight Tides, is an epic about zealotry, suffering, lack of compassion, and the intrinsic problems of a capitalist culture. Steven Erikson continues to build complex societies and tragic characters, cleverly mixing humor, drama, and action with social criticism in a …

Written by Steven Erikson, the fourth installment in The Malazan Book of the Fallen, House of Chains, is the series at its most ambitious and problematic so far. Although the novel more than manages to impress us with its thematic complexity, its fragile structure can at times sabotage the narrative’s strength. The story returns to the desert in the Seven …

Memories of Ice, the third volume of The Malazan Book of the Fallen series, further expands the scope of the main story. Although the narrative is less careful about exposition than in previous volumes, it makes up for this with the complexity of its storylines and character arcs. The story returns to the main characters of Gardens of the Moon at …

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 …

One of the most recurrent problems in fantasy novels concerns exposition, with the intricate world created for the story being described in too much detail, to the detriment of the characters and pacing. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true: the world is put aside for too long and so fails to capture our interest. In Gardens of the Moon, one …