Malazan is a lot like reading a comic book/graphic novel. Lots of badass, overpowered, one dimensional characters, occasionally stilted dialog, crazy worldbuilding and setpieces, and nobody really ever stays dead.
Martin’s books are (fittingly) more like an HBO series. More fleshed out characters with often gray morality and unique personalities, much less epic in scope.
Other than the fact that both series are in the “gritty fantasy” genre, they’re really not much alike.
Wait what? Erikson is the one with one-dimensional characters? There are no two-dimensional characters in any R.R. Martin book I’ve ever read. And Martin is the one with morally ambiguous characters? The entire Malazan series is about a morally ambiguous character (the Crippled God)! And then there’s Kallor, Hood, Mael, Ammanas, Blistig, Dessambrae, etc, etc, etc. Although I’ll agree that Martin is certainly less epic in scope.
Erikson also has a world with hundreds of thousands of years of history and dozens of competing intelligent species and, get this, the world has actually changed! Humanity hasn’t been sitting still technologically for thousands of years! What? Impossible!
Besides, I don’t think Martin has ever written anything as entertaining as the interactions between Pust and his wife or Tehol and Bugg. Pretty sure he couldn’t at that.
I’d say the Malazan books are more like an RPG in terms of characters being hard to kill than they are like comic books - given that it’s a fantasy world with a deep and rich magical history, and that death himself is a character, it’s not surprising that dying is not a final thing. It is definitely a transition, though. Characters who die are fundamentally changed by the experience, which is not usually the case in comics.
And I’m with keeganst94 on the relative dimensionality and ambiguity of Erikson vs. Martin - as I said above, there’s one of the series that I’m avidly reading, and another that has had a book in my possession for more than a year without it getting read.
I suspect part of why that’s happening to you is that Erikson had a plan and Martin didn’t.
In ASoIaF, Book Four was pointless. I can’t blame you for not reading it - I wish I hadn’t. It was just a waste. It reminded me a LOT of Jordan’s last book - introducing a whole new group of characters who do very little while ignoring the characters and events that the audience tuned in to see.
Erikson, however, certainly had a plan. Sure, you start the fourth book and wonder ‘Who are these people and why am I reading a book about them when they have nothing to do with the last three books?’, but there was a reason for it. Plus, there’s the novelty of one “army” consisting of a demigoddess, three spellbound swordsmen, an undead warrior, and two extinct dogs.
Finally, though it might not seem like it, Erkison can actually let characters go. Like Circle Breaker. I thought he’d be back as someone else for sure - I think I’ve been trained to believe that by certain writers. But no, the guy does his job, gets rewarded, and spends the rest of his life living quietly somewhere.
And then there’s the kid mage with the candles (whose name escapes me). No way Martin would have let him stay dead. Jordan wouldn’t even have pretended to kill him.
I would call Eriksson the better writer because he didn’t just take medieval Europe and tossed some standard fantasy elements into it. His world is entirely alien and completely consistent within itself. Even characters coming back from the dead makes sense when “death” is simply another realm and there is a very clear and delineated afterlife. I love the Song of Fire and Ice but the Malazan series is superior in my mind, and yes part of that is the fact that Eriksson put out ten great books in the time span that took Martin to do two mediocre ones.
Bolding mine, and thank you for saying it! I’ve read the first four books and wasn’t going to continue, because I couldn’t wrap my head around that concept. Now that you’ve laid it out so simply, I think I can finish.
Except that I’ll have to start from the beginning.
Its been awhile since I read Memories of Ice, but my recollection of Kallor was (major book 3 spoilers) some evil dude that hangs around with Rake for no logical reason. I kept expecting him to have some sort of redeeming or interesting moment as a character, but instead he just plays the straight up mustache-twirling villain by the end of the book. . Kallor was one of the characters I specifically had in mind when I thought of one-dimensional, morally unambiguous characters.
You do realize that he makes appearances throughout almost all of the rest of the series, right? He did what he did in the third book because that was his assigned task. And he had a perfectly (from Rake’s point of view) logical reason to be involved in Rake’s war against the Malazans. The same reason Rake does, as a matter of fact.
As I stated above, I’ve only read the first three books. I gave it an honest shot, but frankly, if Erikson needs more than a single book to give out some semblance of character development to one of his most interesting characters, I’m not regretting stopping when I did.
Yes, I realize that the author stated the reason why (book 3 spoilers) Kallor was [spoiler] joined with Rake’s forces, but I didn’t buy why they still tolerated him. It felt like Erikson spent so much time foreshadowing Kallor’s eventual betrayal, that it just makes all the characters look naive and stupid for not noticing or guarding against it earlier.
I had a similar issue with High Fist Pormqual in Deadhouse Gates, who’s eventual bumbling stupidness and death comes as a shock to absolutely no-one thanks to Erikson’s one-dimensional portrayal of him, yet it just makes the entire Malazan command look like utter retards for putting him in charge. [/spoiler]
Pormqual BOUGHT his command. Nobles buying their way into high military ranks was the whole point for the noble purge at the start of the book, and part of the overall theme of the malazan empire becoming large and unwieldy and falling into corruption.
One of MBOTF’s massive selling points is the fact that it is straight up the greatest ever for re-reading. Reading the series for a second time is an experience in itself as you come across line after line that slipped by you the first time, but that carries so much weight when you know what happens at a later point.
With all due respect, it was always clear that MBOTF was intended to be a ten book sprawling epic. Erikson stated that right from the start, the story itself was planned as taking ten books, and the books were written with that in mind. Even in book one there are tidbits of information that only can be understood after reading books four/five/six etc.
You simply cannot use the fact that a characters development may have taken place across multiple books as a criticism, not when those ten books are all part of an overarching plot, and you have not bothered to read past the first three. You may as well criticise Tolkien for taking three books to develop Sam Gamgee.
Not forgetting the fact that in terms of the overall plot, Kallor is very much a side character, interesting or not. Again, its like criticising Tolkien for not developing Glorfindel enough.
(ETA: You really used a bad example when you mentioned Kallor and character development. He is seen in a very different light after book 8 then he was after book 3)
How many of those pages featured Kallor? He has a cameo in GotM and doesn’t appear at all in DG. So basically you’re complaining that the third most important villain in MoI didn’t get enough character development over the course of a single book. Kallor stomping around being all evil in MoI is kind of the point. It makes the subsequent revelations about him way more effective. Rather like a certain character from ASOIAF that I’m sure we could all name.
Personally, I don’t understand how one can complain the Erikson’s books are one-dimensional when(mild spoilers for the first two books)
the reader is rooting against the Malazan Empire in the first book and for them in the second book.
GRRM is a lot more than the SoIF, though. He was a highly regarded SF writer before he ever wrote a sentance of that series. Stuff like Dying of the light is a great first novel and Fevre Dream, which I’ve not read, is very well thought of. A lot of good shorts, too.
Erikson is MBotF, so it’s hard to really compare the two in toto. I couldn’t in any case, as I’ve only read the first Malazan book. Yamatotwinkie’s assessment does ring true to me, though - I’d be surprised if the comic book feel went away.
The only reason I mentioned Kallor is that he was brought up in post #22 as a specific example of a “morally ambiguous” character, along with a few other characters that (i think) get very little actual screentime, at least through book 3. I realize he’s more of a second or third-tier character, but I felt that his “stomping around being all evil” cheapens what (should have been) one of the most impacting moments of the series, when (book 3 spoilers) WhiskeyJack dies. Instead of being a gut-wrenching scene, I ended up thinking “well, I saw that one coming from a mile off. Why is everyone so stupid?”
The thing is the entire series really is meant to be a single book (the Malazan Book of the Fallen). None of the books stand alone, none of the characters and almost nothing of the world can be understood through one, two, or even three books. It confused the hell out of me at first (especially because I started on book two), but the fact that for the first time in years I had discovered something original in fantasy was amazing. RR Martin is a good writer, but from what I’ve read he’s writing the same thing fantasy writers have been writing since The Lord of The Rings. Erikson actually did something new.
