This is probably a bit late, since this thread is nine years old, but my $.02 on “The Malazan Book of the Fallen” is that Gardens of the Moon is the weakest book in the series. I don’t remember why I went on to book two the first time around, but on my recent reread, I would have just given up if I hadn’t remembered that it gets better later on.
Not to say that the books afterwards are perfect- there are a lot of flaws. But it’s an entertaining read, and for me that’s enough to justify it.
(His co-creator of the Malaz-verse, Ian C. Esslemont, has written some side stories of his own. And while I’ve been reading them because they pick up some of the dangling plot threads from the main series, Esslemont is seriously in need of an editor. If they weren’t library books, I’d been reading them with a red pencil in hand. I very nearly started a pit thread over his aggravating stylistic errors).
(Again, probably nine years too late, but I’ve been reading the books lately, so it’s on my mind).
I’m having a hard time getting into the Erikson books; they’re TOO stock fantasy. Cheesy even. I keep comparing them back to the “Black Company” books by Glen Cook (Erikson’s spiritual ancestor), and Erikson’s come up wanting.
They’re like a worst-of-both-worlds mishmash of Cook and GRRM, in my opinion.
At the very least it is by far the most out-of-continuity of the series. Garden of the Moon-isms is a common expression for its numerous deviations from accepted Malazan canon. Erikson just didn’t have his world dialed in yet and on the broader view it kinda shows.
It’s funny, but I find Esslemont to be very slowly improving novel by novel - his latest ( about the first meeting of Dancer and Kellanved as young men ) is by far his best. Meanwhile Erikson in his latest series ( the legendary origins of the Malaz-verse ) is getting more verbose and morose, if that is even possible. Esslemont’s books are far less grand in concept, but they have become more fun. Erikson’s are becoming a bit more of a chore to plow through as stories, mostly interesting to pan for the fascinating historical/mythological tidbits.
I love Asoiaf but tried the Malazan books and just couldn’t get into them. Part of it was that we are just thrown into conversations with characters without any explanation, and are forced to learn as we go, but there was a bigger problem. I saw a huge strategic flaw with the world in general. Throughout the first hundred pages there were several times entire armies were destroyed by some kind of magical attack. And it wasn’t some new unexpected attack, it just seemed to presented as “that’s how it goes sometimes, bummer”. I thought if this is a world where armies can be obliterated by magical attacks, guess what! Armies are now obsolete and would stop assembling! That combined with a total lack of character development caused me to give it up before getting halfway through “Gardens of the Moon”.
Is this problem fixed later in the series? Or are major lapses in logic standard fare? Does the character development improve?
I recently started the Mistborn series and it is outstanding!
It’s not that Erikson is a bad writer; it’s just that by comparison with Cook (who he derives a huge amount of his writing style from, BTW), he’s got a lot more in the way of cheesy fantasy trope kind of stuff, and I don’t like it. It just feels neither here, nor there- if you want the stripped down dragster, read Cook. If you want the Cadillac with all the cushy descriptions and what-not, read Martin. Erickson, at least in “Gardens of the Moon” seems like a weighed-down sports car by comparison- neither comfortable nor fast.
(not the best analogy, I know, but anyone who’s read Cook and Martin will probably understand)
I did notice that Orb, Scepter, Throne had less internal monologue errors* than the previous books. Though it also had continuity errors.
*Seriously, I’m not sure what’s so hard to understand: italicized thoughts are first-person and present tense. Un-italicized thoughts are, usually, third-person and past-tense. “It was too bad that Alice hadn’t told him that yesterday” and “It’s too bad I didn’t hear that yesterday” both work. “It was too bad Alice hadn’t told him yesterday” just looks wrong. Esslemont seems to pair typeface and mode of speech at random. Sometimes he even mixes them up in one paragraph!