For shame.

 

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I don't know who Iain Banks is, though I dislike his name.

What should we be talking about as far as Malazan is concerned? I am all for building hype but I try to start less than four months out.

 

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I just wanted to say hi to you on a different board Yoss! It worked!


That said, try Iain Banks, good sci-fi, his Culture novels are pretty damn good. Consider Phlebas is the first, but i'm partial to The Player of Games (his second). I'm reading his third, Use of Weapons, right now.


As for Malazan, i'm up to the Bonehunters, but i put it down. I do this with every Malazan book. I want to love these books. I can see the brilliance in them, the world building is awesome, the characters that i can follow i fall in love with.

But.... there's so much of everything, characters, places, history. The overall story has so many vergences, it becomes too disjointed for me. It sometimes feels like work to keep it all together and i have to put it down, wondering if i'm enjoying it or not. Perhaps that's part of the brilliance, but it's lack of linearity sometimes puts me off.

I was just wondering if anyone else experienced this.

 

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Ahh, I didn't realize we were speaking in general. This board was recreated recently for some unfathomable mod reason so the majority of the posts are gone, which is why you saw no mention of a lot of things.

Steven Erikson does some things really well and others not so well. I love his characters and their 'cool factor'. He can build up characters so much that a simple conversation between two of them is exciting, not to mention a sword fight. There are hundred page conversations on message boards over who the best swordsman in the Malazan universe is, that is how good he is at creating an aura of coolness around characters.

My least favorite aspect of his writing are the over-long self indulgent chapters or even entire storylines that he writes from random, uninteresting PoVs in order to show some small thing relevant to the story and a whole bunch of crap he feels like relating.

I think these chapters along with the 84,000 different storylines makes the entire thing disjointed and in many ways senseless. I think it is impossible for him to tie up every loose end in the final book, most likely the majority of it will be completely left untouched. It isn't like WoT where every storyline ends with the final battle- he has left so much stuff sitting I can't even remember it all to be bothered. I'm sure there are threads that are relevant to other threads in his mind but it is impossible for us to track them over 10,000 pages and put everything together.

Does anyone know what the story is about? I mean really understand? Can anyone actually tie the majority of events in to the crippled god who is supposedly, but damn if I understand why, the focus of all of this? It is almost like he is showing us a snapshot of this world, specific relevance be damned. Without reading it two or three times I think the complexity of the series is too much for a mere mortal to piece together, especially waiting a year between books.

I don't mean to be overly critical, it is possibly my favorite fantasy series ever written, but I do not think it is perfect. I don't think I would want it simpler or easier to follow because that would take something away from it, I just wish I had the key in my head.

My one genuine complaint is that he kills of characters he no longer has a use for is pointless ways. He uses them cheaply to make some philosophical point, not because it is worthwhile, but because he needs to dispose of them as they have already served their purpose. I can't mention the one that pisses me off irreparably because you are not there.

 

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That is a simple yet perfect wish and i totally agree. The book i enjoyed the most was House of Chains, i think because it, at least for me, started at the beginning (for lack of a better word) and was somewhat more linear.

Every book i fight through the first 400 or so pages. Then, at least part of the story starts to come together for me. The endings are what keeps me going. They are simply awesome and add promise to the next story.

I'm still trying to figure out what the purpose is for about two dozen characters that appear important, somehow.

 

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