Sorry that the feature image is so big, but Marc Simonetti’s art is too good to not include.

I just finished reading Memories of Ice which is the third book in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. These books are an incredible amount of fun. Reading them is like watching a Marvel movie - you’re not walking into the theater expecting some sort of biting commentary or depth of character, you’re expecting Badass Superhero Blockbuster Shit (tm), and the Malazan books really deliver on that.

Something you’ll pick up on really early on if you’re familiar with Dungeons and Dragons (or similar) is how heavily this series draws from that medium’s conventions. I was like a quarter of the way through the first book when I had a moment of “is this book just a fanfic about the author’s D&D campaign?” The way the various characters are arranged in these neat groups of 4-10, everyone with an explicitly labelled vocation, and each a D&D-esque amount of over-skilled for their place in society. Like, you’ll have this suspiciously elite, conspicuously multiethnic, military company that’s clearly made up of a couple fighters, a barbarian, a warlock, a healer, an assassin, who are conveniently on their own special mission so they don’t have to deal with army bureaucracy. They talk about “being an assassin” like that’s just a normal career people can have. I think at one point they even use the word “cantrip”. It turns out the answer to my fanfic question is “sort of”. Erikson wrote these books based on a number of GURPS campaigns he played and GM’d with his friend Ian Cameron Esslemont (who has written his own books in the same setting) back in college. The wiki page that goes over this is a fascinating read. Knowing this really changed how I experienced the story, because many of the characters were actually roleplayed by real people before the books were written, and there are key scenes that played out as they did not because of the author’s intent but because of his friends’ decisions and the roll of the dice. I find that really fun and it scratches my perpetual fantasy tabletop game itch.

While fun, there are caveats to this approach, the most common one I see people talking about online being that the Malazan books really just throw you right into the story with no explanation or preamble. Reading these books are like if you were an alien who knew nothing about human culture and had to figure it out after being dropped into late 1930s Belgium - you’re confused, and everything’s exploding and people you just met are dying and you don’t know why, and it’s only going to get worse. There isn’t even much in the way of an audience surrogate character to help you through, most of the characters have a pretty good grasp of what’s happening and of their relationships to others, it’s just the reader that has to figure it out. I find you just have to lower your understanding-things expectations and let the chaos wash over you, because it’s very satisfying when you figure out what that prologue was even about, and in the meantime it’s a fun mystery to solve. Another downside, along these same lines, is that often major events will occur seemingly out of nowhere due to abilities that it was not clear a character had. The climax of the first book, for instance, involves a side character turning into a dragon, which while very blockbuster-cool was not well established. I think this comes from the fact that a lot of the characters, as well as the books’ magic system and history, were pretty well fleshed out in the minds of the author for years in advance. So of course that guy could turn into a dragon, he’s been able to turn into a dragon for decades in the GURPS campaigns, and it’s very well-established in the lore. But the reader doesn’t always get that lore until after the fact, so it sometimes comes off like an ass-pull when this happens.

If I’m understanding it correctly, Erikson and Esslemont created the world of the Malazan books by taking basically every roleplaying session they’d ever done and squashing them together to make them all simultaneously the backstory of the universe. The result is a fantasy world with an insane amount of character diversity and even more insane time-scales. Of course you have your immortal elf and orc analogues. But the ones that you run into just so happen to have achieved immortality - they are very few and history has passed their society by. The vast bulk of the world is inhabited by a humanity that feels as diverse as in the real world. “Human” isn’t just a monolithic category there to act as a default in opposition to dwarves or whatever, they are the vast majority and are hugely varying. Each people group the books introduce you to has its own appearance, traditions, affectations, and history. This actually caught me off guard at first, I was so used to Elder Scrolls rules that when I got bombarded with the names of ethnic groups in book one I just assumed them to be as different as “humans” and “orcs” traditionally are. But the differences between sentient races can vary a lot. You have characters who are only as different from each other as French and Italian people, or maybe European and East Asian people, and as you kind of widen the scope you get to relationships that are like human vs. Neanderthal or even Homo sapiens vs. Australopithecus before you get to the completely separate species that are “human” and “elf”.

I mention Neanderthals and Australopithecus because Malazan’s timeline is so long that the process of evolution is actually apparent and an occasional plot-point. Some things are so old that it is hard to keep track of what exactly happened when. Human history is much longer than in real life, and even then is dwarfed by that of the ancient societies of the elder races. The main Malazan series takes place in the aftermath of the second human empire established by Erikson and Esselmont’s campaigns. The first human empire was established over 120,000 years prior. 200,000 years before that, the chief society was that of stone-age proto-humans, whose descendants would become the various human subraces. For millions of years before them, the world was inhabited by the orc-analogues, and for millions of years before them there existed a society of (excuse what is probably a spoiler) cyberpunk fantasy sentient DINOSAURS. Before them were some weirdo alien lookin-ass dudes that come up more in the books I haven’t read yet, and finally in the dawn of time the immortal elf-analogues were born. I love settings that exist in the shadows of their own history, and these books take that concept to the extreme. You get the sense that everywhere the characters go has just layers and layers of history that is explained just enough to give you an impression legitimate depth. It’s also refreshing to see a fantasy setting not treat its sentient species as atomic or immutable but to have the mortal races realistically evolve over time, both culturally and physically.

While not the extent of the content of these books, the sense that the story takes place in a world with an exceptionally vast history contributes to its recurring themes of righting ancient wrongs and understanding the mistakes of the past to avoid repeating them. While most characters are normal, mortal humans, many players in the politics of the Malazan books are immortal, and the characters who know their history end up being better equipped to navigate the immortals’ 1,000+ year-long schemes and understand their motivations. There are enough immortal characters that you’d think immortality as a concept would become overdone, but even then there are relative ages where the immortals are concerned and they all act as windows into the world’s past. My favorite group of immortals is the T’lan Imass, who have a very unique relationship to their immortality and to human history at large - I’m probably going to have to write a whole second blog post about just them and why I find them so neat. But for now, let me conclude just by saying that the historical scope of the Malazan Book of the Fallen is probably my favorite part of it, and I heartily recommend the series on that basis.