Looping Wor(l)d

What you find below has been written, partially, back in June 2021. I had the idea of doing some kind of “live” commentary of Erikson’s “Fall of Light”. The idea was to break down a bulkier review into a leaner ongoing, hopefully more regular commentary, but it ended up adding too much overhead rather than less as it was intended. Reading, thinking, writing notes, then later picking it up again, reading and then arranging the notes… My constant reading delays are mostly due to pacing in a way I can then write about the books. I feel this sort of commitment that I don’t quite enjoy. So the idea of breaking up a whole “review” into smaller pieces had some merits, but it doesn’t work all that well. I have a backlog of things I should write about, Bakker’s chapter is not over, but even in that case I was exhausted writing the lengthy commentary about my dismay to the last book, I needed a break, and after a break it’s almost impossible to get back into that type of mental space and focus. So who knows when/if it will happen.

As things kept getting stacked I felt the need to get back to Erikson, sooner rather than later. So the idea of resuming this one blog post that was left as an old draft. Pick up Fall of Light again, see what I get out of it… Only to realize that it’s been way too long and this time not only I don’t remember much of the plot, but it’s the tangle of characters that appears as inextricable. And so I take another step back and pick up “Forge of Darkness” from page 1. At this time being already some 130 pages into it, hardcover version.

Let’s see how it goes. I can try doing something monthly, but I really have no idea how it will turn out in practice. Also, the more I write here, the more I get disappointed about how I write.

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This blog-site being in limbo isn’t surprising, and I don’t expect anything to change, at least for a few more months. I guess this can serve as a quick recap.

I’m still quite active, about things, but feel a lot more dulled. Virus-stuff takes a big chunk of my attention and also made me more jaded about everything. Writing on a blog demands effort and time, it was always important for me because it was a way to put down thoughts and move on. But right now I just don’t care about anything anymore, including my own thoughts. Everything feels fleeting. Writing a blog feels redundant.

This book came out in 2016. Back then, I had the idea of writing a commentary page by page, here. Something fast but regular. It didn’t happen, but I read the first 60 pages of the book at least three times, along the years, and have scribbled some notes at the margins. Today Werthead posted on his site the review of the new one. A few weeks ago I updated the wordcount page and found out the book is quite short, even shorter than Gardens of the Moon, and less than half of one of the big Malazan latter ones. I felt a little disappointed. But then I also immediately realized I don’t have any reason to. I have my stuff. I still have so much more of Erikson, probably more than I’ll ever end up reading. And I have this book especially. This is my stuff.

“Length” isn’t meaningless. Thinking so is oversimplification. I like Malazan also because of its “range”, and a smaller book implies smaller scope. Maybe a shrinking of ambition? I have tons of doubts about where Erikson and Malazan could go. I had my doubts about Kharkanas too, even if that ended up my personal favorite. A commercial disappointment that made Erikson switch to the Malazan sequel. Will it work? CAN it work? As Werthead writes in the comments of that review, this book cannot be realistically be sold to a new audience. Whoever decides to start, is going to start from the beginning. But it’s not my job or concern how to sell a thing. What else? How do you continue Malazan? That’s the problem of ambition. Can you even rise the stakes past that point? Or write some smaller scale epilogue, give it time to breath out, tie loose ends. I have no right to say anything about this, I haven’t got to the end.

(Note from the future: many, most, writers have maybe one great book in themselves. There isn’t anything fair about this angle of discussion. Unless the angle is the market and product. Why should we, I, even expect MORE from Erikson? Because he hasn’t died and is a WRITER? A job? As the future closes its doors, I realize even more clearly that the meaningful journey is to the past. If I want to find something that has value, then I walk back.)

The virus stuff caused a certain shake-up. I drifted away from certain communities, I feel a little lost. I lost my themes. As I said, I also stopped caring. I don’t give a shit, about anything. So I’m constantly drifting, between the meaningful and the meaningless. A couple of weeks ago I finished “V.”, by Thomas Pynchon. It was an immense book, full of inexplicable, impossible talent. It’s not even “talent”, because it shows a writer being just complete, and beyond. But also immensely frustrating, because I don’t know enough, I’m not smart enough. Most of the book went right over my head, and the day I finished it I started again from the first page. It’s a new book. I could just keep reading V.

And then I’m reading the first stories of The Savage Dragon, and I’m almost done with Rising Stars by Straczynski. I recently watched the entirety of Line of Duty (bent coppers!), that’s a masterpiece that goes close to The Shield, and whose ending is quite fitting in its imperfection. And whose intention is probably thematically linked to Forge of Darkness here (note from 2025, funny reading this part because I remember almost nothing about it, and I certainly have NO IDEA how Line of Duty could be linked to Forge of Darkness…).

I’ve restarted Dickens’ Black House from the beginning. I read about half the book, what, 10 years ago? In the last few months I started or restarted at least 50 books. I stop at some point, then repeat the process a few years later. I could go on forever, just reading again. Leaving everything in a constant flux of incompleteness (note from 2025: yeah, didn’t go well. Restarted AGAIN in 2022 and stopped at page 350). I’ve picked up the second book in Janny Wurts series, at least three, four times? I want to read more Tad Williams, now that I’ve completed both first books in their respective series, “Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn” and “Otherlands”. Scott Bakker should always be my priority, even when it isn’t. I’m reading light novels, but only if they are as long as Malazan, because in Japan it’s a thing. I started Re:Zero because I was searching through Google for the number zero short story of Shingeki no Kyojin, and instead Google returned me a ludicrous question answered unironically. I’m reading Faulkner (“Mosquitoes”, and I suspect this is Faulkner’s best book), I’m reading Stephenson (both Anthem and Reamde) and I’m reading JR by Gaddis (this type of schizoid reading is especially alive right now in 2025, as right this moment I’m reading Dostoevsky and Gadda). A while ago I finished “The Long Way Down” by Craig Schaefer, another large interlinked series project, urban fantasy and self published. I planned to write a sort of review, but this is how things go. I’ve started Bubblegum, by Adam Levin, and it felt like David F. Wallace in a really good way, but then I felt bad, because I’ve not finished the previous one, The Instructions. I really want to read The Instructions. And I really want to read “XX”. I started “Six of Crows” by Leigh Bardugo, but then it got popular, so I went to “And I Darken”. I’m reading books about old games, to build real time machines. I even picked up the Monster, Bottom’s Dream, a month ago? I’ve made through a few pages. I felt both smart and stupid, and then pathetic.

I’m putting together a new PC to play Factorio.

(some incomprehensible notes here written in 2021, about some other stuff, one mentioning Warhammer… But I really don’t know)

Today I’ve picked up, once again, Forge of Darkness with mixed feelings. I’m still perfectly tuned for this, but as I said I feel dull. The worst part is that these pages are scribbled with notes. Not only I don’t feel as receptive as I was, but I don’t even understand what these notes are supposed to mean. I read the same pages that I’ve now read a few times, and they seem new pages. I said I still feel tuned to this writing, but I cannot quite sink, and grasp. But I don’t care, so this is what it is. It is…

PART 1 (my notes on the pages are in italics, pages numbers from original Bantam UK hardcover edition)

I remember at the time I was looking through forums to read what others thought about the book, trying to take a measure of it before I started myself. Staying out of spoilers isn’t so easy, though, so I read that some readers were disappointed. There was going to be a big battle at the end, but it wasn’t described directly. As if Erikson decided to not give the payoff that readers demanded.

“I just slogged through Fall of Light, way too much philosophizing, not enough convergence. I was looking forward to a badass battle”

Then I read the first two pages, and wondered how you could be disappointed when it was written so plainly.

At the end of page 4, I don’t know if Erikson wrote this at the beginning.

My suspicion here is that this introduction-declaration was written after the book was completed. A way to tie the beginning and the end with a clear intention. Instead of a sort of “this is what I’m going to do”, it would be “this is what I found.” A writing trick.

In any case, it doesn’t matter. This part is a bit ornate in the writing, as most of this prequel series, but far from rhetorical and, especially, far from being opaque. Or subtle. “Stand at a distance, then, and make violence into a dance.” My note: make it entertaining.

Lower on the page: motivation VS truth. The idea is the split between stories and reality. Usually, this is romanticized. Not in the way Erikson means here, but in the universal way. Human beings cannot survive reality, so they fashion convenient stories. These stories form a cocoon of (for) life. An artificial space that is survivable. Erikson is more specific here, because he goes against the war and the art of war. About the morality of the intention behind this process. And so the “rhetorical swagger” is what’s necessary to make the killing possible. A little necessary push to refashion it. A concept that is then encoded, a few lines later, “deftly ritualized”, and so, I’d add, it disappears from perception.

This is my own interpretation and extension, because Erikson here is precise, only talking about the shapes of war. But the concept itself encapsulates modernity, how we feel we can observe and judge, without understanding that we are so deeply embedded within this fictional world that none of us can truly “see.” You can be more careful, more aware of the blindness, but you can’t overcome it. As Bakker would say, it’s darkness that comes before. We come after. We have neither awareness nor control of that context that builds us. The codification happens before conscious thought even surfaces. We are fused with this world, and our consciousness makes no sense separated from it. So how can we possibly judge what we do not see? If then this is true, “necessity” comes fused with the rest, it cannot be critically separated as Erikson does here. Leading to the concept of fatalism, that will return later.

Fall of Light: exhortation to himself. Cannot teach any lesson if you don’t follow it. writing is a monologue, so it’s self-reflection, introspection. The audience is not there. Passive.

(Note from 2025, what I wrote back then stops right here. Not even a true start, not even getting to the end of the FIRST page, quite ironic. So from this point onward it’s all written in the “now”, but based on a mix of notes taken years ago, a month ago, or the day before…)

The introductory page ends with an exhortation, obviously to himself as a writer: “Oh, have done with it, then.”

“The poet who glories in war is a spinner of lies. The poet who delights in visceral detail, for the sole purpose of feeding that lust for blood, has all the depth of a puddle of piss on the ground.”

One of my notes reads: necessity is the system of no-responsibility / a life is fashioned, and so we dance. It’s as if Erikson is rejecting what he’s just trying to begin, as much of the story will have to be a motivation for the war. The high level perspective and moral judgment will have to be seized and collapsed. Brought back to the blood-sodden ground. I think in general this page can be somewhat off-putting to read, because it does take a moral high ground and immediately “preaches” about the spectacle of a “fantasy” book. Fantasies of epic wars. Wars being bad, yeah. Do we need to repeat this? Well, maybe.

“What, in the name of all the gods above and below, are you doing here?”

This is more effective, and again can go all the different ways. You, the reader. You, the writer. You, the character of this story. But to me (and my notes) it speaks to a theme that, hopefully, will return through this commentary I’m writing: stratification. The stratification of the world and the constant switch of perspectives. That single life that is trapped and moved by circumstances. So, in order to understand, we need to move from the god-like fly-by, the judging-eye high level, down, to “incarnate” in a character. Get dirty, get tangled in. To feel that hate and rage, give them names. To feel the world made human, made real. Made broken.

And so… “Choose a cool dusk” in this introduction, becomes the first line of the first chapter: “Stepping out from the tent, Renarr faced the bright morning light, and DID NOT BLINK.” The beginning of a new book is the morning of a new world, we get incarnated into this Renarr, who does not blink. Not averting eyes, not shielding from bright light, not protecting. We take all in. Erikson moved from the abstract intent, to the concrete and incarnate. A voice found, now shaped.

But because we are now incarnate, we are also vulnerable. This world can and will hurt and then kill us. This point of observation has its expensive cost.

Knowing a bit more I wondered if maybe the blinking thing was a reference to Renarr being moved to a position of “daughter dark,” not blinking to the light, and connected to her skin tone proclaiming and revealing more her internal landscape, that in this case could be dissent. But at this point I still don’t know about the metaphysics of these aspects. I merely appreciate that they are subtle, taken for granted by the characters, and left there to simmer. I guess I could complain about this if we get to the end of the whole story and nothing more meaningful comes out of it. But for me things are also more confusing because a few weeks passed since this new re-read, and I know how the chapter ends: “Renarr studied her, and did not blink.”

I wasn’t able to extricate anything quite meaningful from that. Obviously it references back to the beginning of the chapter, but who she’s looking at doesn’t seem representing light, and I just don’t have a working interpretation for it.

Back to the chapter, Renarr is our point of observation to this war camp. The war being a fastidious possibility in the imminent future.

Section in italics from Renarr PoV, “we are awash in lies.” Echoing back the introduction. But this time we are already within the embroidery of characters. The tangle of relationships.

Page 6, my note reads: other realms, the world is layered thus, referring to this part: “By mid-afternoon, when the sun warmed the air enough, mosquitoes would arrive in thick, spinning clouds, thirsty for blood. If soldiers stood arrayed in ranks, facing the enemy, there would be little comfort preceding the clash of weapons.”

The mosquitoes here represent another layer of the world, which is quite typical of Malazan and something I especially like. Those annoying creatures don’t know anything of the world of men, and in this case, of their wars. But still, they are necessarily connected, depending on it. The world is both made whole and fragmented constantly, Erikson often shifts the attention so that you see these layers, rather than cutting them and brushing them off as irrelevant. The world speaks, you only need listen. Listen. Be one with those mosquitoes. Breathe them in, until your lungs are full, and then you die into the world.

It is indeed how Erikson, and many other writers, write. You kill yourself, shut up, die. So that you can be borne into the world, and listen. (which is one reason why I was deeply annoyed at the Nobel given to Han Kang, she was trying to do specifically this, and completely botched it)

Erikson writes as if possessing a character, like a ghost. He’s both a writer, and this character walking through the camp. Superimposed. At the same time the camp exists, and is made. But it is not seen as a blurred, uncertain dreamscape. It is solid, tangible. One page in, and there is a sense of familiarity. You wake up after being unconscious through a whole night, and the world continues uniformly and familiar, as if it never stopped. You’ve always been Renarr.

As she continues walking through the camp, veterans “had known that realm” (of war). My note says: microcosm in the camp, personal experience becomes a realm. Like a warren. Again a stratification, and communication between these parts, whether possible or not.

Then another section in italics, my note saying: VOICE. These are the sections that, I think, feel quite jarring to some readers. The “introspective” sections that are often criticized in Erikson’s writing. It’s not quite the same as standard Malazan, because in this prologue series the style is a lot different again, but these sections specifically I think evoke similar reactions. They feel maybe too articulated to be plausible, but I have a completely different interpretation. As I said, this is Erikson testing. Searching for the internal voice of the character. It’s not a form of internal dialogue, but an actual internal landscape that is translated into a literary one. It’s not plausible in the sense that this is what the character is thinking, word for word, right at that moment. It’s, again, like its own warren. It’s own space that here in the book takes a literary form. Its expression is different from what it is, because it’s meant to be interpreted rather than being simply “read.” I’ll return on this (maybe) when writing some comments about Forge of Darkness, but I think the style here is heavily “Shakespearean.” It’s an internal declamation that is faithful to the internal landscape, but not as plausible, “plain” voice. It’s not an accurate internal thought written down. Instead it is OVERwritten, another superposition. A sublimation of one territory into another. Same as symbolic representation, the symbol you use doesn’t have any direct resemblance to the object represented. The word “apple” does not resemble an apple. It’s a symbol, they are connected, but they are not alike. Here the same happens, but it’s language over language. A symbol representing a symbol. A mold over a landscape.

“The questions seemed banal, like things covered in dust, the dust shaken free, blown into the air by a heavy but meaningless sigh.” Next to this line I wrote: “SANDERSON.” But this is from years ago, and I have no idea what clever thought I thought.

“in the bright light, which rose like another world, a world unlike the night before,” this represents the start of a new, eventful day, but, specifically, a new book. A new world. But also plot-wise the people transformed, as they divide between followers of Light, and followers of Dark.

The whole next section has a line going down, I wrote: observer. More meaningfully, “too solid to be a ghost, but shunned all the same.” This is all contextualized, but I interpreted in a more general and abstracted way. It sometimes (often?) happens that the characters that Erikson “possesses” are then affected by that touch. The writer eye doesn’t just comes in and then leave unnoticed. It’s like these characters feel that abstracted touch, and the connection changes everything. These characters get permanently “dislodged” from their reality. They belong, but not quite. The characters themselves aware of this otherworldly touch.

That’s why, a moment later: “She saw herself observing.” That’s quite delicious, I love second order observations, reminds me of Heinz von Foerster. But this is again another superposition, a ghost-like double Erikson. It’s exquisitely “Malazan”, not just observing directly, but observing the observation. It’s an active, ongoing reflection, an awareness of the story that comments itself. This type of meta-narrative is quite explicit since the first page of the first prequel book, not only in all the winks thrown to the veteran reader, but also as a way to have a heightened attention. It’s as if at some point Erikson embedded the concept of Ormologun and its critic into himself. The story and its critical commentary bundled together as one.

You can as well take everything I wrote up to this point as bullshit, since these pages have a proper, obvious context that doesn’t need any fancy reinterpretation. But there are points of contact and I give myself more freedom to wander around, as I feel more familiar. The double observation, here, happens because Renarr is imagining a scene, same as Erikson is himself doing the same while blending with Renarr. So it becomes a series of thresholds, a dreamworld nested inside another. But then this little brief glimpse Renarr is having is shaken awake. Hunn Raal comes onto the scene, and the presence of others suppresses the internal voice. Attention moves to the outside and you are pressed forward against the transparent glass that is the point of view (the window that is your PoV to the world, focus shifts from the internal loudness, to the external). There are some dry lines of dialogue, some quips and jabs. There is familiarity between these characters, but also some guarded hostility. Again, in all forms of modern entertainment everything is loud and redundant, but I especially like this type of writing where you understand, but something always slips through. You know these characters but they aren’t fully revealed either. There is always something more that leaves you wandering, that draws the attention but without rewarding and satisfying it immediately… Sometimes it can be illusion of complexity, but often it’s meaningful depth. Either way, it always feels great, a pleasure for reading.

The actual encounter with Urusander, following the imagined one, isn’t quite unlike it. He is indeed more busy listening to his own internal voices than to who’s around him. He’s not completely addled in the sense he only raves about what he’s thinking, he does reply in a somewhat coherent way, but his line of thought is “elsewhere.” Which I guess is fitting since he then flees the scene, literally and meaningfully, considering the battle that is ahead. His own is presented again as a Shakespearean monologue than something that makes sense voicing. Something about the veil of representation, surface.

A dialogue continues between Renarr and Serap, more meaningful for what comes later. My note reads: those who see have no power. But this is more my own personal theme than Erikson. I have a whole system built around this: if you want to understand something, then you can’t be part of it. Choice, action imply participation. Understanding instead implies a point of view from the outside. The desire, the tug toward the will to affect something, to change its course, to affect it, even if only positively, is a process that in itself makes understanding impossible. So you surrender one or the other. You can understand something, but you’ll never be able to touch it. Just watch passively. Or you move to be part of it. Enjoy the love and hurt, and whatever else. But you’ll never fully know, then. You’ll never understand. You have accepted being permanently blind, so that you can be part of the world. Contextualized here, with a war ahead, those who sees it for what it is have no power to prevent it, or even change its course. And those who have that power because they are embroiled in it, who have the actual choice, don’t have it at all, because they are trapped within the tangle of circumstances. They are sacrificial victims. Unaware of their own doom (though it’s Sevegg, not Serap, who dies here).

Follows the point of view from the other side, that seems to have a similar function to Renarr, since they are both quite lucid about what is going to happen, neither having real leverage to avert it. Havaral here has a more of an active role, but is still trapped by duty. That part of him that is active is trapped by circumstances just the same. As he moves to meet Hunn Raal, he sees the approach as fatalism itself: “They rode with arrogance, with the air of believing themselves privy to dangerous secrets.”

Reading this in 2025 has a weird effect, because it does feel like the beginning of civil war. The world has gone mad, yet none of us has any power. The more lucidly we are aware, the less power to change it we have.

I guess I’ll stop here. This was supposed to be a quick, brief and to the point commentary, specifically to be the opposite of a more involved review. So I have to find a way, because otherwise this will be the first and last attempt.

As I said, while I’m 35-40 pages into this re-read, with the commentary here stalled at 14, I restarted Forge of Darkness and already 130 pages deep. Forge of Darkness is, by far, my favorite Malazan book. This reread is reconfirming it without any doubt. I know most readers consider it one of the weakest, and that it was not popular in sales, but the much denser prose style is what I adore. That’s the main reason why I like it so much. The prose. That kind of unrelenting Shakespearean heft. It is sometimes quite ridiculous to read, certain dialogues, certain internal monologues. They have too much emphasis, as I already commented above. But it is what I enjoy. This is not a movie. Language is precious. For example I do not like, in the main series, when especially in battle scenes Erikson uses a more cinematographic terse style where this and that “blurs.” This is not a movie. It feels to me out of place. A book is not analogical reality. It shouldn’t represent it “as it is.” That’s why I emphasized the symbolic weight above. Language needs to be precise, honest. But it is a different realm. Separate. Or, if it were the same, two good writers would write the same scene in the same way. And so dialogues need being authentic, but don’t need be the same. The same scene represented in a movie or as theater, won’t use the same language.

From the very first page Forge of Darkness is deliciously dense prose that has meaningful depth. So much more consistent compared to all other Malazan pages that I read (that up to this point means from first book to the prologue of book 7, still haven’t moved past that). I always though Malazan is rougher and more inconsistent, even if it progressively gets better on this. And it’s very, very wasteful. Too many interesting ideas that are crammed in and wasted for what they can be. Malazan moves too fast, is a “blur” sometimes without the necessary weight. Ridiculously, it has no space to breathe properly. Something that instead is completely absent as a problem in Forge of Darkness. Every character that comes on the scene, and every idea, is given space and depth. It forces the reader to pay attention. I guess sometimes it can be too obvious and melodramatic. But I love this dense style. Even Fall of Light feels slightly “off” in comparison, but probably it’s more my own impression as consequence of going back and forth without giving the book enough space. Every character in Forge of Darkness is weird and interesting. There hasn’t been a single page among those 130 that I haven’t relished. A more gothic, bleak (and even more cynical), moody, muted type of book that I did not expect at the time, and I find now even better.

I know these books didn’t sell so well, and it’s the main reason why Erikson prioritized the sequel series. I wish I could be along all those other readers pulling in that direction. But instead I can’t help finding myself pulling in the opposite direction instead. The more “opaque” and unrelenting the prose becomes, the better it feels for me. There is no limit.

I spotted a tiny recommendation for the Malazan series, on Twitter, and I got carried away adding some of my unsolicited thoughts to it.

I always said that Malazan is very hard to recommend to other readers. For example it’s a lot easier to recommend Sanderson, despite Sanderson not really needing any help to get known, since now he’s all over the place. But it’s accessible, and pretty good for a very wide range of reader types. You can read 100-200 pages and see by yourself where the qualities are. And know whether it’s your thing or not.

Malazan has this, instead:

To a certain extent, it’s true. But it’s still a narrow explanation. I ask often myself, why am I a Malazan/Erikson reader? What do I find there? Why it’s so important for me? Malazan is recommended a lot, often next to the more popular Martin and Sanderson, but I’m convinced it has a very low “success rate”. I mean readers who accept the recommendation, give it an honest try, but end up not enjoying the read at all. I always asked myself why.

For many, it’s all about a matter of taste and personal disposition. But that’s not a satisfying explanation for me. I always seek a reason, trying to find an objective motivation… that can describe what is that precisely works for me, and doesn’t for other readers. Many others.

I think I grasp at least some of the reasons why it happens. When I recommend Malazan I try to give objective, useful information. It doesn’t mean that I diminish the qualities there, but I do emphasize what the obstacles will be. And it depends on who’s on the other side of the recommendation. Because of the above, and because Malazan is huge, the main dilemma is that the reader doesn’t know if it’s worth committing. Therefore, the paradox: do I commit to read thousands of pages? Where is the threshold where one stops and decides if it’s worth continuing or better stop and read something else more satisfying?

That’s where I draw the line. Do you intend to commit to something huge, from the start? Fine, follow “the rules”. Start at the beginning. But if you are undecided, skeptical, and you want to know what’s there before fully committing, I’d suggest some …alternative, unconventional paths.

Garden of the Moon, the first book, is not a bad introduction to Malazan, but it is a bad introduction to Erikson. Its themes are buried very, very deep. Easy to miss. On the other hand you are buffeted by a million of things thrown in your face, constantly, vehemently. Scenes that seem inconsequential get lot of attention, scenes that are pivotal, or fundamental information end up being omitted only to be referenced offhandedly much later in casual conversation… or just vanish like a dead end. Sometimes things seem pointless, sometimes it all seems coming in the wrong order. Most readers feel confused, or detached from everything.

Eventually, through a lot of patience and a certain devotion, you read a few thousand pages and you have a map. You become the Malazan reader. Knowing where each piece fits, even appreciating the gaps, for they have an use too. You understand what, where, and why (a bit less when, but that’s not so important… Just to make a joke about the often criticized chronology that on occasions is a little wobbly).

Most successful writers use some proven “devices” to seize the reader. The book must have the reader in its center. The book is about Harry Potter, you identify with Harry Potter. The book is about you.

Me, me, me, me. I want the book to be about me.

The focus needs to be all about the reader, feeding this hole of attention. Malazan does some of this, but its greater part is the opposite. Kicks you out: fuck off, get out of the way. Take yourself out of focus, and maybe something worthwhile can be said. Stay quiet, observe. I’ll return to this…

Malazan is not lonely, but it is solitary, brooding, a bit forlorn. Especially now it represents the time. With lockdowns, being separate, and yet it’s now that we’re all connected, more than ever. And we can observe all, everything around us, collapsing. Governments that blindly repeat actions that have failed, imprisoned in a psychotic loop, rewriting and bending science to what’s more convenient. Over and over we know, with clarity, that measures are effective the more they are timely, focusing on prevention, and what we do is the opposite, we wait until too late, feeding onto a pervasive fatalism. We simply accept a number of deaths, making it a norm. Minimizing risks to make believe everything’s fine. Follow these five simple rules for a false sense of security. All because the world doesn’t want to change, and power needs to be preserved. And we can only observe, passively, this slow, progressive deterioration of reality itself. We just observe from our places. Solitary observers of something set into motion. Sorrowful but unable to act, like ghosts.

Malazan is the pain of the world, when it is spoken through a living or unliving mouth. You are meant as the vessel, Itkovian.

That’s why I sometimes I suggest a new reader to start with “Forge of Darkness”. If you are uncertain, whether or not to commit. You could start from the proper beginning, but you’ll have to dig, probably for a long time before you find those themes. Forge of Darkness is not an introduction, but it can be read on its own without prior knowledge. It might feel that you’re missing pieces you’re meant to know about, but you have to trust the text. The book is confusing even for veteran Malazan readers, in some cases even more because it plays around by scattering some expectations. You can go in blind, but read slowly, give it thought. Malazan is not a page turner, even if it has page turning scenes. Mull on the paragraph you’ve just read, not thinking about it only after you’re done. Dig for meaning.

Forge of Darkness is a brooding, mysterious book, but it has its themes on the front, explicit. Impossible to miss. You want to know what it’s all about without reading a million of pages, then it’s all here, wrapped up and well presented. One book, even if part of a trilogy it’s sufficiently self contained. Not an easy read, but it’s there, and you’ll see it.

But I wanted to go further. Condense more, to a point. What is Malazan about?

“Secret… to show… now.”

https://loopingworld.com/misc/erikson-test.zip

(This link includes two scenes, one from book 2 Prologue, one from book 7 Prologue. Six pages in total. No spoilers. You can read these without knowing anything else. The images are taken from Amazon previews.)

I read this prologue and this scene many months ago, but I immediately realized… This is Malazan, right here. Just three pages. It’s everything.

A woman walks up to this cliff. For the reader this is a blank page. You get the description of strong winds, the ocean beyond. Agitated waters. You get a mention of a Meckros City that sunk there. If you are new to the series you know nothing about it, but me, Malazan reader, don’t know all much more beside that these people built floating cities on the sea. So they knew how to be out in the ocean, and the fact they sunk here leaves an ominous feel about the place.

Like a painting, a white canvas, you add detail. Brush strokes. This vast open space in the ocean. You follow with your mind a small fisher boat, blown off course to these treacherous waters. Miraculously surviving the experience and reaching the shore. But something is missing from the picture. Something like a shadow, looming on the scene. Depending on what you use, there’s always an exclusive, irreplaceable quality. For example, in a movie you can use some tricks, but you show what you have to. The attention goes where it has to. But in a book, you control everything. You decide what is or isn’t there. Here you believe what you’re told. You have an ocean dominating the canvas, and then your attention is drawn to a tiny boat, thinking it’s the center, when it is instead pushed to the margin. There’s a giant shadow that dominates the canvas… but no perception of it. Just… A sense of urgency. A secret… to show.

The wind pushes her away, she endures. Drawn to this shadow. Some more details seep in, but the scene is interrupted by “a presence at her side”. A distraction. A merchant she completely ignores. He makes his presence known, loudly. He’s ignored again. The shadow is there, like a tear in reality. The wind rushing out of it, from a different world (a warren).

“Preda?”
“What?”

He tries to shake her as if she’s asleep or in a trance. She didn’t turn to him, she didn’t acknowledge his presence. It’s the shadow that draws her. And bit by bit, it is revealed. Half a million people that just vanished.

It’s already all here for me. The way a mystery is shaped, the choice of what is and isn’t shown, the momentum leading to the revelation. The contemplation, and an environment that takes shape to become a character. Telling its story, piece by piece. The sense of urgency that builds up… for something already happened, already over. The scene, beside the wind, is quiet. You don’t need to read 500 pages for the solution, in two/three pages you get both the set up and the pay off. A book of 900 pages, in a series of 10 book, and you get the pay off in three fucking pages. The mystery isn’t inflated and built by pretense, it’s there. Immediate. Fully delivering its awe. And when the answer comes, to fully deliver its promise (what is she seeing, why does the sight chill her?) you get an opening for more. It’s just an introduction.

And, why not? We see a woman, commanding the military, ignoring and then bossing around a rich, probably powerful merchant. There is no emphasis about any of this. It just is.

(imo, this scene already has too much dialogue, too many asides. It could have used less. Erikson, who’s never generous, already gives too much. Erikson works better the more he’s entrenched. Going the opposite way. Say less.)

I’m not commenting the other prologue scene because there’s a lot, and most of it is quite explicit, even if open ended. But it’s ironic that I could write a lot about those first three lines: “What see you in the horizon’s bruised smear, that cannot be blotted out by your raised hand?” What other witty commentary is possible when it’s all so straightforward?

Well, for me Malazan is always about a sense of scale. Big books, each one, ten of them. A sense of history, a large cast of characters, a big world, creatures, dragons. And yet it thrives on the small, intimate. Introspection. Often duos on their solitary journeys, like Mappo and Icarium. The human, more intimate scale (hand) is always the view on the world, on things much bigger, the gods, alien worlds (the horizon). A sense of reality that has to go through the filter of human perception. The world through, or into your hand. Animated. A construct. Maybe even a pretense of control, that is always mocked. Gods that are dragged, taken down. Heboric again. Erikson always plays with scale, and knows what he’s doing.

(btw, Paran – Felisin – Laseen, make an important pillar for the first FOUR books. And it’s omitted. Nothing about it is shown. Imagine reading Game of Thrones… and there’s no chapter on the Starks. The story is the same, you just don’t get any direct view of them.)

Malazan can be summarized in a word, a concept. Malazan is… “contemplative.”

It is all about the voice. If you take Lord of the Rings and you know Tolkien was a linguist, you’ll realize that everything that makes LotR what it is, to its core, is language. Language is the filter for everything, something that Bakker understood really, really well. It’s not one possible angle on that book. It is everything. It’s a dimension. Even the metaphysical/religious aspects are all about language (the elves who represent art, immortality, the god-like power of creation, and the world that begins shaped by music, all is a form of language).

Something similar happens in Malazan. Erikson was an archaeologist. This well known fact is often used to explain why the worldbuilding is so good. Because that knowledge gives Erikson a way to look at things, make them more realistic. But I think that worldbuilding in Malazan is extremely overrated. Even Sanderson that I mentioned above does worldbuilding better and more meticulously. What Erikson does is something else, and it is pervasive in the same way language is pervasive in LotR. An archeologist is someone who walks onto a site. He looks around, observes. Contemplates. He reads the place. In his mind he interprets the signs he sees, connects them. He imagines the people there, the culture, the life and blood. He walks though a place that is no more, and yet still there. Like a ghost, walking through an alien world.

Being an archaeologist, an observer of human culture, isn’t an angle, a point of view. It is an enclosure of the world. A receptacle, a symbol. An almost religious experience. Like Heboric before the Jade Giants.

How to observe the world, species, your people, your life?
How to understand things, how to give them meaning?

The same as Heboric in front of the Priest of Hood, there is a sense of urgency. But it’s about the world, not you. The observer is Felisin, not Heboric. It is not you. Felisin that came from a different world:

“The same city, but a different world.”

Passivity is her theme through the book. The flies crawling on her thighs are the least terrible thing that is going to happen to her, nothing is normal anymore. Her world collapsed, leaving her not even scared. Just numb.

This flow of human events that seems nonsensical, vain, empty.

Like Heboric watching the Jade giants, Heboric and the ghosts of a world that is no more: I observe my time as if I’m outside, but I am in it. And yet outside, observing with an external god-like quality… of inaction (powerlessness). There’s nothing to judge, because it’s like a river. It goes downhill. It’s not its merit, it’s not its fault. You get to understand it only when you aren’t anymore part of it. Because when you are in it, you are swimming for your life. The world is about you. You cannot understand the world until you surrender yourself to it. Until you stop pretending to decide its course.

Silence your ego, lets the world speak with its own voice. You stop deciding, you start understanding.

The secret of Malazan is transforming its readers in… Ascendants. From reader to witness. We are the witnesses, from this outside. Given sight.

The writer is a jade giant, the reader is a jade giant. We are all jade giants. We watch. Erikson teaches how to tune in. To the hum of the world. We give voice to these otherworldly giants. We are receptacles. We are vessels of the world. We do not find answers, we must answer.

(The buzzing of Hood’s files, they speak. The buffeting wind, it speaks. “The world is very, very old.”)

(In Game of Thrones Martin transforms Bran into a tree. He can do it. In Malazan, he cannot do it, Erikson transforms the reader.)

I’ve been sleeping 3/5 hours a day this week and yesterday I decided to reply on a forum to explain my interpretation of how the magic system in the Malazan world works, especially because it’s one of those aspects where my own frame of mind seems completely different from that of the average reader. And yet I’m not merely speculating because everything I say I see it grounded in those pages. I’ve only dug it out and made it more explicit. And no, making the Malazan magic system explicit doesn’t remove the beauty and mystery as it usually happens when you over analyze these things. It flourishes.

So, two things for me to notice. The first is that somehow the more I’m exhausted the more my brain seems to kick into higher gear. The second is that I wrote this mostly to pin down my own idea for myself and I didn’t expect anyone even to read it, especially on a forum that seems antagonistic to everything I write (my fault), instead I was surprised to see that my enthusiasm for this thing managed to cross over to some other users. Maybe to see the Malazan series in a slightly different light.

I have some comments to write even about the first page(s) of Fall of Light, because it’s another case where what I read in those lines is something that no one seems to have picked up. And yet that one is very obvious…

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I would have said the reverse – that Warrens are a clunky DnD type magic system, and that Erikson is too obsessed with the minutiae of how it works to give any meaning to it – worsened by the fact that his explanations are pure gibberish.

The magic system in Malazan is anti-mechanical. It’s strictly the opposite of science. You won’t grasp it if you parse it in a traditional way like a system of fixed rules in a roleplaying game. To explain the core of it I’d have to talk about philosophical concepts like “dualism” and an anthropocentric conception of reality.

The thing is: Malazan “spawns” from Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant (it’s not inspired by it, being completely different, but it’s conceptually hanging from the same branch of the same tree). Thomas Covenant is like a pre-modern version of fantasy, coming from a certain romantic tradition. That means, in the fewest words possible: the fantasy world doesn’t *exist* as external, objective reality as we assume our own world, but it’s just a “projection” of an internal mental or soul state. A mental “landscape” that turns concrete. Tangible objects and creatures you see are not simply tangible objects, but symbols. As it happens within a dream. The fantasy world is essentially like The Matrix, an artificial construction that closes around you. The writer consciously traps himself within this system he himself created, then “seals” the dome with some horizon occlusion.

Malazan moves from there, if you frame it as post-modern. It has a metalinguistic frame, observing the observation. Observing the world as an artificial creation. It’s like Covenant’s world, but moved on, looking at that world not from the inside (as Covenant, trapped within) but from the outside, like a writer, writing, observing himself writing. The main plot is hidden, because it’s a “shadow” of the text. A lot of this is even amusing wordplay, just for “fun” (see Shadowthrone and Pust, or even Lady Envy, or Kruppe a little bit, being conscious of the “meta” and rolling with it, hovering just a tiny bit above rules without completely breaking them). The magic in Malazan doesn’t make sense traditionally because it’s not a traditional mechanic. It’s not “rules of physics with a fantasy bent”. Magic in Malazan is pure meaning. Wherever meaning coalesces, magic becomes real and tangible instead of just an abstraction. Even the sedimentation of a strong emotion of a small community can potentially give birth to a small god (like the Cthulhu thing in book 5). The same as in reality we are driven by powerful symbols and meanings, that give us identity and drive. That construct our lives, creating differentiations as a linguistic system (see constructivism or even some Wittgenstein). Malazan takes this concept and makes it into something tangible instead of purely conceptual.

So, the important aspect to understand magic in Malazan is to observe how it transformed and evolved in the world. You notice how there are “old” gods and new gods. And you notice how the old gods have proprieties that are simply deduced from the societies that produced those gods. Very simple example: if the populations were sedentary or migratory. Essentially: all the gods in Malazan “behave” functionally as real gods in our own world. They are projections of cultural “meaning”. And that’s what you observe in the evolution of society within the Malazan world, the more it becomes “civilized” the more the gods become blurred, more subtle, representing more complex concepts. Gods evolve along the society that gave them birth. That, if you want to stay concrete, means that the relationship between gods and worshipers is circular. Belief shapes gods, gods have influence on believers. They use and are being used (see what Heboric does to Fener). It’s always a system of meaning, and it again comes from a fantasy world that is built as an anthropomorphic creation. A body, that Erikson SHOVES in your face when he tells you magic begins with Krul, who’s a god, who created magic with his own body. Or even with Erikson’s version of “gaia” the earth: Burn. Or the Mhybe, that is the MOST important thing within all Malazan. A woman who becomes a world. It’s only through a body that meaning can be created (witness!). Krul creates differentiations within his body, going from chaos to law. To rules. To systems (or same as the Crippled God has to enter the Deck of Dragons system in order to “play” the game, where “playing the game” is yet another metalinguistic pun, since we’re talking of a card game based on tarots). Exactly like a cultural system, or the evolution of civilization. So, as in Thomas Covenant the “fantasy world” is a body. An anthropomorphic creation. A filter, a lens you use to observe human life, through human life, through the act of writing (and act of reading as a surrogate of it, or, like, parasitic, or like a bird perched on Erikson’s shoulder observing what he’s doing with the hope of understanding some of it).

Like a linguistic system the Malazan magic has a diachronic dimension that is even more important than synchronic aspects: it’s ever-evolving.

That again means this fantasy world is built as human-sized (even when it project human fears or human struggles, that look inhuman, it’s always circular. Same as even the most inhuman species are still kind of human representations anyway). Whereas our own would is (supposedly) built on science. Rules, math. Stuff that is alien to a human dimension, that you can only try to grasp, but that is qualitatively different. (see Heboric flying with the Jade statues in book 4, those statues represent something closer to our world) Something that David Foster Wallace also writes about and defines: “the widening gap between knowledge and experience”.

Or: post-modernity. Trying to come to terms with a world that makes no “sense” anymore.

Bakker writes the same stuff, but from a different angle. So it’s like if it’s complementary and opposite to Malazan.

This is the stuff I like. If you know more of this kind I’d love to hear about it. Sadly I really haven’t found anything that comes close… (well, Evangelion, Donnie Darko, Upstream Color, Battlestar Galactica and LOST, these do certain things on the same line with their mythology, but none do it as well and, MOST OF ALL: *coherently* as Malazan)