Category Archives: Malazan


Could you just stop the EAMD bullshit?

I have Fall of Light and will start very soon, I’m now back reading the final part of The Bonehunters, as well the last 300 pages of A Dance with Dragons. It makes for a nice and interesting contrast.

These last few days there has been at least a little noise about R. Scott Bakker. The new book is imminent (July) (actually only the first half of the first book, something that makes me very upset) but the first reviews are coming out as well as sample chapters that, in Bakker’s case, are always enough for plenty of discussion and speculations.

But my attention was caught by a specific aspect that I consider very interesting. What’s the “EAMD bullshit”? Here’s a quote:

Ever Are Men Deceived. It’s shorthand for the psychobabble that Bakker tends to get into in the middle of, like, random sentences. The crossed-out part above is an example. You have a woman running around desperately trying to find her young son in the middle of her enemy storming the gates and a full-blown riot. So…naturally she reflects on how prior knowledge influences actions and guides the course of events

This is the pertinent quote he gives (the italics are not Bakker’s):

Our knowledge commands us, though our conceit claims otherwise. It drives our decisions and so harnesses our deeds—as surely as any cane or lash. She knew well the grievous fate of little princes in times of revolt and overthrow. The fact that her husband’s Empire crashed down about her was but one more goad to find her son.

And here’s how he comments it:

Esmenet’s chapter would be amazing if he could just stop talking about the EAMD bullshit every other sentence. She’s panicking, she’s crying, and then she’d thinking that ya know, everyone is controlled by what came before and the history of their world and blah blah blah.

Seriously, edit that shit out. The first paragraph here is totally unneeded, at least the two sentences. It robs the story of the drama and panic that Esme has in the moment. She’s a parent. She’s not thinking about how knowledge command us. She’s thinking that in sieges and revolts princes die.

That’s it. That’s her motivation. We don’t need more than that. We don’t need to jump from point to point. Just that mantra – in sieges and revolts princes die.

Well, there’s indeed a noticeable slip into third person. That’s why it would be interesting to discuss it with the writers themselves, not even just Bakker.

These days we are used, especially in fantasy, to this “third person limited” perspective, and it happens that when some structure is universally used it becomes canon. People get used to the canon and if you suddenly don’t respect it then you’re doing something wrong, or giving a feeling of wrongness to the reader. In this case I wonder, is that simply a slip, a stylistic quirk or vice, or a *deliberate* slip?

I use to think at this third person limited point of view as a bird that alights on the shoulder of a character and speaks for him. But sometimes it’s the bird talking, you just don’t notice. Or the bird can alight from that shoulder and land somewhere else. A meta-structure. Self-awareness? Erikson in the eighth Malazan book uses Kruppe, a character in the book, as a framing device. Commentary. It’s one further loop of that voice, another lens that bends the light of the story.

As a reader, the more you play with this, the more you have my attention. Writing about writing. It’s not a slip, a mistake, it’s grasping the structure itself.

David Foster Wallace in a short story titled “Mister Squishy”, part of the “Oblivion” collection, has a sudden shift, mid-sentence, in the middle of the story, from third person to first. It’s one of the biggest chills I ever got while reading a story. Only then you realize the story was always told in first person. Of course that’s deliberate, if a bit gimmicky. It’s part of the experimentation, playing with the rules to obtain an effect. Or just put the reader off balance by failing to conform to certain expectations. It’s a sense of vertigo, and it can be very powerful.

It might be asking Bakker too much to actually play even more explicitly and deliberately with structure, and drag the point of view breaks even more as a plot point. It still might be just a slip, or simply a measured consideration, where the effect and the message were considered more important than submitting to a rigorous structure.

Martin is absolute king, in my reading experience, of dealing with this third person limited. Better than everyone else by far. There are still “slips”, for example in descriptions, but they are always “transparent” for the reader, so you can never catch the bird talking, it’s always the character. Martin never actually slips, never wanders off.

Bakker might be seen as having this voice driving a point, using characters as metaphors. Erikson? I’m not even sure and I’ll observe with more attention. Erikson deliberately breaks structure even if usually sticks to third person limited as the norm. I remember at least one case where in a single scene the bird jumps shoulders. Maybe Erikson just doesn’t give much authority to the rule of the structure and, if the story is better serviced that way, he makes exceptions without hesitation.

“Stop the EAMD bullshit” is a mantra that works perfectly well for Erikson too, after all. That’s what I often read in forums (“I wanted to see more action. If I wanted unlikely philosophical conversations I would read Dostoevsky.”). Yet that’s why I read these books. Because they just don’t repeat and conform to the rest of the genre. Wouldn’t it just be more carefully hidden and unaddressed sleight of hands? I want those voices. I treasure that self-awareness, those layers of commentary that bend the angle, that disrupt the natural flow. Sometimes you have to break this habit of just slipping into stories, of immersion. Sometime breaking the immersion you very carefully built might even be the point. Show a deceit, seize that structure. But, of course, the higher you aim, the higher the risk. You might even slip and it makes for a clumsy fall. Part of the deal? Accept it.

Fantasy Realism

Well, that’s an oxymoron. Article on the New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sarah-larson/an-open-letter-to-the-white-walker-army

Even Jon Snow, who, as several characters reminded us, has a pretty face and a sympathetic backstory, isn’t enough to provide all the human intrigue in a scene with seven million undead C.G.I. assholes.

“Game of Thrones,” which is part fantasy, is also mostly a drama, and those of us who are there for the drama, White Walker Army, and for the comedy, such as it is, rate you very low on the emotional-realism scale. We dread your appearance not just because you threaten Jon Snow and his cohorts but because you threaten to drag the show we love further into a realm that we find tedious. As a friend texted me recently, “It’s turning into a video game.”

The reaction I saw to this was about the attack on the genre elements of the show, that a part of the public certainly likes very much, but I’m not interested specifically on that aspect today.

I also believe, and have written a few times, that the more ASoIaF moves away from the political backstabbing and toward its more fantastic elements, the more it actually loses its shine and appeal. It’s not so much because I personally dislike fantasy in my novels (obviously), but because Martin’s skills don’t seem to be there. He’s good at writing the other stuff. So the series seems more on a downward trend not because of its sprawl, but because its direction (ice and fire) is less brilliant and inspired than its core (game of thrones).

I felt something similar when I was reading Erikson’s “Memories of Ice” the third book, also specifically about another zombie army. I could see what the author was trying to do, but I simply did not think it could be achieved. It would be a failure, for reasons that are similar to those expressed in that New Yorker article. Yet Erikson managed to pull it off by resorting to a certain “trick”. And it worked! It was brilliant and it managed to achieve that ambition I thought simply not possible.

Martin is not done, so we all have to wait to see if he pulls it off, or even WHAT he’s trying to pull off. But I think he has a more traditional interpretation of fantasy and that he’s not interested in digging deep. It’s just a layer. But because of this, there’s the risk of disappointment when the reveals will kind of fizzle out, or will look like dry CGI.

The TV show had the merit of pulling in the general public, but to a lot of them the “fantasy” in it still feels tacked on. Something they tolerate more than something they enjoy.

Malazan done better: Bloodborne

Despite loving Malazan and thinking it has no challengers for what it does within its genre, I also do think it’s weak on certain aspects.

I tried to explain as a mix of aesthetic joined with depth and meaningfulness. The same as you’d get when looking at densely decorated architecture, but where each single decoration isn’t meant to be merely beautiful to stare at, but also with a dense symbolism and meaning.

Games, books, movies or whatever else, if there’s support for deep mythology and where no detail is left to chance. This myth comes from Tolkien. It’s not just in service of “realism”, and so immersion, but also as a way to reward digging and discovering what’s hidden in that depth. It means engaging with the medium, being part of it, enjoying revelations and epiphanies in those rare occasions when everything locks perfectly together, or perfectly realigns to show a new perspective.

Looking for hints, have your mind making the connections, slowly getting closer to find a solution, or a compelling interpretation. This is all about complexity and detail worth having. A medium that matures and takes itself seriously.

A lot of what I tried to describe in abstraction is already possible in the Malazan we have. It part of what makes it really good. And it is also what Malazan has in common with the approach to the lore and storytelling in the “Souls” game, including and in particular with the latest: Bloodborne.

Bloodborne is that aspect of Malazan turned into game. That aspect of active entertainment. Where the medium demands and requires that you engage actively. The problem is: Bloodborne does it even better.

If you know very little or nothing about Bloodborne then here’s an article that will tell you about story and mythology:
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/04/09/whats-really-going-on-in-bloodborne

I couldn’t avoid thinking that the whole of Bloodborne not only would fit perfectly in Malazan, but it would be exactly what “Night of Knives” could have been if it was pushed to its full potential. Night of Knives is that same story, only missing that particular “heft” that is instead fully realized within Bloodborne.

The basic structure of the town turned into hunting grounds and dream dimensions bleeding into reality during a special night (and the moon), is not only the common link between the book and the game, but also the manga “Berserk” by Kentaro Miura, that we know for sure has been a major source of inspiration for Hidetaka Miyazaki, the designer of Bloodborne. These three, Berserk, Bloodborne and Malazan go hand in hand (and of course heavily influencing all three is Lovecraft). The only difference is that Malazan swallows them in a much bigger picture. Yet the other two seize aesthetic and mythology, that smaller slice, and realize them even better.

Not to say Night of Knives is a bad book, but it falls shorts (very short) of that potential that was there. And I’m thinking of a potential that not even Erikson could realize.

So this is what I’m trying to point out: some of the ingredients that make Malazan great are ingredients that went into Bloodborne. Those aspects that come out even more clearly in Bloodborne. And what Malazan lacks when compared not to similar works, but when compared to its own ideal potential, is what instead a game like Bloodborne fully delivers.

Erikson’s Malazan

(Non-spoiler) quotes from the recent QA about the series on Tor. Erikson’s own words:

Writing it felt like more than one lifetime: it felt like hundreds of lifetimes, all crowded into a single place and a single time.

I died and was reborn a thousand times in these ten novels, and I wonder now how many times a single soul can go through that.

I laid traps for you time and time again, pits for your unwary headlong rush – the plunge intended to make you feel whether you wanted to or not. With luck, you stepped into a few of those. If I was a god, I’d throw you into every one of them.

That last one is almost chilling (see in the context of the “Magus” recent quotes here on the blog). I have this idea that Erikson isn’t completely conscious of the implications of what he writes, yet he shows being so lucid.

Hidden under

I randomly bumped on this old Erikson interview. A couple of quotes:

The dialogue that I have written that I remain pleased about is generally the tersest kind. The massive understatement. The line with a hundred volumes hiding under it, pages ready to explode but all, somehow, held back, contained. Exchanges where all parties skirt around what’s really going on. Evasions and the like.

Well, that’s what I like reading indeed :)

1: Finish what you start.

2: When a scene drags, when it gets brutally hard to get out the next line, the next word; when blood starts beading on your forehead, don’t switch scenes, don’t shift characters, don’t do any of the running-away things you might be inclined to. Push through. Everything up to that point was the lead-up to this moment, and this moment is when you learn – you learn how to write, what it is to be a writer, and all the reasons you possess for being one. That tight, claustrophobic place, is your call to courage. Don’t evade, don’t back away, don’t shift laterally. Keep going, until it hurts.

3: Finish what you start.

Malazan covers – how they should be

I was looking at Subterranean Press limited editions of the Malazan books and being quite disappointed at the art there. But then I always am with that sort of stuff.

For fun I decided to describe what I’d instead put on the covers. I’m not an artist, but this is the sort of stuff I see in my mind and that I think would look great. Obviously just the first five books, because I’ve still to read the rest.

1- Gardens of the Moon. Well, Pale. Camera at the ground level, bottom up. You see at a distance Pale’s high walls, enough to give the walls some details and impressive scale. The cover should have a sense of verticalness to it. So the eye is drawn right at Pale’s walls, imposing, going upward. But then the impressive vista should escalate in scope as hovering above Pale you have Moon’s Spawn, maybe very slightly askew. So no characters on the cover, just a wide view of the scene, to focus on scale and scope. It should give a sense of disproportion, as if you cannot give a proper size to the elements in respect to each other. Sense of wonder.

2- Deadhouse Gates. Chain of Dogs. I’d go with top down, a look at a valley far below from an high point, the Chain of Dogs going through it. Not close enough to really detail people, just again giving a sense of scale at the long trail going through the dry land. Capemoths and stuff. Warm colors along with a sense of bleakness in the environment. Could even play with dust forming up a skull-like shape, in the background, but very subtle.

3- Memories of Ice. Just Kallor on his throne of bones, right in the center of the cover, arms open wide, hands too, but relaxed, as in welcoming. The layout should have a sort of curve to it. So that Kallor is almost facing the center of the cover, while the bottom part of the cover is through a top down angle. In this part, the three gods. K’rul in the center (bony, accusing finger pointed at Kallor), Draconus on left (I can’t remember if he has the sword already, if he does, let it drag behind, like a sack barely held by one hand), Nightchill on the right. All facing away, toward Kallor, from this slightly top down perspective to give the image some depth. The cover should be black & white (I’d love a strict ink style, no shading), with some slight/faint bluish highlights.

4- House of Chains. Oh, think of Hamlet holding the skull in his hand. Only that Hamlet is Karsa, and the skull is a poor Malazan soldier (looking like a child compared to Karsa’s bulk). The cover should be almost like a silhouette in black. On the right you see Karsa’s impressive sword thrust on the ground. No detail, just a black shape, slightly tilted and about as high as Karsa. It should dominate the view even if aside. Karsa should be with a knee down on the ground, a massive hand completely wrapping up the Malazan soldier’s head, helm still on (and the whole body still attacked, not just a head). The scale of the hand should be massive, dominating the comparably small head, as if about to completely crush it in his hand. The guy is dead, but Karsa is lifting him, so he’s as if upward, hanging from Karsa’s hold, just the feet and lower part of the legs dragging slightly aside on the ground. The height of the guy should be almost level with Karsa, who’s kneeling down though, so bringing the height ALMOST on the same level. Exception to the silhouette style is: the scene has some depth to it, Karsa slightly on the back, the soldier slightly on the front. One trick is: Karsa isn’t looking at the skull, but right through the cover, right at the camera. The scene should also have a sort of dichotomy that fits well as a theme. In the back you see a forest at dawn, mountains in the background, or some T’lan construction (as in the book). But a peaceful, warm colored scene. Then there’s a sharp cut, with Karsa and the soldier almost like a dark silhouette, so much darker, but enough to give them a lot of detail. Just lack of color. So you have these two different levels, the warm background, and the very dark foreground. With Karsa frowning at the camera.

5- Midnight Tides. That scene at the sea, where the massive thing comes out out the water. Something inspired to the third picture you see here. Scene again based on wide scale, slightly tilted for dynamism. Camera from the land looking out at the sea. Looking like something straight out of the apocalypse.

As it goes

Okay, to hell with boundaries. I make a sport of this blog confusing everything with everything else.

Reading Malazan book 6 I found a quote that is basically the Malazan formulation of the Kabbalah quote:

The gods, old or new, did not belong to her. Nor did she belong to them. They played their ascendancy games as if the outcome mattered, as if they could change the hue of the sun, the voice of the wind, as if they could make forests grow in deserts and mothers love their children enough to keep them. The rules of mortal flesh were all that mattered, the need to breathe, to eat, drink, to find warmth in the cold of night. And, beyond these struggles, when the last breath had been taken inside, well, she would be in no condition to care about anything, about what happened next, who died, who was born, the cries of starving children and the vicious tyrants who starved them – these were, she understood, the simple legacies of indifference, the consequences of the expedient, and this would go on in the mortal realm until the last spark winked out, gods or no gods.

Here’s again the quote from Kabbalah:

(about the question “What is the meaning of my life?”)

“It is indeed true that historians have grown weary contemplating it, and particularly in our generation. No one ever wishes to consider it. Yet the question stands as bitterly and vehemently as ever. Sometimes it meets us uninvited, pecks at our minds and humiliates us to the ground before we find the famous ploy of flowing mindlessly in the currents of life, as always.”

Then I happened on this page (with some interesting nice pictures), and I found this quote that metaphorically matches the previous posts on Free Will and being bound to a point of view:

The descent of the divine emanations concretized in cosmic creation is occurring at this moment, and the fact that the world is such or such a thing, for the modern mentality, or that in accord with our viewpoint we perceive this or that, is completely indifferent to the process of the universal creation, which is ongoing, even visualized from the horizontal viewpoint, and simultaneous, from the vertical projection.

The interesting part is the formulation of the system as “simultaneous, from the vertical projection”. Meaning deterministic. There’s no time scaling. Yet experience from within, our viewpoint, is bound to time and seen as becoming.

So this aspects of Kabbalah seems to retain (and explain away) the problem of compatibilism.

Related, but only if you are a particular type of crazy like I am, here’s a page of David Foster Wallace’s personal copy of Joyce’s Ulysses. Showing how a text with bi-dimensional perspective is given three-dimensionality because of 2nd level (recursive) observations: