What to follow Malazan with? Looking for palate cleanser before diving into next big thing.
So I’ve been in the Malazan marathon for a while. Currently early in book nine, but expect to be done book ten within a month. It’s fantastic (pun intended)! Going to need something to cleanse the palate after such a rich series – the speculative fiction equivalent of the pickled ginger served with sushi. Any suggestions?
I would wholly recommend it to certain people, and tell other people to avoid it, haha. A few comments.
(1a) If you’ve ever played D&D or GURPS or something similar, you will enjoy it more. The arc and characters are inspired by his own campaign. That campaign must have been the most amazing, most epic campaign ever conceived, but still.
(1b) Because it’s inspired by an RPG campaign, there are a few things that are somewhat unusual in terms of structure. In particular, sometimes characters that you know and love just die, seemingly abruptly. Unlike a pre-plotted story, the characters do not come with plot armour.
(2) There are a lot of characters – like, more than War and Peace. Wikipedia says over 600 named characters. For some people, you end up completely lost.
(2a) Furthermore, he does this thing where he starts describing a scene, or a character in a scene, without naming the character for something four or five pages. So you’re reading along for a while trying to work things out from context, when suddenly he name drops and you’re like, “ohhhh, that was the context I needed five pages ago!” When I start a new chapter, I’ve personally taken to skimming ahead until I find a proper name (to place context), then returning back to the front of the chapter to start reading. It’s actually probably my only gripe about his writing style, but it drives me mad.
(3) There’s this wonderful, almost lampshaded, plot contrivance he uses, which the characters in the story refer to as a “Convergence” with a capital C. Due to the system of magic, gods, powers, etc. in universe being drawn to major events like flies to a flame, all the mere mortals are overawed by these things called Convergences. The characters are even self-aware that they’re being led into a Convergence. It’s really quite clever – as it means that the usually bizarre notion of all these threads coming together for a end-of-novel climax have an in-universe explanation (rather than seeming very contrived like so many other novels). It’s an amazing literary trick!
(4) War is hell. Probably a good 30% of the series is just warfare – medieval, magical, fantasy, naval… For example, one book has a major plotline which is basically just a forced march under duress through a desert, and the attrition that goes with it. Additional cool stuff happens, but the setting is almost all fantasy military exploits. The death tolls in the series are very high. And some of it is very gruesome.
(5) The writing (except for note 2a) is really good, in my opinion. I’ll quote a couple of paragraphs to give an example (POV character contemplating his son, who has dragon’s blood):
Take a scintillating, flaring arm of the sun’s fire, give it form, a life of its own, and upon the faint cooling of the apparition, a man such as Rud Elalle might emerge, blinking with innocence, unaware that all he touched could well explode into destructive flames—had he been of such mind. And to teach, to guide him into adulthood, the singular aversion remained: no matter what you do, do not awaken him to his anger.
Sometimes, Udinaas had come to realize, potential was a force best avoided, for the potential he sensed in his son was not a thing for celebration.
No doubt every father felt that flash of blinding, burning truth—the moment when he sensed his son’s imminent domination, be it physical or something less overtly violent in its promise. Or perhaps such a thing was in fact rare, conjured from the specific. After all, not every father’s son could veer into the shape of a dragon. Not every father’s son held the dawn’s golden immanence in his eyes.
A very helpful write up on this, thanks! Yeah, I think the ‘waiting several pages to see what character we’re dealing with’ thing would be really annoying. But, it sounds like an interesting series despite this.
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