Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson

well just finished this book last night (stayed up til 6am! ack! :) and damn!!!! soooo good!! love it!! but now my only reservation is “please god dont let the series drag and lose focus” !! coz sooooo many of these multi-volume series do and start sucking so much! my 2 biggest disappointments were George R. R. Martin’s and Kate Elliot’s. those rants will be a separate post at some point! haha! but i’m hopeful coz i then spent an hour after finishing the book, reading more about the future volumes and they look like he knows where he’s going. hmm... you know what one difference is maybe? (i’ll have to confirm by reading Erikson’s series ;) Martin mostly keeps the same characters throughout and so has to become quite inventive with the plot, to the point of backtracking in my opinion, to make 4000+ pages of story keep going. Erikson has introduced a ton of new characters, settings and stories with each book, with one book (#5) being completely unrelated. but is later tied into the original story by subsequent books.

one reason his books (i’m hoping ;) will work as a 10 volume series is coz he created the Malazan world before beginning writing, with Ian Cameron Esslemont, for a role-playing game. so the creation of this world is super thorough with tons of detail!!!! and its a true world... a world with several continents and several countries/lands on each continent, and lots of different races!! i think if you’re gonna do 5+ volume series you have to create multiple lands and continents, you just cant get away with one. for one novel, no problem. also what might be great about this series is that each book is a complete story with a conclusion. only the 9th out of 10 books ends on a cliffhanger!!! which is more how Jacqueline Carey writes her novels vs. Martin or Elliot!! and i like that coz yes, i like to read about the same world and characters in several books, but please make a book finish a story arc!!!

so i think that detail-obsessed part of me is one of the reasons i love fantasy so much!!! i love pouring over glossaries and maps!! hahaha! and lately my beef with some fantasy authors is that you can tell when they planned the world ahead of time vs. on the fly as they wrote. the books really suffer when the world, characters, or story are created on the fly, in my opinion.

so back to Gardens! another awesome thing about Erikson is that he’s not stingy about magic!!! some books have just a smidgeon of magic. or magic on a grand scale, ie. main character has been blessed/fated to become the saviour of the universe. or they talk about what a huge toll magic takes on the caster so they dont use it much. in this book, there are consequences to magic use, which is totally important to have, but they still use magic a ton!! it makes me think of X-Men The Animated Series vs. the movies. in the movies they barely use their mutant powers, first movie not at all almost vs. the series where they’re always blasting someone!! even jean grey who’s power is telepathic/telekinetic is still blasting away at bad guys!! she barely did anything in the movie except become the phoenix!

so all round an amazing book and i’m really really hoping the series proves as awesome as this book!! nothing sucks more than absolutely loving books then getting turned off by future installments. it devastated me with George R.R. Martin.

oh. and great characters too of course!!! such variety of different types!! and he lets you into the head of each one so you totally start to get them!! oh one scene i gotta mention that killed me! so sad! the one where Quick Ben released the Korvalah demon named Pearl on the rooftops during the ambush. that demon has the voice of a child, but is super powerful, and so is surprised when the attackers are not fleeing and asks whether it should pity them and Quick Ben says no just kill them and then you can go free. as yet another attacker comes, Pearl says plaintively “Ben Adaephon Delat, see the last who comes. You send me to my death.” and Ben whispers that he knows. as he is about to leave Pearl says “Ben Adaephon Delat, do you pity me?” and he replies softly “yes”.