And they are so bad ass and so individual, each, partly due to sheer size of the series, are given their own personal histories and nuances that grow, are set back, and grow again.

These books are almost completely and sublimely dominated by wonderful characters that absolutely don’t fit the traditional fantasy character default appearance setting and it’s not one or two or three characters, we all know it’s almost countless. Literally of the 100 greatest female characters in fantasy, he has a dozen of them. Further, I’m on social media and I follow and am followed by book publishers and people in the industry and thus I see all these think pieces and polls regarding books and I am constantly bewildered, for years now, at how many articles I see that are “top 10 Fantasy this” or “the best fantasy that does this”, written by other writers and industry professionals and clearly when the answer should just be The Malazan Book of the Fallen or Steven Erikson in general, he’s NEVER even mentioned or listed and is instead passed over for what I’d call social media trendy, very solid works of speculative fiction that I wholeheartedly recommend, but nothing remotely in the same league of how Erikson’s work fits and dominates in those categories.Įrikson does this with a completely modern perspective but wearing the clothes and walking down the roads familiar to us, or so we thought.

The crippled god by steven erikson