Bantam Press' cover for 'Gardens of the Moon.'
A friend of mine once told me about a movie series backed by Ted Turner which was set up to be an epic, three-part, 12-hour opus about the American Civil War. It was called Gods and Generals, starring Jeff Daniels and Robert Duvall, and it was canceled after the first 4-hour entry of the trilogy. This bothered my friend to no end — if someone’s going to put in the effort to create an epic piece of art, then it needs to be given a chance. Yes, it was slow, but this made total sense in its entirety as a story as it was a beginning. The payoff comes by the end when the people who believed in it and stayed true start raving about the quality of an inspired work that began and ended with epic vision. That the conclusion was worth the journey.
Too bad for Civil War buffs, but for fans of fantasy novels there is The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, a series which wholly encompasses this sense of scope. Encompasses it and obliterates it.
Written in the early 1990s and published by Bantam Books in the UK by 1999, Gardens of the Moon marked the beginning of the Malazan series. Eleven years later, including eight further novels and four novellas, the Book of the Fallen will hit its zenith when book 10, The Crippled God, is released in January 2011 (UK). Since the series’ inception, author Steven Erikson (real name Steve Rune Lundin) has published at a rate of almost a full novel per year, missing only 2003 and 2005 book-ending Midnight Tides. With the series collectively amounting to over 7500 pages softcover, that is an awful lot of work — work rewarded with a dedicated fanbase and a World Fantasy Award nomination. The feat is even more impressive when compared to other successful fantasy writers of the last 20 years, notably Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin, who fought to keep both themselves and their stories on track as their popular fantasy sagas progressed.
