Tag Archives: fantasy

Book Shelf: Malazan Book of the Fallen

By Joel
July 13, 2010

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.

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HBO picks up Game of Thrones for Series

By Will
March 2, 2010

The Hollywood Reporter and several other outlets are reporting that HBO has given the greenlight for a ten episode order of Game of Thrones. The TV series, which is based on George R.R. Martin’s extremely popular A Song of Ice … Continue reading

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Sitges ’09 Reviews Part Two: Doghouse, Macabre, Heartless

By Shelagh
November 19, 2009

To see Shelagh’s first batch of  reviews from the 2009 Sitges Film Festival, including Splice, Amer, Cargo and TiMER be sure to click here. Probably the best night I had at Sitges was not at a film, but at a … Continue reading

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Sitges ’09 Reviews Part One: Splice, Amer, Cargo, TiMER

By Shelagh
November 7, 2009

Last February when on holiday in Spain, I was fortunate enough to meet Mike Hostench, co-director of Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya, the largest fantastic film festival of Europe and one of the largest and most important … Continue reading

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TIFF Review: Solomon Kane

By Shelagh
September 22, 2009

British director Michael J. Bassett brings to the screen Solomon Kane, the graphic novel penned by Robert E. Howard  (who also created Conan the Barbarian) with all due seriousness and gravity, as apparently befits the character. I have not read … Continue reading

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