At the moment I can only say there's some of that in the second and third books, but at the same time it's not the same. Not to me at least. A bit, the very beginning of DHG also made me moan a bit and fear I was embarking in another 800-pages of the same tedious first experience I had with GotM, but that got turned around quickly enough in DHG, before I abandonned the book.

Beyond some point, you've absorbed (and retained) enough of the background/setting that the mysteries and the occasional baffling WTF-just-happened-there scenes become interesting to follow and get drawn into (the whole jade statue stuff, or the DH stuff in the second book for instance). Erikson also polished a lot between book 1 and 2 his in media res devices and storytelling angles, at least providing you with POV characters as baffled by what's going on as you are (at least some whom you can relate more to) and who cares enough to puzzle it out too. He also got a lot better at making you care for his characters. You become more than just a remote witness to the actions of important (or at least comple people at some point. For some, that point may very well have been reached in GotM itself (a lot of people seemed to have strugled with the beginning but have been drawn into the Darujhistan stuff a lot more than I did before I had read MoI. All these mages, politicians, assassins and thiefs, demons, giants and undead creatures were just standard Fantasy-RPG fare to me (at that point, anyway), and you just know that for all the appearances of "originality" some majorly villainous god or another is gonna show up at some point. Yeah, they were not very Tolkien-ish characters, but - sorry Mr. Adam Roberts - Tolkien isn't the sole source of fantasy clichés!

I guess the main rule (more like a convention than a rule) of storytelling Erikson transgressed in GotM is that before a reader can be bothered to absorb such big amounts of information and make the efforts to follow you in a tale like the one he was telling, you need to hook him solidly and make him care to work his way through (for some reason I'm suspecting Erikson has an even smaller female readership than the other best-selling Fantasy writers... a lot of his stuff is the sort that excite the more intelligent tier of young men a lot, the big magic, the lack of teenagers, the very intricate stuff for "initiates". That's what he managed to do fairly well in DHG but not in GotM - at least not with me. Another related problem is that Erikson didn't mitigate the problems he created by bombarding readers with tons of information by using tricks that would help the reader retain at least a fair amount of that, to make it more than "noise" in that novel. The ratio of valuable immediate information to noise in GotM is fairly bad. I have an above average memory, but to retain much of what I read I need to be made to care to absorb that information, and be able to make a few sketchy links of my own that I will use as mnemonic devices, or have a bit of visual help (like a map, or good textual descriptions to create a good mental image I will retain), a bit of context, some characters I can relate to enough that I will care enough about to retain references they make to their homeland and the situation there (Seven Cities people for instance, not vague references to these distant events by characters like Lorn). Something to work with and get some footing! Birdviews are all good and well, but even birds want to perch somewhere once in a while. Bombard me with continent names, city names, neighbourhood names, race names (that most times in GotM I couldn't tell if they're human people or not), people, past events with none of that and I give it all a few hours before it's all washed out of my memory as "pure noise" (the first books at least have such a low retainability factor that every time I leave the series behind for a few months I need to start at the beginning again....) Erikson shows you casually characters from races without any proper physical description... because the characters who see those people are used to them. He will imply the barghast are enemies of the Empire but there will be one with Whiskeyjack and you don't get any information why he's there, and no one seems to care... and you don't really understand what a barghast is or look like, anyway - if they all come from one location or they're scattered on the various continents. You get confused by all the geographic references you can't retain so well because Erikson doesn't help to visualize them enough (and that end up confusing you at some point. Was this name that of a continent, a city, a Malazan province? Should I care?) You get explained military strategies (that won't be relevant before the next year, and book 3!) in details that you can't even puzzle out with the help of the (really confusing) map (and mind you, so many names not on the map have been mentionned by this point that you've stopped caring much about the geography) and don't care one bit about the two sides, which look to be fairly divided beside. And what are those Seven Cities and those vague refeences to it anyway you ask yourself, and why should you care about what's going on there or what went on there when you already have your hands full trying to understand the conflict with the 12 Free Cities and the motives of all the factions involved? Why should I care for Whiskeyjack's past when he's appeared only remotely in a handful of scenes when I get this information, and I don't really even have a BB character to follow and care for at this point?

After books 2-3, all this stuff becomes interesting. But the first time around? It's mostly just noise.


What gets annoying in GotM is that you feel alone and remote and uninvolved, because Erikson uses mostly "advanced players" (like Tolkien opening LOTR with 200 pages of esoteric stuff with Elrond and Gandalf, Aragorn etc., like Herbert - who used the in media res device too in Dune - telling it all through Jessica, Leto etc. without having a Paul somewhere to anchor you and give you some footing, some angle to approach the complicated stuff) to carry his tale, and it makes you feel there's really no good reason except the whims of the writer why you shouldn't understand more about the basics of geography/politics/magic/cosmology when you spend most of the book in the company of such knowledgeable people as the Empire's number two, an experienced Claw, Whiskeyjack and his people you know have seen a lot and understand a lot, the Empire's High Mage, another very skilled Mage, the top people in Darhujistan like Baruk - and you start thinking that unless some characters who don't understand any more than you do show up soon, there's just no way you'll ever catch up. You know the big book of magic rules and the world map is right there on the table and everyone around the table has read it many times, but you're just denied even a peek at it. Erikson himself said it best through one of the characters (not sure who, but the line stayed with me: "He had nowhere to turn for answers, and he was getting tired of asking questions".

A critic has described GotM as "absorbing on a human level". DHG sure is - the chain of dogs is a griping tale, with a major epic wind, and is a very original (and in my view, very succesful) introduction to a story line and characters that goes totally off the road of your basic hero's journey, but GOTM? I want some of the stuff that Amazon guy who thought that was smoking. The best that could be said about the characters in GOtM are that some are cool and sympathetic like Tattersail (Krupe OTOH is just a massive annoyance in that book - what's the point of making him act the idiot like that, no one, not even the people around him, is fooled by his routine...it gets old after two scenes at most), but the issues they're dealing with are so beyond your reach at this point they hardly become "absorbing" as persons (especially since in that book in particular Erikson tendend to substitute what seems all too much like RPG "levelling up" for proper character development, when in DHG and MoI he started combining the two aspects with a lot more success).

The whole "archeological" approach gets most fascinating by book 2 when you start understanding a bit more the basic mundane aspects of the present (military, politics etc.) and start to care to puzzle out the past with some of the characters and you have enough hints about the cosmology that it actually becomes fascinating, but in book 1 it all too often gets tedious and annoying, this whole feeling that Erikson is forcing you way too much to run after him and his characters to catch up.




Again, after only a third of the series I can agree with that, and I got to enjoy that approach, as I thought all along I would because this sort of thing is exactly my cup of tea, and why I chose to read Erikson in the first place, based on descriptions and reviews of what was in there, and how good it would get.

My problem is really with GOTM, the POVs Erikson chose to tell the story from etc. I don't want to enter a world like this knowing and understanding everything, it's really the information overload in GotM that baffled me and irritated me after a while. Some people enjoy a lot the big magic stuff, but personally when I can't really follow it I get rapidly to the point where I want to skip to the end and see who won the fight and move on...

If I'm not supposed to understand the first thing about what Tattersail is doing with her magic, then I prefer to see her through the eyes of people who don't either, not through her own. If I'm not to understand the first thing about the Tarot, I don't want to have long scenes about it between an Adept and a High Mage. Cut to the chase and just give me her conclusions, I won't understand the first thing about how she got there anyway. I tend to call it "self-indulgent" because I don't feel Erikson cared all that much for the reader at the other end but wrote the book mostly for his own enjoyement, and that of his pals like Esslemont.

As I reread it (which I'm doing atm), what also irritates me is that the book (the story anyway) is actually good, and now that I know the Imperial basics in geography and politics, the rough recent history, the magical and cosmology basics, etc. I have no problem at all retaining information or getting interested in these details and obscure references that the first time around I reacted to as distractions and cluttering, but I'm a bit pissed that Erikson made me lose my time plowing through this stuff at the time I couldn't possibly enjoy most of it. I expect to catch many new things as I reread the first books of a complex series - I love layered stuff - but GotM just went way over the top.



I'm quite sure you're right. In GotM, that goal is just a bit inexpertly achieved, IMO.



I'm quite sure there are. I know pretty exactly what kind of people around me I could recommend this book to who would enjoy it the first time. Experienced RPG players for instance, and one friend in anthropology who enjoys imagining the whole way of life and beliefs of very obscure cultures (the sort of small steppe tribes I never even heard of) and doesn't mind she has but a few scraps of old poetry, a few obscure etchings on a ritual stick and three pieces of broken pottery to start with.... you know, the kind who will read literal translations of old epics and will skip all the annotations until the end to come back and see how much her understanding of anthropology will have been enough to puzzle things out and how she matches the scholarship of the editor.

That being said, I didn't re read GotM 5-6 times (not the whole, mind you, I stopped once before part 2, once in the middle of it, and once about 100 pages from the end) because I didn't understand it or got discouraged by it. There is lot in GotM that I suspected (what ascending means, and what the Warrens might be and so on) and turned out right later. I abandonned it mostly I got bored with it along the way and my to-read pile at home is so huge I rarely let writers bore me for very long.

And why I bothered to return to it? Mostly because of Wotmania people, not the book itself. And now? Mostly because I enjoyed books 2-3 a lot last year and want to carry on, but of course I've forgotten too much.

After MoI I bought all the others then published (up to nine), so one day I'll finish the whole thing



He improved even more obviously as a storyteller than as a writer, I'd say, if that makes sense.

And again, if it wasn't for the fact it's book 1, GotM in itself is quite good. There was some very interesting stuff in it, even the first time around (Quick Ben's stuff interested me - especially after his scene with Shadowthrone, and I liked the Sorry and House Shadow storyline... but then the fact the Emperor and Dancer must have ascended was one of the few things I caught on right off the bat...)