So I just finished the Crippled God an hour or so ago. Started writing this to get my thoughts out, and didn't decide whether it was review or rambling, or who I was writing for, until halfway through. I'll share it with you nonetheless!

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The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Written by Steven Erikson, an anthropologist, archaeologist, and – of course! – long-time dungeon and dragons player, this ten-book series offers the most breathtaking and humbling sense of scale that I have ever found in a work of fiction. With one hand he portrays squalid humanity and all of its foibles: he gives us hundreds of living and breathing characters, shows us their love and their ambition, their struggle, the importance that they assign the things they do in his world. With the other hand he gives us a vast history with which to frame these characters: a world whose story stretches back through the ages, with characters that feel the weight of time, and make the reader feel it with them, like no other fantasy out there. And, most impressive of all, he marries these two qualities: he paints a world of futility and struggle, banal – his favorite word – striving for meaningless goals, and then he turns around and makes the people he writes about matter to us.

And it’s all, of course, set in a deeply realized fantasy world. Erikson definitely does the genre justice, and wrings it for all it’s worth: the themes he touches on can be more easily exposed in his world. He can create vast differences in lifetime and power, a contrast that is often played on but ultimately is not important when it comes right down to it. When humans and immortals, dragons and dogs make their choices, it is always their humanity – or lack thereof – that takes center stage.

Erikson’s writing has had its ups and downs, its flaws. He’s had pacing problems here and there, a weak introduction to the series, swings in locale and characters from book to book. An over-abundance of page-time given to seemingly inconsequential characters. Too much reliance on nihilistic inner monologue.

But I really feel like it all came together magnificently in the final book. I was surprised to see so many plot threads from so many novels come together so seamlessly, without feeling forced. All of those seemingly inconsequential characters are still fairly minor when taken alone, but when viewed as a whole - as a vast collection of tales and lives brought together at the end, like this, with individual moments of glory lasting for brief snippets of time - I understand what Erikson was doing, and why, and I’m glad he did it. These characters, even as they are framed within a harsh and humbling world, matter to the reader and to the outcome for the brief moments that they shine. This is exactly the sort of thing Erikson seems to be striving to make us feel.

Ultimately, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, and The Crippled God in particular, was a grand and powerful journey through one of the most thoroughly realized – and stark and unforgiving – universes I’ve ever encountered.