The "Malazan Book of the Fallen" thread.

[Jagged]

Considering that we know lots of the people currently posting in this thread have not finished the series I think Spoiler Tags are entirly Appropriate. I'm fine if someone wants to go start a thread with Spoilers clearly announced in the title so that they don't have to use tags. That is fine. But to just start throwing spoilers around when you know that some people who have been posting and reading the thread recently are only partially through the series is bad form.

[Kalbear]

Fine, Arakasi and Jagged - I'll mark those as spoilery to save your delicate sensibilities. I find it a bit ironic that you're worried about me spoiling aspects of books that have been out for years while actually talking about spoilers in cleartext about the book that's just about to come out. But whatever. It's also ironic that you're spoiling aspects of books I've not read yet (BH for starters) when talking to me in generic spoilers. See how silly this becomes?

I've not read BH. I've just read up to MT. It doesn't really change a whole lot though.

SPOILER: Arakasi said

Lets go back to Heboric. In book 2 and 4 he has some victories over forces that we could call stronger by your statements. You say you stop worrying about them because you don't think they can get hurt. But in book 6 he and co gets ambushed by the renegade Imass and he gets killed. If your stance was right well he'd be alive, Felisin would be alive, Itkovian would be alive, etc. But they're not.

Christ, this is annoying.

SPOILER: Spoilers through BH

Congrats, you've spoiled BH for me.

Felisin's death was telegraphed since DHG when she became the whirlwind. It was not a big surprise. I figured that was the role of the Whirlwind. Heboric dying does surprise me quite a bit, actually, because like you say - he was absolutely overwhelmed many times and survived. Itkovian wasn't that special; I barely remember him. The point, again, is reality vs. perception. When someone like Karsa survives something that lays waste to continents, I just go 'okay, he's not going to die no matter what'. Hell, people don't even get really hurt in these books. People can escape via warrens or gods come to rescue them or anything. That's what I expect now - that people are going to survive. Somehow. In some weird, pulled-out-of-their-ass way. Perhaps that changes in BH - but from the spoilers I've read with Eres involved, it sounds like that becomes more pronounced, not less.

It might matter about 3 main characters dying if there were the same amount of main characters as in Martin's books - but there are pages and pages of 'main' characters, each of which seems to change from book to book. But again, since that wasn't my argument in the first place, I don't really care. It's about perception. It's about people like Tattersail being exploded and somehow surviving, or of the entire bridgeburner contingent ascending, or about everyone who faced the Jaghut Tyrant doing just fine despite this being this Horrible Thing. It's about Icarium and Mappo facing really scary demony things that they're worried about...and still just wading through them like chaff. (and yes, Icarium is a godthingy too. Mappo isn't. ) It's about the random crazy sappers and engineers and heavy sword people somehow living through things that gods are fighting in. While I realize there are explanations for this, the net result, to me, is the perception that no one is in particularly big danger.

[Jagged]

SPOILER: mine and MT spoilers

I think I have said one thing in the thread that might be considered a spoiler without a spoiler tag and it was very general. I also wasn't addressing just you but everyone. Also the fact that Bugg is a god is hardly a generic spoiler on your part which is what first caught my eye. I knew there was something about him but I didn't know he was an Elder god when I read the book

[Arakasi]

SPOILER: BH

Well considering you've said you're not going to read the series anymore, I didn't think you were worrying much about spoilers. Read spoilers at your own risk of course.

I would say there is a difference between major POV characters in Erikson and just people who have gotten a little bit of stuff. Of course Erikson has a larger pov cast compared to Martin, who has had about 15 or so because of how he strictly does his PoVs. But major characters aren't all that much different. Each book has tended to have 4-5 main characters who dominate the PoVs, and they've carried over from book to book like Kalam, Paran, Fiddler, Crokus, Heboric, Felisin, etc. I think that's a stylistic difference more than anything. Robb's death was clearly very important even though he was never a POV character. Same with Tywin. If you truely listed out major characters between the two you'd probably get a pretty similar amount of people with a pretty similar amount of deaths.

As for Tattersail surviving, might have a point there if Silverfox was anything like Tattersail, which she isn't. Ascending is part of the world Erikson has created. He's not the only author to dabble in metaphysics like that. I see that it is your perception of it that's getting you here, but it's not like that for most of the readers here. Regardless, I don't see characters not being in danger. Advance readers have said already that in this next book some of the biggest characters in the series die. We know from BH that Karsa, Icarium and Rhulad are all rushing towards a big confrontation. Silchas and Scabandari too from the teaser. There is going to be lots of deaths.

[Kalbear]

I'll possibly read the series, but I want to know beforehand whether it's worth it. Given the lukewarm reaction to BH (at best) I decided not to buy it right away. I'll probably hold off until people kind of say how awesome things are before going ahead.

And no, I don't care about BH spoilers, but it's funny to lecture me on spoiler tagging things while actually spoiling me and not indicating where the spoilers are coming from. Really, I think once Reaper's Gale comes out we should have another topic - it's just too silly to wade through these spoilers vs. others.

[Arakasi]

Honestly I forgot til you said it that you hadn't read the last book. *shrug* And yes once RG comes out I'm sure we'll have a seperate thread for it.

I don't understand the lukewarm reaction at best to BH though. Was talking to Rhaco earlier and we both liked it more than MT. Other people on this board have posted saying they like it when I read through the start of this thread. Really it's mainly Wert posting a lot about how much he dislikes it. Which sure is valid, but it's not exactly a concensus. Same with Memories of Ice being the best book.

[Kalbear]

Again, it's amusing that you plaintext things like

SPOILER: stuff

the return of tattersail and duiker

but get mad at me for saying other things. I just don't understand the inconsistency. I don't understand the inconsistency in general in this thread. It just makes it confusing and weird.

Liking something more than MT is, to me, not high praise. I liked HoC better than MT. MT was what made me go away from this series; it was just too boring, too long, and too poorly written. So yeah, someone saying that it was worse than MT? Ugh. Avoidance. It also didn't sound that essential; it sounded like a lot of traveling. Maybe RG actually gets somewhere and people do something.

That, and I truly can't stand Karsa - so avoiding BH and this might be an option. Gods, what an idiotic character.

[Voland]

ffs! Stop bickering about who spoiled what or whatever.

And I guess I'm somewhat in between you guys. At the end of SoS I was expecting everyone to die on the next page. The Red Wedding just freaked me out. But I lost that feeling during the wait for Feast, even with a full reread beforehand. I don't have that feeling with Erikson either, but I see Arakasi's pov. People have died, and for the people that have come back there have always been consequences. There are no easy rebirths in Erikson's world, and neither are there in Martin. Both Cat and Beric paid a steep price for theirs, and the same can very well be said for Tattersail, Paran and Duiker. In fact, I'm saying it, imo of course.

[Werthead]

Last I recall, I think quite a few people expressed some dissatisfaction with TBH, including Brys and Jay Tomio (IIRC). Didn't Calibander have something to say about it as well? (trying not to speak for anyone else here)

TBH wasn't a bad book and indeed the individual two halves of the book were pretty good. The only problem is that they were shoehorned together very uncomfortably and we had that:

SPOILER: TBH

Unbelievably lame ending where Kalam takes on six hundred members of the Claw and wins, albeit heavily injured and with help from Apsalar, when just a few Hands in DHG nearly took him down.That's just freaking ridiculous.

[Hark]

Liking something more than MT is, to me, not high praise. I liked HoC better than MT. MT was what made me go away from this series; it was just too boring, too long, and too poorly written.

I didn't enjoy reading MT either. I was actually pretty disappointed. But after reading BH and getting a much better sense of where things are headed, I am very glad SE wrote MT and that he took the risk of building a second, separate world within his already vast world. It enhances the epic quality of the convergence to come. It makes looming events seem of greater import. It turns out that thinking BACK to MT is actually far more enjoyable than the act of reading it was.

The Bonehunters was pretty good. I liked it. It doesn't have a tent-pole story element like DHG or MoI (and HoC), but it is a much better "transition book" than AFfC was.

That, and I truly can't stand Karsa - so avoiding BH and this might be an option. Gods, what an idiotic character.

I love Karsa. See, it's like watching CSI: Miami. You can either be driven insane by David Carusso's character Horatio, or you can stop taking him so seriously and just be entertained by the sheer absurdity of him. Karsa is a caricature. Enjoy him!

[kcf]

It's strange to see the wide-ranging opinions of MT - for me it's the best written book in the series by a large margin. A couple of the other books (like MOI) come off as a bit more enjoyable and such, but the writing in MT remains a level above the other books.

This opinion led me to be relatively dissappointed with BH - it really seemed forced at times and the beginning didn't work very well for me. Early reports indicate that RG may be similar in that respect - but early reports are notoriously bad anyway. I'm worried, but I'm sure I'll love it regardless.

[Hark]

kcf, here's what I didn't like about MT. It's that very frequently, the characters would start philosophizing for pages and pages.

Like, Saren Pedak (sp?) notices a beetle crawling up a tree and then goes off thinking about how life really is just a series of trees, and how we are the bugs crawling up them, and how different kinds of bark are different kinds of lives, and sometimes someone comes along and chops down your tree, which is like some cosmic metaphore.. etc etc etc.

Saren, Trull and Hull were more guilty of this than most characters in the book, but their musings were given a lot of play.

I tend to like books in which things *happen* and people *talk*. I don't like books that spend a lot of time inside characters' thoughts as they ponder, or inside characters' minds as they dream, or that take a very detailed approach to describing feelings (or the contents of a room). MT had a lot more of than than other books in the series. BH was much more: "He did this and said that and went here and did that," which I prefer. When I open a novel and see more than two or three pages in a row that don't contain dialogue, I get worried.

[Rhaco]

It's strange to see the wide-ranging opinions of MT - for me it's the best written book in the series by a large margin. A couple of the other books (like MOI) come off as a bit more enjoyable and such, but the writing in MT remains a level above the other books.

I'm not sure many people would disagree with any of that. Where some would disagree, I think, is on whether or not 'more enjoyable' trumps 'better written'. Here, I'd say it most definitely does.

[Maltaran]

Karsa, Icarium and Rhulad... well, one of them ought to die die if they square off otherwise I doubt it will be satisfying. Unless someone learns a cute trick, doesn't seem like it'll be Rhulad. That said, hope it's Karsa. Geez, I really can't remember much about the setup to this arch, now that I think on it.

IMO, the only way Rhulad will die is if Rake kills him. My theory is that the Crippled God is sending his soul back to his body every time he gets killed, but Dragnipur would take Rhulad's soul before the CG had a chance to send it back.

[Cuellar]

Maltaran, I think that's fairly given. But I think he's hardly invincible, and the beatdown Icarium would give him would be epic.

I agree with the Karsa thing. He basically reminds me of a video game character in an RPG who just shreds through millions of things. In fact, he's pretty similar to my warrior in WoW (without the looting bodies and selling shit to a vendor). Hell, he even finds random dungeons to go through and beat up ancient creatures there!

-Cuellar

[pat5150]

Well, with Shadowplay nowhere in sight, that means that I'm starting Reaper's Gale tonight!

Let's see who will live and who will die!

Cheers,

Patrick

[Xanrn]

So are Trull and Onrack in the Dramatis Persona?

Or how about Ganoes Paran?

I get edgy if I don't get a T'lan Imass fix.

I am still waiting for Tool to make his return.

Also Toc the Younger and his band of Wolf worshipping Mercs, Grey Helms/Swords (cannae remember which is which).

Killing Whiskeyjack was like killing Ned and Robb combined.

Although the.

"Get your Leg healed"

"No Time"

"Get your Leg healed"

"Not at this Moment"

"Get your Leg healed"

"Sod off Already"

"Get your Leg healed, whoops too late it broke in the middle of a sword fight"

Was a bit much.

[Jagged]

Kalbear.....you are right there is no way that spoilers will be kept out of this thread. You were right.

[duckman]

I love Karsa. See, it's like watching CSI: Miami. You can either be driven insane by David Carusso's character Horatio, or you can stop taking him so seriously and just be entertained by the sheer absurdity of him. Karsa is a caricature. Enjoy him!

Although I love the series, I can only take small doses of Karsa at a time.

If he dies in RG, I wouldn't mind at all.

However, if someone like Rake dies...

[Hark]

However, if someone like Rake dies...

<said in my best Horatio voice>

Looks like Rake's.....

gonna need a shovel.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!