Mythcreants and Malazan

When I began expanding my experiences of reading in the genre of fantasy in 2023, joining groups on Reddit, discovering new authors and ending up with far too many recommendations; re-igniting my passion for literature and adding to my now ever-increasing “to be read” lists, it was inevitable that I would end up hearing about The Malazan Book of the Fallen.

Of course, I didn’t know that at the time, but when I joined a reading group on Discord, Malazan was mentioned, so I got a copy of the first book from my local Waterstones, with the intent of reading it along with the group when they started. I searched my Reddit group (r/fantasy) just to see what it was all about and get the gist of it etc, and discovered that a lot of potential readers were “put off” about reading the series because of its complexity and many had decided not to read the series at all, purely based on the negative experiences of others having not enjoyed the first in the series, or having not being able to “understand” the books.

I took a sneaky peek at my copy. I didn’t get why people didn’t get it. I started looking for reviews and reasons as to why readers had issues with the series. Google, as always, is my friend. I focused my search on book one of the series, Gardens of the Moon and one of the first articles I found was on a site called Mythcreants.

Here’s what their website says:

“Mythcreants is an online publication for speculative fiction storytellers. To better understand and tell the stories we love, we analyze popular works, theorize on storytelling craft, and explore the technical aspects of writing and tabletop roleplaying. We’re here to educate you on the most effective ways of engaging your audience while providing entertainment, insight, and inspiration.”

There are hundreds and hundreds of articles on this site. The one I found is titled: Lessons From the Extremely Serious Writing of Malazan.

I love literature. I love literary analysis. I love discovering what works, what doesn’t work, and why. I love nuance and inflection and imagery and poetry and insight. I also love learning about literature, so this article seemed right up my alley.

I read the article, looked at the comments, joined the Malazan group on Reddit (r/Malazan was mentioned in the comments) and did a search, found more comments about the article there, and then went back to the article. This article was posted on Mythcreants in June 2023. It is still receiving comments now, and I’m not at all surprised. I’m also not surprised that some comments were deleted at some point as I can see how things may have become quite heated – I can also understand why, and I’ll get to that later, but I digress.

The article focuses on the prologue of the first book of the Malazan series, Gardens of the Moon. It’s written by a member of Mythcreants team, Chris Winkle, who is the Founder and Editor in Chief.

This is my response to that article, both as a reader and as someone who has studied and is interested in literary analysis and criticism.

I want to clarify here, that I was not offended by the article. My intent here is not to be disrespectful in any way to Chris, or anyone who shares the opinions she has of Steven Erikson’s work. The article is presented as a teaching article, and is tagged as analysis, writing, dialogue, lessons from bad writing, scenes. My responses are intended to give an alternative view/alternative analysis of the text, supported by evidence. My aim is to give an honest and fair representation, both of Erikson’s writing, and the article in respect of how I interpret the content of each. In some cases, it may even be a critique of the critique.

The original article is quite long, and although most of the text is repeated in these posts to give context to Chris Winkle’s analysis and my own responses, you may want to give it a look first. You can find it here.

Quotes from the book are formatted as such. Responses from the writer of the article are cited as CW: and are italicised. My own responses follow and are not labelled or italicised so that it’s less confusing.

I’ve split my response into sections that follow the structure of the original article, and because the whole response would be long. They are linked below.

• A Book Should Speak for Itself
• Watch for Disorientation in Your Opening Paragraphs
• Scenes Should Highlight the Action
• Villains Don’t Have to Look Villainous
• The Opening Overall

My closing comments are here