Writing Forum

First on my list of modern fantasists is Steven Erikson. Just like Tolkien, Erikson can be trying for some readers, but that's for different reasons. Erickson's stories often take cryptic forms. He likes to plunge his readers into waters, right from the opening page, that are way, way over their heads. There is no acclimating to a Steven Erikson story---usually readers are merely hanging on by finger tips and teeth ends, trying desperately to hold on to something solid so not to get thrown off the ride.

Meh, some folks like that sort of writing---others, not so much.

British Tor agreed to purchase and publish his first novel, Gardens of the Moon, only on one condition---that he give them nine more from the same world, same series, and to get on with it, Stevo!! Oh yeah, and they paid him one million pounds to do it.

The excerpt below is a good example of Erikson's prose work:


There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage along a foul, tortured path – made foul and tortured by our own indifference – is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come.

I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us – each of us, my friends – to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing – all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.



As one can see, Erikson likes to build his epic stories out of conflicts and questions we often face in our real, modern world. Life after death? Is that what we're striving for as a species? Glory given us by God, rewards awaiting us in Heaven? If we live for the next life, one only assured us through faith, have we in some way abdicated our moral obligations in this one? This question, and other human dilemmas much like it, are the legs upon which many of Erikson's narratives stand. And his prose craft, magical and mysterious much of the time to my ears, propels his stories, gives them a poeticism that often overcomes that uneasy feeling one gets reading his novels, the whirling sensation of walking a literary tightrope without any kind of net below us.