I first got into Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series because I had heard it described as dark military fantasy in the vein of Glen Cook’s Black Company books. They do fit that description somewhat well.

Odd as it sounds, I find the Malazan Book of the Fallen series to be fairly upbeat, in a certain sense. The books present a fairly unpleasant world, full of horrors- an entire race that turned itself into a horde of undead hulks in order to wage a millennia-long campaign of genocide, a theocratic regime that intentionally drive hundreds of thousands of its own innocent people mad with hunger in order to use them as fanatical man-eating shock troops, plague and religious war depopulating large swathes of a whole continent, whole armies roasted alive, and who knows what else- and that’s just the first six books! Meanwhile, even what seems to be the most reasonable government on the planet is still in the habit of doing things like having entire families publicly impaled on walls pour encourager les autres. Not a fun place to live.

And yet, to me it has a certain positivity and hope that a lot of other “gritty” fantasy, like George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series and (to a less extreme degree) the Black Company (to name my other two favorite modern fantasy series), generally doesn’t have. In the Malazan Book of the Fallen there are inspiring characters like the indomitable Coltaine in Deadhouse Gates, or the heroic Gruntle and the compassionate Itkovian in Memories of Ice. As awful as the world and events portrayed are, virtue and heroism are real, and at least sometimes powerful. The sheer larger-than-life badassery of many of the characters, which turns people some people off, gives the feeling of a world where individuals can matter and make a difference.

There is a sense of hope, about humanity if not the universe in general, that is much weaker in Glen Cook and even weaker still in George R.R. Martin. Characters in Cook’s work are usually sympathetic and sometimes even admirable or heroic, but they tend to be inefficacious. The men of the Black Company are dragged from war to war, and are lucky just to stay alive; major characters die and the world carries on as if they were never there. Garrett has greater control of his own destiny, and the power to do some good, but the world won’t change, and he knows it. (Some of the Garrett books have a very strong feeling of melancholy about them, despite their humor.) As for Martin…Well, it would be oversimplified but nevertheless fairly accurate to summarize much of A Song of Ice and Fire as “Loathsome Bastards being loathsome and bastardly to people, many of whom are also Loathsome Bastards.” There are admirable (or at least decent) people, but they usually do much less to influence events.

Lest I give the wrong impression, I am not criticizing Cook or Martin for this. This is meant as observation, not value judgment; I love Martin and Cook, and when it’s done well I love books with the sort of grim world and outlook they often portray.

Any thoughts?

My apologies for the silence. Real life intruded rather nastily over the last few days.

Interesting post at Boing Boing- the new Neal Stephenson book Anathem has its own original soundtrack CD. I’ve long thought that it would be cool if books had soundtracks, either an original score or just a compilation of appropriate music. I know the cost would be prohibitive, unless perhaps you limited yourself to old public domain recordings, but I can dream.

I often listen to music while I read. I don’t pick music according to the book- I have a big CD collection that I just rotate through, keeping about six albums in my changer at a time and listening to each a few times before swapping them out- but sometimes the book and the music synch up in cool ways. During one of the climactic parts of Glen Cook’s Soldiers Live, for instance, I had Amon Amarth’s Fate of Norns on, and it was just perfect- epic military fantasy and Swedish death metal. Can life get better than that? No, sir. Well, not legally.

I should have mentioned this when I posted about my Glen Cook article, but it slipped my mind at the time. If you’re on Facebook, I run the Glen Cook fan group there. Come on over and join us.

My new Forgotten lore column is up over at crucialtaunt.com. This week it’s about Glen Cook and the omnibus collection Chronicles of the Black Company. I hope you like it.

Warning: this post has what you might call a thematic spoiler for Jack Vance’s The Book of Dreams, though nothing that would be likely to diminish your enjoyment of that book.

A few days ago, SF Signal had a discussion on the best and worst endings of books. This got me thinking about the subject, because endings are often the aspect of fiction that I find the most interesting. They’re the biggest determinant of a story’s “aftertaste,” for lack of a better term. My own preferences are towards the grim or melancholy side of things, though not exclusively. Some of my own personal favorites:

Poul Anderson, The Night Face- Great buildup, and at the end… Anderson rips your heart out with a single sentence.

Glen Cook, Soldiers Live- Very poignant for me after spending so much time with the Black Company. Like Croaker, I’ll always have the memories.

David Drake, Rolling Hot- The first Drake novel I read, and the one that made me a devoted fan. I can’t recommend this one enough. (It’s included in the Drake collection The Tank Lords.) It was especially effective for me because, atypically for one of Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers stories, one of the principal viewpoint characters isn’t a soldier, but a civilian who gets dragooned into joining the conflict. The whole book is a series of savage muay thai kicks to the emotional groin, and the very end is just devastating.

Jack Vance, The Book of Dreams- The culmination of the five-novel Demon Princes series. Anticlimactic, but that’s the point, and it works wonderfully. You’ve won what you’ve dedicated your life to- leaving you with nothing.

Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man- The climax of the story sort of comes out of nowhere, but the very end manages to be blackly humorous and straightforwardly horrifying and disturbing at the same time.

John C. Wright, The Golden Transcendence- I’m not all death and gloom. This is the last book of the Golden Age trilogy, one of my favorite science fiction series ever. Like The Night Face, but with a very different set of emotions at the end, it has a truly perfect final sentence. With the conclusion of his trilogy, Wright leaves the reader feeling- as he should- exultant.

If novellas count, Neal Asher, The Engineer- Creepy. As. Hell.

While I’m at it, I’ll throw in a movie:

Colossus: The Forbin Project- Great science fiction movie that sees its own grim logic through to the bitter end. (It’s also quite fun, the second time you watch it, to imagine that the movie chronicles the birth of Neal Asher’s Human Polity.)

Those are the ones that first come to mind and have really stuck with me. Anyone else have a list of favorites?

I’m not dead! I vanished for a while due to personal stuff (Good stuff, but time-consuming) and let the writing slide. I’ll try to be more consistent in the future.

Alastair Reynolds mentions something interesting- he envisioned Clavain from the “Revelation Space” series as Sean Connery- specifically, Sean Connery as he looked in “The Hunt for Red October.”

I have, on occasion, envisioned characters in books as actors while I read. When I started reading A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, for instance, I almost immediately imagined King Robert as Brian Blessed- partly from his role as the Duke of Exeter in Henry V, but mostly from when he played Richard IV in Black Adder.

For somewhat less clear reasons, I always imagined Garrett from Glen Cook’s Garrett, P.I. books as looking (and sounding, which makes no sense) like Gabriel Byrne’s character in Miller’s Crossing. Don’t ask me why. I also always imagined either Crask or Sadler (I don’t recall which) as looking and sounding like The Dane from the same film.

Anyone have any examples of their own?

Well, related to my last post, I was at the book store the other day, and was pleasantly surprised to see that Glen Cook’s Sweet Silver Blues, the first book in the wonderful Garret series, is back in print from Roc books. Previously, the only way to get that one (and most of the other Garrett books) new was through the Science Fiction Book Club. I hope the rest of the series will follow; it deserve the exposure.