Stuff I’ve been up to elsewhere: I’ve got a review of John Beachem’s debut novel Storms of Vengeance at Fantasybookspot.com, and an overview of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire at Crucial Taunt.

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?

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?