Gardens of the Moon

About Gardens of the Moon

The Malazan Empire is finishing its conquest of the continent of Genabackis, and the city of Darujhistan — the last free city, built above ancient catacombs full of sleeping demons — is next. Gardens of the Moon is the first novel in Steven Erikson's ten-book Malazan Book of the Fallen series, and it announces its ambitions without apology or orientation: this is epic fantasy operating at a scale that makes most other works in the genre look modest. Erikson drops readers into a world already in full motion, with an empire, multiple resistance factions, a pantheon of deeply involved gods, and a cast of dozens that includes soldiers, assassins, mages, and ancient entities so old their original purposes have become obscure even to themselves. The novel's famous difficulty — no orientation chapter, no gentle introduction, no glossary relied upon as a crutch — is a feature, not a flaw: Erikson trusts that readers will piece together what they need from context, and the pleasure of the first read is partly the experience of a dense, real-feeling world gradually becoming legible. The magic system, called Warren, is one of fantasy's most unusual: power is accessed through dimensional pathways, each associated with a different kind of magic, and the users of that magic exist in permanent tension with the gods who also inhabit those spaces. The Bridgeburners — Paran, Whiskeyjack, Sorry, and the rest — are one of fantasy's great military units, drawn with the specific affection of a writer interested in what soldiers actually are rather than what they symbolize in service of a narrative. Gardens of the Moon is not the whole Malazan story but the opening move in a sequence requiring millions of words to resolve, and reading it is the beginning of one of the most demanding and rewarding experiences in the genre.

Tropes & Themes