[drinksinbars]

i think it is just indicitive of the problems faced by authors when creating monstrously long books. If you are writing a standa lone novel or a trilogy its a daunting feat and requires precision in your writing and story with little room for anything else if you want tocapture the audience and hold them,. once yo get beyond three though many authors feel the need to give their views on things and thye create storylines to preach their point of view (goodkind). erikson started that much later (MT) and it has become the main theme of the story. whereas the first four books were designed with convergance and war and battle and the plot was a tight ly condensed point desiogned solely to entertain and capture its hard to compare the two. if the series had of continued like that it would have been lauded as a masterp;iece eys, but it would have lacked a core element linking the stories. the malazans for all their faults are the best of a bad bunch when it comes to societies an dcivilisations and erikson as an antropologist has included a lot of stuff designed to mirror and reflect his view of the modern world through the books.

on the same note his obvious confidence in his prose has clearly increased and the books do read much smoother, if anything tth is the best written book on the series, but as we reach the end its more rooted inmotivation and ideas with plots designed to educate to eriksons way of thinking. all of the books had some element of this apart from gotm, but in the klast few it is much more readily apparent.


give a man an audience and all that. personally i really enjoy it, especially the endest silann stuff. for all my talk about it being preachy it is not as pervasive or ingrained as in other novels and nor is it judgemental - you are given people from everyside and watch them batter each other.