[Felisin Fatter]

I also tried rereading ASoIaF recently and was too bored to finish. Also, I just wanted all the noble characters (over twelve) to get beheaded nice and quick for what they were doing to the people they were supposed to be responsible for and install democracy, or socialism, or anything other that feudalism. They all fail so hard at kinging, there is nobody in the entire series I'd want to sit on the entire throne.

Where ASoIaF is 'better' than Malazan is in the area of mystery and speculation. I still really want to know what happened with Lyanna and Rheagar and that whole mess. And who wrote the pink letter, etc. Martin is good at plot and mystery and secrets. And I do love his short stories, I have concluded short form is his strength, not epics. So, I would recommend the Dunk and Egg stories and his earlier short work.

Though I also love speculating on QB's origins and other Malazan mysteries, it is somehow harder... and less relevant to the story. Hm, I guess the difference is that with Martin, there is a hidden truth that neatly explains everything (like in a whodunnit). With Erikson, there is history that got muddled, rewritten, experienced differently by each participant and that is not as relevant as it might think. So getting the answers still wouldn't neatly resolve things, they stay muddled because people are. Plus, those answers still wouldn't be the only correct answers.

[Egwene]

I think I got to about book five of ASOIF but then gave up. I would say that it could be I just did not 'click' with Martin's style of writing, however...

I really loved Dunk and Egg!!!

[Andorion]

Felisin Fatter, on 27 November 2015 - 10:10 AM, said:

I also tried rereading ASoIaF recently and was too bored to finish. Also, I just wanted all the noble characters (over twelve) to get beheaded nice and quick for what they were doing to the people they were supposed to be responsible for and install democracy, or socialism, or anything other that feudalism. They all fail so hard at kinging, there is nobody in the entire series I'd want to sit on the entire throne.

Where ASoIaF is 'better' than Malazan is in the area of mystery and speculation. I still really want to know what happened with Lyanna and Rheagar and that whole mess. And who wrote the pink letter, etc. Martin is good at plot and mystery and secrets. And I do love his short stories, I have concluded short form is his strength, not epics. So, I would recommend the Dunk and Egg stories and his earlier short work.

Though I also love speculating on QB's origins and other Malazan mysteries, it is somehow harder... and less relevant to the story. Hm, I guess the difference is that with Martin, there is a hidden truth that neatly explains everything (like in a whodunnit). With Erikson, there is history that got muddled, rewritten, experienced differently by each participant and that is not as relevant as it might think. So getting the answers still wouldn't neatly resolve things, they stay muddled because people are. Plus, those answers still wouldn't be the only correct answers.

I don't really think that Martin is better at writing mystery. A lot of the speculation around ASOIAF stems from two factors

A. The long gap between books after book 3 which left readers idle and annoyed:
1. A Game of Thrones (1996)
2. A Clash of Kings (1998)
3. A Storm of Swords (2000)
4. A Feast for Crows (2004)
5. A Dance with Dragons (2011)


Compare this to SE

1. Gardens of the Moon (1999)
2. Deadhouse Gates (2000)
3. Memories of Ice (2001)
4. House of Chains (2002)
5. Midnight Tides (2004)
6. The Bonehunters (2006)
7. Reaper's Gale (2007)
8. Toll the Hounds (2008)
9. Dust of Dreams (2009)
10. The Crippled God (2011)

B. While Martin tends to leave things hanging at the end of a book, SE likes to resolve a bunch of things with a huge convergence where things explode, people die and we cry.

Regarding speculation another thing I have noticed is that people speculate about what is going to happen in Martin books, while with SE we often have to speculate about what has already happened the best example being the TtH convergence. SE's plots and events are far more complex, larger and more epic in tone than anything I have seen in Martin.

I agree with the point about SE's muddled narrative.

Regarding short vs long form prose I agree, The first Martin prose I read was "The Hedge Knight" in the anthology Legends 2 which I loved. His writing in Book 1 was also good. But the more I read, the less I liked

[Gorefest]

Egwene, on 27 November 2015 - 09:46 PM, said:

I think I got to about book five of ASOIF but then gave up. I would say that it could be I just did not 'click' with Martin's style of writing

Either that, or you could't find more books?

[worry]

Martin's just the better writer. Period. With finality. To be continued?

Spoiler

No, not to be continued. End of story.

[Kanese S's]

Egwene, on 16 January 2015 - 10:27 AM, said:

Werthead, on 15 January 2015 - 04:51 PM, said:

Andorion, on 12 January 2015 - 02:06 AM, said:

The TV show contributed massively to the popularity and 'mainstreaming' of ASOIAF. Plus there's the macro vs micro theme issue. From the long-term perspective a bunch of people fighting over who gets to sit on an iron chair is pretty micro. In MBotF entire Ice Ages triggerred by wars in the other hand is a micro-theme - a specific war mutating into a macro-theme. The Wars of the Roses point above is very well-made. If you are going to take historical events and set them in a fantsay context, it may make for very fine reading, but it also narrows down the scope of the narrative and the plot. If on the other hand you have a fresh world with an intentionally dispersed racial structure, with deep anthropological and archaeological structuring, the scope is naturally broadened.

Before the TV show had started, ASoIaF had outsold MALAZAN (which had just concluded) by approximately 600%, and that was of four compares to MALAZAN's then-ten (not counting ICE or the novellas). The TV show has caused that to explode massively (the ratio is now 30+ million copies of five novels to 2 million of 11, not counting ICE or the novellas). So the fact that the ASoIaF fanbase dwarfs the MALAZAN one is certainly part of the issue, although not a definitive one. There is also a hell of a lot more nitty-gritty discussion of the philosophical underpinnings and themes of Scott Bakker's novels than there has been of Erikson, yet Erikson has outsold him massively.

Another is that ASoIaF is a much easier series to get into (to even Erikson's regret) and uses superficial simplicity to hide much greater depth and complexity, such as the interrogation of power and consequence that continues through each book. For example, ASoIaF is influenced by the Wars of the Roses but it is very definitely not the case that Martin takes those same events and resets them in a fantasy context. There are allusions to real events (and on a much broader sweep, including to things like Napoleon's march on Moscow, Roman politics and Babylonian history) but the books aren't simply recasting them. The suggestion that the books are also just about people who are fighting to sit on a chair is also a gross oversimplication of what is going on.

The other problem is that whilst Erikson engages with a much larger number of themes and ideas (as you'd expect, with a much larger number of novels so far to draw upon), he does not necessarily do so in significant depth. His exploration of capitalism in MIDNIGHT TIDES, for example, is interesting but the conclusions are ultimately fairly standard.

The final nail in the coffin is that whilst Martin has been happy to pin down and nail down ideas and concepts as long as they do not pertain to spoilers, Erikson has been massively more reluctant to confirm or deny anything (see his reluctance to comment on D'Rek's world map as a good example of that). With so little of the MALAZAN world set in stone (again, its world is bigger and more impressive than Westeros/Essos but it lacks anything like the depth of backstory and history, as Erikson is more interested in depicting the feel of that without the detail), it's difficult to have solid discussions about much of it. In fact, I get the impression that Erikson would rather people not engage in discussions of the nuts and bolts of the world but more in the thematic, tragic and philosophical aspects. The problem is that those aspects do require some solidity behind them to have a fruitful discussion, and ultimately MALAZAN is too vague in its worldbuilding to permit that.

Thanks for the data, Werthead. I had not realised that there was such a difference in sales, still, as you mentioned, the massive explosion due to TV has obviously contributed greatly to there being so much more ASOIAF material about.

I think you raised a lot of good points but I don't agree with your overall conclusion that the Malazan world lacks depth. The very fact that not everything of backstory and history is all there is what to me makes the Malazan world so much more credible and deep. That is what human history and human life is like. We are forever drawing conclusions based on knowing only part of a story. How many things have been re-written in history books because someone dug up some evidence which put a completely different light on how a people or an event had been perceived up to that point.

The Malazan books are very much about the reality of how history comes to be. They depict the differing approaches from 'we do not know everything so we make it up as we go along', the 'we don't like what really happened so we bring out an official version' to the 'we thought we knew what happened but did not realise our source was faulty' and all sorts of other variations. So as we read, we are trying to figure out what really happened, but as in life, we can not ever know the truth of most things.

The Malazan books are history books. They contain miss-information relayed in good faith, have huge gaps where there is very little historical documentation, knowingly or unwittingly pass on propaganda of the past and never, never, give us all the answers to our questions. That is where the real depth lies. It asks us to see beyond what is in front of our eyes, to doubt some of what we read and to always allow for the possibility that things might not be as they seem. The books challenge us to complete the picture ourselves. That is after all what we have to do in real life - another book that poses more questions than it gives answers...

Gotta agree with Egwene here.

To me, Erikson and Esslemont's world has more depth. The various cultures they've created in Wu feel like actual cultures to me, whereas Martin's often feel more like archetypes. Which is also fine; that's not necessarily a criticism. But Wu feels bigger and more complex than Westeros/Essos.

[coldhands]

There must be many reasons to like/care for, one Writer over another Writer. Mine are very simplistic. I care for the Malazan writer over the writer of ASOIAF. I do not have the words to grade one writing over the other on artistic merit, I'll say they are equal on prose. But my frustration with unfinished GRRM tale weighs negative with me. I believe fame has gone to Grrm's head and as a result 5 years have passed between the 5th book and the yet to be finished 6th. Though GRRM has lent his name to 12 Edits and 4 side novels in this time.
Now he does live in the Capitalist world where the. motto is lets make more money. Who could blame him. Erickson the anthropologist seems the Socialist to me. The metaphors he uses, subplots he puts forth are more for filling to me in a human living/life way.
Again this just my way of seeing it. One seems a formula that works and repeats. The other, the Malazan world lives and tells a story.

This post has been edited by coldhands: 12 January 2016 - 10:44 PM

[Ribald]

I did some analysis of Malazan stuff on my new review and blog site. And I am planning on doing a lot more.
You ncan see an example of it in my critical review of Assail.
http://thecriticaldr...an-c-esslemont/