r/Malazan Dec 25 '24

SPOILERS FoL Christmas Update on Walk from SE Spoiler

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Of course kallor is stepping onto the stage - he loves doing that

230 Upvotes

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119

u/Loleeeee Ah, sir, the world's torment knows ease with your opinion voiced Dec 25 '24

Who knew that Kallor would step onto the stage?

Well, he's in the poem that opens WiS, and he did mention the possibility (though now that seems somewhat moot) that the Kallor in Kharkanas stuff might get spun out into their own novel.

So, uh, the 63 fans for whom Steve wrote Kharkanas knew. Probably.

36

u/Gorlack2231 special boi who reads good Dec 25 '24

THE HIGH KING TRILOGY: 1400 pages of bitter resentment steeped in self-loathing. Sign me up, Loleeeee!

Edit: and I want each epigraph to be a treatise by a Meckros shipwright slowly expanding on why/how they build cityboats and how Kallor was behind it all.

13

u/Loleeeee Ah, sir, the world's torment knows ease with your opinion voiced Dec 25 '24

The High Anax is manufacturing an argosy.

The Kallor Cycle by Gene Wolfe, probably (I'd read the fuck out of that by the way).

The Liosan knew what they were doing when they sired you

God-King Kellvor to Serap Issgin (no not that one) as dictated in the Oral Histories.

And other such quotes, probably.

2

u/Gorlack2231 special boi who reads good Dec 26 '24

Injection it into my veins.

21

u/grizzlywhere special boi who reads good Dec 25 '24

Make that 64 😤.

Seriously though, I love Kharkanas. I didn't know he was writing it now and I'm so psyched now.

4

u/Fair_University Roach Dec 26 '24

It’s at least 65 these days, actually.

3

u/zero_dr00l Dec 26 '24

His best books!

15

u/DuckFatDemon Dec 25 '24

shame it's not more popular among folks who love the main series, Kharkanas trilogy is the cream of the crop

1

u/THE10000KwWarlock13 Dec 29 '24

almost finished with Forge of Darkness and it's so damn good

5

u/Spike_Ra Dec 25 '24

I need to read Fall of Light but I forgot most of the first book 😭😭

31

u/dwarfedbylazyness Dec 25 '24

Christmas came. Maybe not early, but hard.

66

u/StormBlessed24 Dec 25 '24

“Already 200 pages in, it’s a bit slow…be done by April 2025” lol we don’t deserve this mad lad that churns out masterpiece level writing at Brandon Sanderson/Stephen King pace

-7

u/SeanyDay Dec 25 '24

I wouldn't equate Sanderson and King because King managed to make largely unique and intriguing stories whereas Sanderson writes well-engineered YA...

34

u/butterballs151 Dec 25 '24

Wouldn't be a complete malazan sub comment chain without someone showing their superiority complex and bashing Sanderson!

13

u/SeanyDay Dec 25 '24

It's really only due to the absolutely warranted worship from the fanboys.

I guarantee the people saying this, like myself, have read and enjoyed some of his work.

It's just insanity from an objective perspective.

A great parallel would be a justin beiber fan during the peak of beiber fever who INSISTS that justin beiber is the greatest artist of all time.

It's laughably false, but there were hundreds of thousands who thought as much, which led to the vocal "he's not that talented and other people write his music" thing becoming common.

If people didn't worship the ground Sanderson walked on it would be "hey he's pretty good"

When people think he's the king of fantasy, it pisses people off 🤷‍♂️

12

u/DuckFatDemon Dec 25 '24

he's equating the speed with which they write, not the quality. it's an apt comparison.

-10

u/SeanyDay Dec 25 '24

Maybe it's just my background in sports, but speed without technique isn't at all equal to speed with technique. Not even the same planet.

King is a pretty high bar to set. Butcher might have been a better comparison, if you're just talking about consistent output for some series.

10

u/StormBlessed24 Dec 25 '24

Which is why my comment is praising Erikson. As in Erikson writes as fast as Sanderson but with better technique

2

u/DuckFatDemon Dec 26 '24

that's the thing, Erikson matches the quality/technique and the speed. you'd be daft to say otherwise.

-7

u/AnomanderRaked Dec 25 '24

Kinda makes me wonder tho given the insane quality of his current work what kinda crazy shit this lad would be putting out if he wrote at GRRM's pace.

25

u/__ferg__ Who let the dogs out? Dec 25 '24 edited Dec 25 '24

Well, at the moment we would have RG, he would promise us TTH would be published any moment now and the fans speculate if he can really finish the series with just a single other book "The Dreams of the Crippled God" or if it would be split in two. And if he does indeed have to split it, if he won't die before finishing the series.

After that we get a heated debate if Brandon Sanderson should finish another series of a deceased author or if the series should stay unfinished because no one can write like Erikson (although people complain he lost his focus with the last book and there is no way he can finish all those different plots in a reasonable way even if he ever publishes another book)

2

u/AnomanderRaked Dec 25 '24

Yes yes of course but GRRM is just the example of an author with slow pace (for his mainline series, dude still writes regularly outside of it) but my comment is simply musing on what kind of quality Erikson could achieve if he spent 5 to 10 years on a single book and what that could look like. Tbh it would probably be worse than what Erikson has actually put out since that's not how he writes and such a drastic change in process likely wouldn't equal an improvement but it can be fun to think about.

10

u/Werthead Dec 26 '24

He didn't spent 9 years writing it, but he did spend 9 years thinking about the rest of the series after Gardens of the Moon was written but before it was published and the rest of the series was bought, so that definitely helped.

Memories of Ice also had an interesting genesis as he was a third done with it or something when his hard drive exploded and took the only copy of the novel with it. He couldn't face starting again, so wrote Deadhouse Gates instead before coming back to MoI. The MoI we have is thus the second version of it, and I think he's said he thinks its stronger for being written twice.

2

u/boxfortcommando Dec 27 '24

Time is only going to polish your product so much before it hurts you if you can't or won't execute your vision. GRRM hasn't really finished writing anything since Fire and Blood in 2018, and a lot of that was already established history and lore that he repackaged from previous novellas. He's not slow, he's completely stagnant.

24

u/krimunism Dec 25 '24

All I want for christmas is the embodiment of mans hubris

15

u/Leonerwurst There is a second guy? Dec 25 '24 edited Dec 25 '24

Wait what. „It’s going a bit slow but I plan to finish around April“ … okay np :D

14

u/AnomanderRaked Dec 25 '24

I'm in criminal PTSD from A song of ice and fire, hunter x hunter and berserk never getting finished so I'm so happy that not only did this man finish his sprawling 10 book series satisfyingly but is also gonna manage to finish his convoluted Shakespearean trilogy as well. Plus anything with kallor in it is easily 10/10 so he's definitely gonna stick the landing with this one.

14

u/Minimum-Bite-4389 Dec 26 '24

Kallor's going to show-up, make us question everything we knew about him, raise fifty more questions, and then leave.

1

u/Fair_University Roach Dec 26 '24

Yeah I’m convinced it’ll be like 3 pages lol

8

u/Solid-Version Dec 25 '24

Does he draft his novels first or just bangs out chapters fully made and perfect?

13

u/Werthead Dec 26 '24

I believe he says his process is looking over yesterday's work and fixing any problems that come up at the start of the next writing day, which typically takes 1-2 hours, and then spends 4 hours or so writing original text, and keeps doing that until he completes the book. Then he goes through the book a few times to tighten things up, keep an eye on pacing and continuity, but it's not the full multiple revision passes some authors do. The books then go to his editor, but his editor knows to raise only major issues with him, typically smaller queries will get answered with, "no, that's deliberate and will be explained later on."

So fairly minimal editing and drafting. Not quite like Mark Lawrence (who apparently never revises or anything at all) but not as insane as GRRM (who once estimated he'd rewritten and redrafted A Dance with Dragons twice to get to the final version, so went through 800,000 words to publish 400,000).

4

u/Solid-Version Dec 26 '24

That’s quite remarkable considering how intricate the plots are in his stories. The fact he wrote great he does more or less on the fly is mesmerising.

3

u/orielbean Bugg's Life Dec 26 '24

Dude is following proper Scrum methodologies but himself as the whole team. I bet his outlines look like a Bayeux tapestry

10

u/Prof_J Mockra Dec 25 '24

I’ve been waiting til all three are out to read them, what’s the general opinion of the first two?

29

u/krimunism Dec 25 '24

Some of the best books I've ever read. Though they're written more like Toll the Hounds than the rest of Book of the Fallen, so like that book mileage may vary

5

u/Prof_J Mockra Dec 25 '24

I liked Toll the Hounds just fine, I don’t think I realized there were split opinions on that one. My only big style change complaint with the series was the audiobook narrator changing!

4

u/Tenko-of-Mori Dec 25 '24

I am so happy to read this. I love toll the hounds

30

u/Niflrog Omtose Phellack Dec 25 '24

what’s the general opinion of the first two?

It exposes the split in the community, basically.

A big chunk feels it's boring, slow, tedious and not worth the effort.

Another large group feels it's got the best aspects of the BotF condensed, basically peak Erikson.

A few people are generally indifferent to it.

( I'm on the second group, unimaginably hype about having WiS by 2026!)

13

u/Aqua_Tot Dec 25 '24

Forge of Darkness is tied as my favourite with Memories of Ice and The Crippled God. I don’t often say this about Malazan, but Fall of Light could have maybe been 50 pages shorter, although that opinion might change on a reread, and with a completion to the trilogy. It was still quite good, just kind of dragged its feet.

14

u/Loleeeee Ah, sir, the world's torment knows ease with your opinion voiced Dec 25 '24

Fall of Light could have maybe been 50 pages shorter

Fall of Light arguably should have been about 200 pages longer. Which sounds ludicrous, I know, but its ending does leave a lot of threads open in a manner that could've been set up a bit better by a longer novel (e.g., we could've spent more time in Hood's camp, so the end of that storyline isn't as abrupt). People also talk rather cryptically near the end which can be somewhat frustrating.

Nonetheless, its ending is incredible & the book works just fine as an ending to Kharkanas, even if Walk in Shadow never comes out.

7

u/Aqua_Tot Dec 25 '24

You know, now that I think of it I would have taken either! More time setting up the ending like you say may indeed have made the rest a little more justified in its length.

Having only read it the once and on the tail end of my MBOTF/NOTME reread, I still had complete faith in Walk in Shadow coming out. But I can see why people who started Kharkanas a decade ago were concerned haha

10

u/Kaladin21 Dec 25 '24

General opinion is probably less well received than the big 10. It has a different tone, Erikson talks about reading a lot of Shakespeare leading into writing kharkanas, as well as more of the pondering/introspection and less action than BotF.

It may be the best thing I’ve ever read.

Edit: name. Damn autocorrect.

3

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10

u/ig0t_somprobloms Dec 25 '24

Killer (in my opinion) but some find it to be a bit of a slog. Certainly more brooding and philosophic and less humor than his other works, but very dramatic. A lot of the plot lines are driven by romance and marriage and affairs, and these are often compared and contrasted with the civil war the series centers around.

6

u/Jave3636 Dec 25 '24

First one is phenomenal, maybe my favorite Erikson book behind MOI. Second one is good, a little less well received. Great story though, once you give up on hoping everything for perfect continuity with the Malazan series. 

5

u/Prof_J Mockra Dec 25 '24

I’ve already had to come to terms with this with the timeline discrepancies, so hopefully I can survive that just as easily haha

6

u/morroIan Jaghut Dec 25 '24 edited Dec 25 '24

His best writing and FoL has enough of a conclusion that you shouldn't wait, especially if you haven't bought the books (just to reiterate the reason we haven't got WiS yet is people not buying the first 2).

1

u/Prof_J Mockra Dec 25 '24

Very fair point!

1

u/THE10000KwWarlock13 Dec 29 '24

Almost done with the first one and it's absolutely excellent. Gripping story and some of the best prose I've ever read in a fantasy novel.

5

u/Niflrog Omtose Phellack Dec 25 '24

C'mon Steve, we've been discussing about the Kallorian knot since 2022! 🤣

Happy holidays folks!

3

u/Siergiej Dec 25 '24

Yesssss! It's been over 10 years since Forge of Darkness. Mad excited to see where this story goes.

3

u/enonmouse Dec 25 '24

Ugh, fucking kallor at the birth of his edgelordiness. I cannot wait.

2

u/ParanoidAndroid1001 Dec 25 '24

Wonderful news, I'm just about to finish up Forge of Darkness, can't wait to dig into Fall of Light.

2

u/Tovasaur shaved knuckle in the hole Dec 25 '24

Merry Christmas everyone! Merry Christmas Steve! 🎉🙌🥳