Vast legions of gods, mages, humans, dragons and all manner of creatures play out the fate of the Malazan Empire in this first book in a major epic fantasy series

The Malazan Empire simmers with discontent, bled dry by interminable warfare, bitter infighting and bloody confrontations with the formidable Anomander Rake and his Tiste Andii, ancient and implacable sorcerers. Even the imperial legions, long inured to the bloodshed, yearn for some respite. Yet Empress Laseen's rule remains absolute, enforced by her dread Claw assassins.

For Sergeant Whiskeyjack and his squad of Bridgeburners, and for Tattersail, surviving cadre mage of the Second Legion, the aftermath of the siege of Pale should have been a time to mourn the many dead. But Darujhistan, last of the Free Cities of Genabackis, yet holds out. It is to this ancient citadel that Laseen turns her predatory gaze.

However, it would appear that the Empire is not alone in this great game. Sinister, shadowbound forces are gathering as the gods themselves prepare to play their hand....

Conceived and written on a panoramic scale, Gardens of the Moon is epic fantasy of the highest order - an enthralling adventure by an outstanding new voice.

Listening Length

26 hours and 3 minutes
Author

Steven Erikson
Narrator

Ralph Lister
Audible release date

October 2, 2012
Language

English
Publisher

Brilliance Audio
ASIN

B009L65JEG
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	26 hours and 3 minutes
Author	Steven Erikson
Narrator	Ralph Lister
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	October 02, 2012
Publisher	Brilliance Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B009L65JEG
Best Sellers Rank	#1,423 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #3 in Sword & Sorcery Fantasy (Audible Books & Originals) #8 in Military Fantasy (Audible Books & Originals) #29 in Military Fantasy (Books)

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Carson

A reasonably enjoyable disaster

Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2018

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UPDATE: I got to book 8 somehow, but I realized I don't even care how it ends and I was just forcing myself to read on for the sake of completion. Yes, I got to book 8 and I don't care what happens in book 9. My biggest complaint is Erikson seems to have very little direction in his writing. Characters are developed, but you get so many new characters that you kind of stop caring by the time the story returns to the characters you used to like (sometimes 3 books later). Plots rarely resolve in a satisfying way, because he's clearly just flying by the seat of his pants. Read it if you don't mind meandering plot with some interesting stories, but don't expect a continuous series.

This book is a complete mess in many ways, but it was still enjoyable to read.

Let me start with the good parts. First, there's a lot of creativity in this book. The world is interesting, the history is long and complex, and the world is bigger than any one character. Second, Erikson is an excellent writer. I couldn't have finished this book otherwise.

Now there are problems. It's going to sound like I'm really negative about the book and hate it. I don't hate it or Erikson. I do think it was over-ambitious for his level of writing ability at the time of writing. I also think there are some things new readers should know before starting.

* You expect a lot of new characters and places when you start a new fantasy series. Never have I been forced to endure such a steady stream of characters, histories, and magic systems with so little in the way of development or explanation. It becomes so overwhelming with so little structure it's hard to even care enough to read on.

* The dialog is a mess, especially early in the book. Most writers would put clues in the dialog to help with exposition. Unfortunately, I don't think Erikson even knows what exposition means. At many points it just sounds like the characters are speaking nonsense. It's not entirely because you don't know anything about the topic of the conversation, but also because their dialog lacks subjects and is often jolting and unnatural.

* Character development is okay, but very abstract. You get to know a new friend by seeing what they do and say, right? This is also the best method for getting to know characters because it aligns with our real-life meetings. In the book almost everything happens in characters heads, and you don't get to visualize a lot of what they say or do. They also talk to themselves quite a lot. This leaves you with a sense of what they think, but not really much in the way of how they act with other people. It's told to you, not shown. This may have actually worked out, because otherwise character development would have been even more incomprehensible dialog.

* There are far, far too many unexplained character intuitions. Some of these unexplained intuitions are explainable by the story, but most are lazy shortcuts for foreshadowing and having characters think things a normal person wouldn't.

* The book desperately needed an editor with some pull. I don't know what happened here, but it really read like a self-published book from a first-time author with dreams well beyond his abilities. An editor should have pulled back and reminded the author we don't know about this civilization or that type of creature, and he should probably make us care about the current cast before adding on more. You want to craft a world, fine, but take some time to explain it rather than just assuming we've read (or want to read) your academic thesis on Malazan history.

* Everything stops reading like nonsense about halfway through. I can't imagine many people make it that far. You start to focus in on some characters and get a sense for what they want to accomplish through their plans. The "how" turns out to be excessively convuluted and poorly-explained, but you don't realize that until you think back after finishing and realize their plans were actually just the plot outline made manifest.

* The book all builds to the final climax, but the final climax is a series of loosely-related stories. Rather than ending in a big climax, then, there are an awkward series of resolutions as bad guys 1 through 4 all meet with their just ends ... in totally different scenes to wrap up totally different character stories.

* While introducing new side-stories and mysteries can maintain a sense of mystery, doing it endlessly and to resolve stories rather than begin them is frustrating for the reader. You don't even care to think ahead by the end. Will the story be resolved according to your clever interpretation of prophecy with our protagonist's cunning? Nah, there will just be some new entity or plot device that is totally unforeseeable. Probably some new entity appearing or falling from the sky.

* Minor spoilers here, but nothing that will ruin the book. Even at the VERY END of the book, Erikson is introducing new characters, creatures, and items. The demise of what you thought might be the most powerful villain and tyrant happens in a place that isn't even clear, with new rules (you can't be enslaved if X), and at the hands of a new being that hasn't even been hinted at. It honestly felt like a child was telling the story. "But then then there's this other guy, and he's even more powerful, and he beats the bad guy."

* My saddest criticism is that character motivations don't really move the story along. It's what writers call "and then" storytelling. Characters have plans, but they don't really make sense in light of what they want and know. Almost no one is acting like a normal human with normal human motivations, which makes them all harder to relate to. "Why was she doing that?" is an unanswerable question for a main viewpoint character at the very end of the book, and she's not alone in that respect.

Ultimately book 1 was exceptionally ambitious with lots of interesting ideas, but the author lacked the skill to pull it together into an interesting story.

How, then, could I possibly say Erikson is a good writer? He writes each paragraph well. Being good at putting words together is not the same thing as being a good storyteller. Erikson is like a runner with excellent form and top-notch ability who will never win a race because he's running all over the stadium looking at new shiny objects. It limps along, but only because he can manage the next step. It feels like it's about to collapse at any moment, and in the end it sort of stumbles to a halt and then simply ends.

Surprisingly, I do plan to read book 2. I've been told it gets much better and that I "just have to get through" book 1. It was so frustrating I can't imagine a world where the quality of story changes dramatically. I will give it a shot, but I'm putting it down unless there's significant improvement.

284 people found this helpful

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RyonAmazon37

Why Wild Worldbuilding Can Only Get You So Far

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2020

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I'm always on the lookout for a lavish fantasy series I'll find satisfying as an adult reader with high expectations (as a teen, "next Dragonlance novel" was enough to thrill me), but I found Gardens of the Moon extremely disappointing. It's more Wheel of Time (which I think is shockingly, comically bad) than A Song of Ice and Fire (which I’d argue is completely deserving of the place it's taken up at the center of the genre).

The best fantasy novels/series typically place enormous emphasis on the mundane/normal, partly to provide a real grounding for the fantasy elements and partly because the further aspects of a story get from our reality, the less relatable the whole experience tends to become. For example, George R.R. Martin spends quite a bit of time developing an enormous set of fully fleshed out, real-feeling human characters, relationships, political conflicts, etc. before showing us dragons and extreme magic (and dragons and magic still make only very occasional appearances). J.K. Rowling doesn’t begin the Harry Potter series with magical battles or ground it in magic but in dozens of characters that feel fully alive and relationships and conflicts that feel real (a lonely boy mistreated by stepparents). Similarly, Tolkien doesn’t begin The Lord of the Rings with Gandalf fighting the Balrog and passing through the center of Middle Earth but with Bilbo and Frodo and the hobbits, whose very relatable lives and connections draw us in and enable us to relate to, and care about, the fantasy that follows. Gene Wolfe, whose writing is more challenging and literary, can create an incredible feeling of magic, mystery, and oddity with only the smallest devices of fantasy or science fiction thanks to his prose and first-person narration. Susanna Clarke and Mervyn Peake (whose Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Gormenghast are top ten all-time fantasy) are other examples of fantasy writers who are great in part because of their brilliant characterization and their ability to ground fantasy (in Clarke's case, fantasy eventually involving rather amazing magic) in what feels like reality. In truth, the greatest strength of the best fantasy writers is their ability to present dozens of figures who feel more alive than the protagonists in bad fantasy.

Erikson, either intentionally or as a result of misunderstanding what makes the best fantasy work, unleashes a bizarre number of very extreme fantasy elements right from the beginning: multiple apparent god figures, mages of all kinds with an odd and complex system of magic involving "warrens" (which are also methods of transportation), multiple inhuman beings, one mage who has been transferred into a small puppet, a floating moon ruled by a mage lord (and peopled by some kind of crow who can live for hundreds of years), etc. I'm probably getting some of that wrong, but the point is: he's overloading us with tons of extreme magic and fantasy before he's established any human grounding to make this feel real or to make us care.

And unlike the best fantasy writers, he's not especially good at making his characters feel alive: two hundred pages into Gardens of the Moon, I mildly cared about Paran and Tattersail, but only mildly, and almost no one else felt like a real, living person. Martin, Rowling, or Clarke, who would know to focus on character and grounding in reality, could do more with an unimportant character who's going to be killed at the end of the chapter than Erikson can do with major characters in two hundred pages. Peake could make someone come to life (and remind us of people we’ve met or seen) in a few pages. Even Brandon Sanderson, who I think is far from the level of Martin/Rowling/Tolkien when it comes to characterization and dialogue, does at least have a strong ability to get readers to relate emotionally to his characters by providing access to their deepest feelings in a vivid, moving way. I cared much more about Kaladin in the early chapters of the first Stormlight Archive novel than I did about anyone in this.

This might be defensible if Erikson had Gene Wolfe's or Ursula Le Guin's literary style, artful prose, and psychological depth, but his writing is unremarkable. Not Terry Brooks level embarrassingly bad or Robert Jordan level mildly bad, but nothing special. I think, unfortunately, like Sanderson in some cases, Erikson seems to operate on the belief that the elaborate world-building and history are what make fantasy work. And unfortunately, some fantasy fans seem to buy into this idea, allowing Robert Jordan to spend tens of thousands of pages telling a mediocre story with uninteresting, paper-thin characters because the world of the story is vast and complex (even if literal people in it aren't). This is also evident in the way many fantasy readers lump Tolkien, Martin, and Jordan together—as if two of them weren't brilliant (one in telling a beautiful idealized story and the other in critiquing it) and one of them a hack.

My point is that Gardens of the Moon is (on the basis of the amount of it I could force myself to read) the case of an author who thinks the core of great fantasy is creating an elaborate and strange world rather than realizing that what matters most is one's ability to tell a compelling human story (with characters who feel fully alive and conflicts that engage us emotionally) in it.

34 people found this helpful

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Meagster

Just keep reading and it will all come together eventually

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2019

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I had to write this review to defend this series! Yes, this book and sometimes the series is a bit all over the place. Yes it is complicated and it has many characters, but so does game of thrones. You are thrown into this book and you have no idea what is going on, and i didn’t understand the magic system until a couple books in. But keep in mind the author intentionally does that! As an archeologist and anthropologist he said you don’t always get to know the whole story of a culture or society, and it gets pieced together as you go along. So if you can get past that and the idea of you might not know everything, this is one of the best world building fantasy I have ever read, and it actually made me realize that I enjoy military fantasy as well. As a woman I never felt the female characters were not as fleshed out as the male characters which isn’t always common in fantasy, and some concepts and characters stayed in my mind months after finishing the series. If that isn’t enough praise I almost never re read non classics and this series I have read 3 times now. If you like in depth world building and great plot movement you will love this series, you just have to give it time to marinate.

57 people found this helpful

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Rob Ert

One of the worst novels I have ever read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 27, 2019

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This is one of the worst books I have ever read. After a few hundred pages it was so obvious what a failure of writing Gardens of the Moon is.

Steven Erikson CANNOT tell a story. He fundamentally fails at the key things a good storyteller must do.

The book starts with a foreword by the author in which he half apologises, half refuses to apologise for how badly written this book is. But there is no excuse good enough. It was rejected by so many publishers with good reason. It is atrocious.

The reader is dropped into the middle of a scene, with no exposition, no explanations, no character introductions. That itself might not be so egregious, if we later learn what is going on. But Erikson then repeats this technique for every scene for the rest of the book. Every time you start a new scene, you have no idea where it is taking place, who is in the scene, how they got there, even who is saying which item of dialogue can be confusing at times.

There is very little in the way of scene descriptions or character descriptions. Most of the book seems to be pointless dialogue between an unknown number of people. I have nothing against dialogue, but the dialogue is wooden and written as if we are mind readers. It's fair to say that I had no idea what anybody was talking about most of the time, or why they were even talking about it.

A lot of the time I couldn't even form a mental image of what was going on, because of the complete dearth of descriptions. When you don't know what someone looks like or what their past is or what their motivations are, it's very difficult to remember them from one scene to the next. In Gardens of the Moon you read a conversation about unknown things by unknown characters in an undescribed location. And then you do that repeatedly.

I did not get the impression that the characters say or do anything due to innate motivations or desires, because they are so devoid of personality. The only thing the characters remind me of is a 14 year old's D&D game. They are overpowered and make seemingly random decisions. I was constantly asking myself: have I missed something? The book reads as if you are missing key information, and you keep reading expecting it to be elucidated, but it never is.

The most important thing for a good novel is the characters. If the characters are interesting, intriguing, or if the reader cares about them, then we want to continue reading, because we want to find out what happens to them.

I couldn't tell you anything about the characters in Gardens of the Moon. Because I wasn't told anything about them. And most of them have terrible names that ruin the readability of the book.

The 10 book series seems to have a very fanatic following on the internet who are eager to claim that you have to read all 10 books and then reread them in order to finally appreciate this series. I'm sorry, that is a poor excuse for bad writing. It is the writer's job to tell a story. And Steven Erikson catastrophically failed.

98 people found this helpful

Graeme Greenan

Disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 5, 2019

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Having read the reviews for this book (good and bad) I thought I'd give it a try. The passive aggressive foreword wasn't a good start as the author basically states that if you don't persevere with his vague, heavily-padded narration, it's your problem not his.

Ignoring the temptation to bin the book, I somehow managed to read a quarter of it, trying my utmost to give him the benefit of the doubt, telling myself It'll get better. It doesn't. He spends too much time bouncing from one cryptic scene to the next (probably twiddling his fingers together like Mr Burns praising his own 'cleverness ') leaving you in a perpetual state of indifference as to the fate of his two dimensional characters.

I should have listened to my inner doubts. Reading is supposed to be an enjoyable experience not a perseverance.

46 people found this helpful

RobNSue

complicated and like nothing you have ever read before

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 29, 2018

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I don't know why Amazon lists this as 'Volume Two' as that is very misleading. This is the first book of the 'Malazan Book Of The Fallen' series. Be warned, this is not a casual read as Erickson does not believe in 'Setting The Scene' or getting characters to explain the backstory via dialogue and the backstory & setting is huge, complicated and like nothing you have ever read before. You will just be dropped in and left to doggy paddle until you can start to work out what is happening and that will continue for the whole series which puts many people off but I just love the sheer scale and originality of the story. Stick with it though and other fantasy stories will seem shallow and unimaginative.

37 people found this helpful

giki

I tried to like it, but failed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 17, 2018

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I really really tried with this book, there is some good stuff in there, but in the end, it was just all too much for me.
It wasn't the endless incomprehensible battle scenes, or the unnecessarily overblown descriptions of anything and everything (he gets quite rapturous about rotten flesh), that did it for me. It was the fact that every-time a main character gets killed off, they somehow spring back to life. I don't consider this a spoiler since it happens right at the start and regularly thereafter. I quite like it when an author dispatches one of the main characters - It can really shake things up, your expectation for the rest of the story is shattered in an instant. But then, with this book - two chapters later, the character is right back in the thick of it and the story is plodding on just as before. It might be fine to do it once, but it becomes such a regular occurrence in this book that you start to expect it. It also winds me up when major leaps of plot (including repeated reanimation) are explained away as due to some previously unmentioned magical force. 'Because Magic' bleugh. It renders the rest of the plot fairly pointless. I like a clever plot.
There were loads of other things that I did not like about this book (you might have guessed that), but I have to admit I only read halfway. Perhaps the story was just about to change from the long hard uphill slog into something much more interesting and enjoyable. Perhaps I am missing out, but I really could not bring myself to read any more.
I liked Tool, he was the best. One of the stars is for him.
Other than that - just not my cup of tea.

26 people found this helpful

MayaZ

Just brilliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 4, 2018

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Thank-you Mr Erikson and Mr Esselmont for the Malazan epics. Yes, they take some effort to get into and understand - but does that pay off? YES, big time. I do wonder about the philosophical meanderings at times but these books take epic fantasy to a new and un-surpassed level. Reading order is confusing - I am using hertz or wurtz or something similar.

Holds, warrens, ascendants, elder gods and so much more - it defies a normal imagination.

These books are awesome - get into deciding about the Tiiste, T'lan, Jaghut, mortals and many more - these books rock, read them. You won't regret it.

20 people found this helpful

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