Interview Steven Erikson

The Malazan Archaeologist

Imaginales festival in Épinal 2018

→ Version française disponible ici

→ Review of Gardens of The Moon

→ Review of Deadhouse Gates

Hello Steven,

You are one of the most famous fantasy writer in the world.

Your saga, The Malazan Book of The Fallen, is actually relaunch in France by Leha Editions.

How could you explain the cycle for your new french readers ?

The series is a history of an alternate world, a world where magic works. It’s a kind a story where you dropped into historical events to begin with. Hopefully, there’s a sense that life goes on after the series just as much that there was life before the series .It doesn’t really have a beginning and an end, it’s more a piece or a fragment of history. As an archaeologist and an anthropologist, i wanted to approach this with many perspectives and point of views as possible in terms of interpreting history. That’s partly what the story is about.

Secondly, the inspiration was the Illiad, the kind of tale where gods are active in the mortal realm. In the same way, i wanted a lot of characters to be on the ground like thieves and people living in the street. So you can follow levels of powers and making your way upwards to the gods. Of course, most people think the gods control everything but i wanted to reverse that so the thief in the street can actually toppled the gods, and this goes both ways.

French Edition of Gardens of the Moon

You wrote the Malazan universe with a friend, Ian Cameron Esselmont. How did you work together to build this world ?

We roleplayed the entire background history. We started with Dungeons and Dragons and moved to Steve Jackson’s Generic Universal RolePlaying System. We basically gained the history. That gave us the foundation of the world then we moved on to the novels. Then, Ian took some area of the history to write his novels (He did six that fit into the ten book series i’ve written). Basically, we would contact each other just to make sure we had character, spelling, names and certain details that we could agree upon from our memory. Then he would write his books and i would write mine. As far as we were concerned we stayed true to the atmosphere of the Malazan world. It didn’t matter what style we used. They would complement each other

Ian Cameron Esselmont and two of his Malazan books

One of the most original thing in your first book, Gardens of The Moon, is your system of magic.

How did you conceive your warrens and how did you tie them to your gods ?

It developed organically. We were adapting the game’s magic system in something that we wanted to explore in the fantasy world. Warrens are, in a sense, planes of existence but they also had aspects. So, if you think of the four elements that the greek would speak about — Fire, Air, Water and Earth — we’ve sort of attached magic capacities to these things and called them Warrens. Then, we added Shadow and Light, Life and Death. They were all aspected. If you draw on the Warren of Life, then you can do things like healing. But we also want the magic system to be egalitarian so it was based on discipline, research and determination. Magic was there for being available to anyone. As anthropologists we thought : “How does that change the cultures around them ?”. It occurred to us it would create a culture without a gender bias so there would not be gender-based hierarchies of power. You would not maintain them because there would be no way to sort of impose a power structure upon either the gender. So, it became a world without sexism and that was very interesting to explore.

“Most people think for the gods control everything but i wanted to reverse that so the thief in the street can actually toppled the gods, and this goes both ways.”

In Gardens of the Moon, you include different races which live sometimes thousand of years.

Why did you choose a timeline so wide ?

Both Cameron and I, as archaeologists, we can come to a landscape and we can see the depths of time in that landscape. We wanted a sense of depths of time running through this world as well so there are layers of existence, layers of experience going back thousand of years. What made it interesting was there are characters who actually experiences all of those layers. Then we could explore the long term views of humanity. Quite often, that’s a difficult thing for each of us to do because we have such short lifespans. We can only think of terms of maybe one or two generations. But imagine someone who can think of terms of ten thousand years ! What is his view on History ? What is his view on the human condition ? That was very interesting to explore.