Little Toy Robot

What did you do this weekend?

The robot rested. The robot saw Spider-Man 2, which he found very exciting and satisfactory for a big-budget Hollywood movie. The robot watched two separate Adult Swims! The robot bought chip clips.

I also shunned the sun and made my way through Steven Erickson’s Gardens of the Moon, which was just published in the U.S. for the first time. The book is huge, and dense, and confusing, but I thought most of the action and exposition that took place in Darujhistan was very fine indeed.

Darujhistan, “born on a rumor,” is a hotly contested independent city, rife with intrigue, fighting off an imminent attack by the hungry Malazan Empire and the suspicious attentions of other forces. Darujhistan, the “City of Blue Fire,” is lit by gas lamps, and the lamps are lit by a mysterious sect of cave-dwelling people called Grayfaces!

I think fans of Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris stories and people who enjoyed the backdrop of the twin gods merrymaking throughout M. John Harrison’s In Viriconium (The Floating Gods in the U.S.) will enjoy the Darujhistan sections of the novel. It’s not a decadent, surrealist MJH landscape, and it’s not as clever as Jeff’s prose. It’s epic fantasy on a grand scale, and it excels at its type.

More importantly, I was told, Gardens of the Moon is the author’s first novel and functions as a gateway into his universe and the subsequent books, which get high marks from all sorts of people.

Each novel, then, is a chance to watch myth-creation in action, to see how choices made at the dawn of time play out across the ebb and flow of civilization and empire. Languages change, gods get bored or die, entire races vanish from the face of the planet, and the truth becomes twisted. In more than one book, races and cultures exist and evolve for thousands of years with only the haziest knowledge of their own beginnings. One nation even ends up getting its own creation myth completely wrong: a tragedy with disastrous consequences. One character, Icarium, “a mixed blood Jaghut wanderer” who pops up from time to time wreaking havoc, and who has lived for eons, suffers from his own devastating memory loss, trapped in an eternal search for the truth of his own identity. Everyone, it seems, must at one point or another struggle with the immensity of this world’s past.

Although Tor is streamlining the release of the series (five out of a planned ten have been published in the U.K. already), I’m not waiting. It’s cheaper and quicker to buy the British paperbacks used on eBay or Alibris than wait for the Tor hardovers every six months.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2004 at 11:23 pm and is filed under books.