Gardens of the Moon

Fantasy

Print length: 666 pagesTor, 2005

Description

The Malazan Empire has survived years of conquest, internal purges, and costly warfare, yet Empress Laseen's armies continue toward Darujhistan, the last Free City of Genabackis. After the devastating siege of Pale, Sergeant Whiskeyjack and the battered Bridgeburners receive a mission shaped as much by imperial suspicion as military strategy. The surviving sorceress Tattersail and young nobleman Ganoes Paran become entangled in the same campaign, while thief Crokus is swept into Darujhistan's resistance. Assassins, mages, ancient beings, and competing gods turn the approaching conquest into a collision of mortal and supernatural designs. Opening the Malazan Book of the Fallen, Gardens of the Moon uses a large cast and an in-progress world to explore empire, loyalty, survival, and power.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Dense · Descriptive

Pace

Variable

Tone

Atmospheric · Cerebral · Dark · Tense

Structure

Braided · Fragmented

Focus

Character · Plot · World

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 5 / 5
Background knowledge: 4 / 5

Themes

BelongingColonialism and empireMoralityPowerSurvivalWar

About Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson is a Canadian fantasy author whose career is largely defined by the Malazan Book of the Fallen, a vast epic shaped in part by his experience with tabletop role-playing games. His fiction favors dense plotting, enormous casts, and societies whose military, political, and economic systems matter as much as individual quests. Gardens of the Moon exemplifies his demanding method: it begins amid an unfolding conflict, asking readers to orient themselves without a conventional introduction. Erikson also works deliberately against familiar fantasy roles, giving characters motives and traits that unsettle easy categories. Beneath the scale and violence, compassion is his stated governing concern. His recurring subjects include social inequality, egalitarianism, mortality, and the uses and distortions of history. The Malazan world’s cultures were also conceived without sexism or gender-based hierarchies as an inherited norm. What distinguishes Erikson’s work is the combination of elaborate world-building and formal difficulty with sustained attention to suffering, solidarity, and the moral pressures placed on people by institutions and war.

Series

Malazan Book of the Fallen

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Tor
Language: English
ISBN: 9780765348784

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