/lit/ - Literature

>>6235694
Ah, okay, wonderful... Well... Where to begin?

Erikson is an archeologist and an anthropologist. This shows heavily in his world. His universe is absolutely gigantic, spanning multiple continents riddled with magical realms. Every place is thick with history, the ground beneath every building is layer upon layer of civilizations that came and went, burial sites hide ancient, immortal creatures from times that have been forgotten or distorted by time and the subjective nature of history.

The sense of wonder you feel when reading is unmatched by anything else. His is truly a fleshed out world.

Literal Gods walk the earth, powerful enough to shatter entire continents. Ascendants can transform into giant dragons, swords are imbued with pocket universes in which those slain by said swords are imprisoned for eternity. He seems to follow the Diablo rule of not being afraid of massively overpowered characters and forces; if something is awesome, it stays. And he deals with the consequences of it -- people who've lived for millennia, since the beginning of time itself battle eachother in a never ending game of power, wrecking havoc on the mortal world in the process; most Gods consider mortals mere pawns to use and discard. But even so they depend entirely on mortals, it's from the ordinary people, the worshippers, that the Gods derive their power.

So if the Gods are this terrible, why do people keep worshipping them? These kinds of questions are everywhere.

POV characters are both superpowered demi-god killing machines and impoverished peasants and hopelessly romantic teenagers. Every aspect of life is dealt with in some way. More than anything, it's a tale of how people deal with the senseless cruelty of an indifferent universe, a story on the importance of compassion and the perils of certainty.

It's utterly impossible to give it an adequate description. The only thing I can say is that if you enjoy massive, sprawling epics, then look no further. This is, so far, the end all be all of EPIC fantasy. In every sense of the word. The scale of the world, of the plot, the struggles associated with being a thinking creature... etc...

It has everything you could want in a fantasy story: Cloak and dagger assassin action, massive armies clashing, magic on an unprecedented scale, political intrigue, romance, explorations of the human condition. Everything.

And to top it all off, he's just a damned good writer. The only two authors that have ever brought me to tears are Nabokov and Steven Erikson -- they're both masters of tragedy in their own ways.

If you aspire/fantasize about becoming a fantasy writer, then you HAVE to read this series. Not doing so is equal to wanting to become a chemist without learning the periodic table.

Pic related: It's a flying, hollow mountain used by prehistoric, cognizant pseudo-dinosaurs as a city... And this does not even scratch the surface of the beautiful insanity that is this series.