Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson is the pen name of Canadian author Steve Rune Lundin, a trained archaeologist and anthropologist whose academic background directly shaped his approach to epic fantasy. He is best known for the Malazan Book of the Fallen, a ten-volume series co-developed with collaborator Ian Cameron Esslemont from a shared tabletop role-playing campaign, beginning with Gardens of the Moon in 1999. The series is renowned, and sometimes notorious, for its immense scope: dozens of point-of-view characters, a sprawling multi-continent history spanning hundreds of thousands of years, and a refusal to over-explain its world, throwing readers directly into events already in motion in a style critics have compared to literary fiction's demands on the reader. Erikson's anthropological training informs the series' unusually convincing depth of invented cultures, religions, and languages, and the Malazan books are frequently cited by fantasy readers and writers alike as one of the genre's most ambitious and structurally daring achievements, prized for treating war, empire, and grief with a seriousness that avoids easy heroism. New readers should start with Gardens of the Moon, though many readers find the opening volume deliberately disorienting and recommend pushing through to Deadhouse Gates, the second book, before judging the series. There is no film or television adaptation of the Malazan books to date. Erikson has continued expanding the same universe with further trilogies set in the same world.