Willful Child

About the Willful Child series

Willful Child is Steven Erikson's broad, gleefully juvenile spoof of Star Trek and space-opera tropes generally, following Captain Hadrian Sawback -- a preening, rule-breaking, catastrophically overconfident starship commander -- and the long-suffering crew of the AFS Willful Child as they blunder from one galaxy-endangering incident to the next. It's a hard tonal left turn from Erikson's epic fantasy work: crude, fast-paced, and openly parodic, aimed squarely at fans of the original Star Trek series and its many imitators.

Willful Child (2014) sets up the format: episodic missions that go wrong in increasingly absurd ways, with Sawback's ego reliably the biggest threat in the room. Willful Child: Wrath of Betty (2016) and Willful Child: The Search for Spark (2018) continue in the same register, each riffing on specific genre and franchise conventions -- the titles alone signal the target of the parody.

Erikson has described the trilogy as written for fun between Malazan volumes, and it reads that way: broader, sillier and far less interested in the moral weight that defines his fantasy work. It's a curiosity for Malazan fans wanting to see a different side of the author, and a straightforward comic read for anyone who grew up on classic Star Trek and wants the trope-skewering played for laughs rather than reverence.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: Willful Child, Willful Child: Wrath of Betty, then Willful Child: The Search for Spark. Each book follows Captain Hadrian Sawback and the crew of the AFS Willful Child through a new set of escalating, parody-driven missions; the trilogy is best enjoyed with at least passing familiarity with classic Star Trek and general space-opera conventions, since the humor leans heavily on genre-savvy readers catching the specific tropes being sent up. No knowledge of Erikson's Malazan novels is needed -- this trilogy is unconnected to that world.