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A review by rbreade
Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson
As this massive series moves forward, it becomes more and more clear that Erikson needs better editing. His overuse of the ellipsis--and misuse, because in almost every case he should be using a dash--is distracting, as is his over-reliance on the sentence fragment and sentences that begin with conjunctions, as well as his tendency to explain rather than trusting the reader to make an inference. Here's an illustration of all these problems, from page 533, when the character, Seren Pedac, has just returned to her empty house:
"Blinking, Seren looked about.
Shadows. Silence. The faint smell of decay....
'Seren Pedac's...empire,' she whispered.
And she had never felt so alone."
His bio indicates he's a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so it's puzzling and more than a little amazing that he emerged with these bad habits intact. What saves this from being the sort of hack fantasy that drove me from the sub-genre many years ago is the imagination--filtered through a background in anthropological studies--Erikson brings to the story, with its many genuine surprises and his willingness to let well-developed characters die or radically change in service to the story.
"Blinking, Seren looked about.
Shadows. Silence. The faint smell of decay....
'Seren Pedac's...empire,' she whispered.
And she had never felt so alone."
His bio indicates he's a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so it's puzzling and more than a little amazing that he emerged with these bad habits intact. What saves this from being the sort of hack fantasy that drove me from the sub-genre many years ago is the imagination--filtered through a background in anthropological studies--Erikson brings to the story, with its many genuine surprises and his willingness to let well-developed characters die or radically change in service to the story.