Steven Erikson's Blog

The God is Not Willing has been out for a few months. You can read more about the book and how it’s being received here, here, and here. If you have yet to pick up a copy, you can find it at all the usual places, Amazon, Chapters, Barnes and Noble, and my home town book shop – Munro’s. If you prefer to listen, it’s out as an audiobook as well, narrated by the talented Emma Gregory.

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Steven Erikson

There is probably no greater terror for a scholar of literary criticism discussing a work of fiction than to have its author sitting in the audience.  I’ve seen this often enough and I have great sympathy for their plight.  I can see the unease, the occasional timidity, the moments of diffidence, all of which substantively contrasts with the natural confident aplomb of scholars expounding on a literary work...

Sturgeon Falls lies between Numaru and Nutimik Lakes along the Winnipeg River.  Unless one is familiar with Whiteshell Park and the river that marks its north boundary, the notion of a river might conjure images of your standard waterway, sleepily winding its way through the landscape, with treed banks.  But the Winnipeg River is more a collection of interlinked lakes cutting through boreal forest and precambrian shield.  Something about it is undeniably primal.

My wife is convinced that I live in a cloud, a mostly opaque cloud.  I just don’t notice things.  She has a point.  The shoes that man was wearing, the pattern on that woman’s blouse, those visible panty-lines on those tight leggings (okay, maybe I noticed those visible panty-lines, but where she sees an unwelcome flaw, I see … well, let’s just call it a difference in aesthetics).  We can walk side by side down a sidewalk in a busy city and we might as well be...

A few years back I was in the last days of a long book tour through France, sponsored by my French publishers, Leha Editions.  The last weekend before I flew back to Canada, I found myself attending a small Fantasy and SF festival just outside of Paris.  After a walk back from the event in the fine company of SF author Peter Hamilton, I lingered for a time alone in the back garden of the building where we’d been given accommodations.

This building dated from the seventeenth century or thereab...

If memory serves, we didn’t get out to the site until the Autumn.  The crew was small.  The head archaeologist was Tony Buchner, with me as his assistant and one other archaeologist in tow.  For part of the project, a Plains Cree from the Cypress Hills was hired, whose name was Harry Buffalo Calf.

The Swift Current petroglyph site consists of a single glacial erratic made of dolomite that sits perched on a projection of high ground overlooking the Swift Current River.  Back then, it was surro...

We weren’t going anywhere.  It was June 1st, 1982.  There were four of us, maybe five.  Odd, but some people just fall away from memory.  I’m pretty sure it was four.  Definitely not more than five, because five is the maximum that can fit in a Pontiac Grand Prix, assuming only two up front, and when I recall the scene, I am pretty sure there were only two in the seat in front of me.  So, let’s settle on four.  

Four guys in a brand-new gold-painted Grand Prix rental, that was buried up to it...

We’re a resilient species, but everyone has a limit, a threshold, beyond which anything can happen.  When I think back on the summer and autumn of 1981, I am left shaking my head.  I suppose the most well-known tale of going ‘bush-crazy’ is Stephen King’s The Shining.  Never mind the supernatural elements of that novel, it’s about isolation.  The Overlook Hotel serves as a metaphor for Jack’s internal house of horrors.  A person just … snaps.

Now, digs aren’t much like the Overlook Hotel.  Th...

Let’s talk curses.  In a way, we’re all cursed, right at birth.  We’re cursed by the culture we’re born into.  That culture begins, of course, with the family surrounding us.  Then there’s the society our family’s immersed in, which may be variable as the years pass, but not too variable in the grand scheme of things.  From our embracing society, we move outward to our general culture and its myriad belief systems.  

We’re raised within all of this; educated ear...

It was the morning after.  The three guys on the crew sat around the firepit, nursing monstrous hangovers.  It was the last day of the project and we were about to pile into the van for the return to Winnipeg.  Those three guys were Kelly, Laury, and me.  The local farmer’s strange little dog, Sport, was hanging around, suddenly our best friend ever.  Another crew member, Candis, came by to drop a bag of garbage onto the fire.  We sat watching it burn.

The morning of the day before, we three ...