Steven Erikson's Blog, page 2

Many years ago, on a Sunday, myself and two other archaeologists convened on the bank of the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg, less than thirty meters from where that river joined with the Red River.  A new bridge was being planned.  There was a lot of construction going on in the area at the time, and we were on hand to mitigate the work.

On this Sunday, no press was present, nor any construction workers, because what we were about to do was private.  Just a quiet little excavation.  A half doz...

I haven’t set out to write a memoir.  I don’t even know if this qualifies as one.  Here in the midst of the Covid lockdown, my normal writing habits are impossible to maintain; my daily sojourn to a local café or pub is no longer safe practice.  The necessary rituals to pull me into the fictional headspace aren’t happening.  Yet the need to be writing doesn’t go away.

An emergency trip back to Winnipeg in May kicked open the door to revisiting old haunts, so it’s not too surprising to find th...

We’ve gone (as we shifted POVs) from ‘Macomber’s wife’ to ‘Mrs Macomber.’  Where do you think we’ll go to from there?  Read ahead and find out, if you like, and then come back and tell me it was all accidental.

Now, from her POV, we get the expositional paragraph describing Robert Wilson.  Note that we’ve had her description (from an outside narrator), and now Wilson’s, but this time from a filtered POV (hers), which, through its immaculate detailing, is actually delivering some serious subte...

I know that this story is still taught in English Lit courses (just peruse all the study-aids online to see that), and I am assuming that the focus has expanded in such courses to address the racist and misogynistic elements now recognizable in the story.  When I teach these first four pages, I focus exclusively on the craft of scene-building: I’m not much interested in addressing the rest of the story.  I read it once and that was enough.  This focus is all about craft and structure, and I trea...

Gardens of the Moon was written a long time ago.  In fact, the first draft was set down shortly after I graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and while Iowa’s greatest gift to me was the extra two years in which to write unencumbered by the necessity of holding down a full-time job, it was my undergraduate writing degree that truly taught me about writing.  The arena for learning wasn’t, oddly enough, in the workshops themselves (though those were very useful), but in the various lecture co...

Gardens of the Moon was written a long time ago.  In fact, the first draft was set down shortly after I graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and while Iowa’s greatest gift to me was the extra two years in which to write unencumbered by the necessity of holding down a full-time job, it was my undergraduate writing degree that truly taught me about writing.  The arena for learning wasn’t, oddly enough, in the workshops themselves (though those were very useful), but in the various lecture co...

It was almost thirty years ago that I read Origins Reconsidered, a book by Richard Leakey primarily focused on his teams discovery of the Turkana Boy, a homo erectus skeleton found in the shore of Lake Turkana, East Africa. I found that book perhaps more inspiring than any other thing Ive read on human evolution, and over a two-month period I wrote an extensive collection of poems related to it. Ive decided to offer it up here for free, in its entirety. The cover is something I put together...

Godswalk Mountain Range, Northwest Genabackis, Teblor Territory

The ascent had taken six days.  By midday on the seventh they reached the top of the escarpment flanking the near-vertical wall of ice that had been on their left for the past two days.  The face of that wall was ravaged by past melts, but at this height winter still gripped the mountains, and the winds that spun and tumbled down from high above were white with frost, bleeding rainbows in the sharp...

Commenting on a work-in-progress is always risky. Whatever the author says is going to run headlong into fan expectation like a ’65 Delmont 88 slamming into a wall. The car’s enough of a tank to go through that wall, but there will be a dent or two, and when the dust finally clears, there might not be a fan in sight.

I’ve hesitated for weeks on this. Had a few discussions with friends, most of whom quickly advised against it (for my own peace of mind, one presumes), and they wisely cited past...

[NB: This critique was written prior to Episode Six, Season Two.  That particular episode has done nothing to change my mind.]

Did I really use that word in my title?  I searched high and low for an alternative, something, anything to describe what has been done to my beloved Star Trek.  But nothing else quite fits as well as that single word: clusterfuck.  But even typing it makes me wince.  

Normally, I try to avoid turning a critique into a rant.  By nature, I’m pretty laid back and those...