Archaeologist of lost worlds

Overdosed on Harry? Had it with hobbits? Steven Erikson's sweeping 10-volume series, "The Malazan Book of the Fallen," might be just the fantasy epic that adult readers have been longing for.

By Andrew Leonard

Jun 21, 2004 | "What's this, Daddy?" my 6-year-old son asked me one morning, as we were mucking about in the backyard. He was holding a rusted, mud-and-clay spattered hunk of cast iron, heavy enough that he could barely hoist it waist-high with both hands.

I recognized it as the head of a mattock. But I told him it had to be a magical artifact dating back to an ancient, lost civilization that had flourished in what is now called "Berkeley" thousands upon thousands of years ago.

His eyes sparkled. It wasn't that he believed me. I'm not trustworthy on these matters. But a 6-year-old digging in the mud doesn't need much encouragement. Suddenly, his latent paleo-archeological inclinations blossomed. He found a little paintbrush to wipe the dust off half-buried bricks. He began a running commentary: A salamander under a rock became a Great Snake Demon. A broken hoe blade -- a fragment of the shield of the mighty warrior MegaMon.

Ancient civilizations are seductive. Lost ancient civilizations are better. Lost ancient civilizations that thrived in a time of magic and mystery when gods walked upon the earth are the bee's knees. I know -- I've spent most of my life looking for them. When I was a teenager, the myths of Greece and Rome and the sagas of Northern Europe delivered them to me. Later, I made an extended stay in the Far East, where the antiquity was layered so thick one breathed it in with every gasp. Today, as a parent and wage slave, I get them via the fantasy tomes teeming in every bookstore.

There is no shortage of fantastical worlds to plunge into, but it is not always a satisfying submersion. So much of what is available is so, well, unimaginative. Even excluding what is just plainly bad -- Extruded Fantasy Product, as the aficionados like to call it, from the likes of Robert Jordan or David Eddings or a host of even less talented imitators -- we're still left with endless retreads of the same basic story lines. If it isn't yet another reworking of tired medieval chivalry tropes (Hey, I adore the work of George R.R. Martin as much as anyone on this planet, but even I get tired of page after page describing the household sigils of this noble family or that, or what the knights were wearing just before they ran off to joust), then it's another plague of goddam elves. (So tall! So thin! So tragic! Like a race of supermodels.)

Watching my son evoke complexity from slivers of stone and rusted farming implements, teasing out a narrative that, though fundamentally incomplete, was still beguiling, helped me get a better grasp on what I find exciting. Successful fantasy does not require magic swords, or the triumphant overthrow of whatever Evil Dark Lord of Black Shadow Midnight Murk is currently torturing the poor denizens of Happiland. It doesn't even require a subplot involving a teenage boy (or increasingly often, girl) who becomes a Man (or Woman) while on a dire quest to find (or destroy) the Holy Trinket.

Next Page: Alien races, dragons, magic swords, quests. All of that, yes. But not too many teenagers

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