Kharkanas Trilogy

The Kharkanas Trilogy is a three volume epic fantasy series written by Steven Erikson that serves as a prequel to the author's ten volume Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Set more than 300,000 years before Gardens of the Moon, the trilogy explores the tragic history of the Tiste people and the circumstances leading to the fracture of their race. It also delves into the machinations of the Elder Gods that still impact the world at the time of the Malazan Empire. 
In October 2017, Erikson announced that Walk in Shadow, the concluding volume of the Kharkanas series, would be delayed while he instead worked on the first book in the Witness Trilogy.Steven Erikson Facebook post 25 October 2017 He returned to Walk in Shadow in July 2020 after submitting the manuscript of The God is Not Willing to his publisher earlier in the year.Steven Erikson Facebook post 22 July 2020 In 2022, Erikson once again put Walk in Shadow to the side as he focused on completing No Life Forsaken, the second book in the Witness Trilogy. In February 2023 he estimated he had completed about 300 pages of Walk in Shadow and planned to return to the book later in the year. He said after some initial "wandering around in the narrative", he believed he had found his feet and "the writing of the book should proceed pretty much seemlessly" when he returned to it.Steven Erikson Interview and Discussion of The Kharkanas Trilogy - Books with Banks - See 02:50
== The Books ==
* Forge of Darkness (2012)
* Fall of Light (2016)
* Walk in Shadow (TBD)
== Short Introductions ==
:Forge of Darkness looks at the Tiste realm of Kurald Galain during the early days of Mother Dark's reign and its orchestrated slide into civil war. Meanwhile Mother Dark's consort, Draconus, is determined to provide his lover with a powerful magical gift that causes deep rifts among his fellow god-like Azathanai. In the west, the Jaghut Lord of Hate and Hood make decisions that will alter the fate of their race and the world forever.
==Trivia==
*Unlike the Malazan Book of the Fallen, which was heavily influenced by the role-playing game sessions of Erikson and Ian C. Esslemont, "most of [the Kharkanas trilogy] was not gamed."Ten Very Big Books podcast - Memories of Ice - See 46:30
*To prepare for the Kharkanas Trilogy, Erikson read the entire works of William Shakespeare, both plays and sonnets. "I was thinking of narrative style, the notion of oration as witnessed on a stage, and with that, the necessity of a particular cadence (what I ended up calling 'breath-length' clauses) in the sentence pattern, as well as declamation (something rarely seen in modern narrative, but with roots going back to Greek drama, and likely even further back to priestly performance)."The Dilemma of Time - Steven Erikson Facebook post 27 July 2020
*Writing the Endest Silann scenes in Toll the Hounds that took the reader back to Kharkanas interested Erikson enough that he decided to follow up the Malazan Book of the Fallen with the Kharkanas Trilogy. He says those scenes "opened the door to the Kharkanas Trilogy...That's where I really started thinking about post-Crippled God...and thinking about what I would approach next. And I think I just got so caught up and interested in the Kharkanas stuff, that I ended up putting a lot of things in place that I was going to deal with...and open up a whole new series on. Which nobody liked."Spoiler Chat: Toll the Hounds - Part 3 with Dr. Philip Chase and Steven Erikson - A Critical Dragon - See 1:10:40
*Erikson says the choice to tell the story of the Kharkanas Trilogy through Blind Gallan followed the precedent of the opening and closing poems of the Malazan Book of the Fallen which served as framing device for the story told within the novels. He says it is a signal to the reader to "pay attention to the framing because the framing is going to tell you a lot about the nature of the story being told. And in this case it is Blind Gallan, a poet, telling the story to another poet. The other poet we know as Fisher. And so there is a level of mutual awareness of the manipulative powers of narrative...and that's why Gallan tells you right at the start this is not a history, I'm going to drop things, I'm going to pay attention to some things, I'm going to ignore other things, I'm going to fit it to suit the theme that I'm going to discuss here. And Fisher, he's on board with that because he's also a poet. He's an artist. So there's that other level of intentionality going on in the narrative frame which, hopefully, helps guide the reader to an understanding that that which is presented here isn't just historical recount. That there is subtext to this stuff. And Gallan has reasons for what he does, and saying what he does. And even changing and manipulating the events to suit his purpose."Steven Erikson Interview and Discussion of The Kharkanas Trilogy - Books with Banks - See 17:55
==External links==
* Steven Erikson Interview and Discussion of The Kharkanas Trilogy - Books with Banks
==Notes and references==
Category:Kharkanas Trilogy