No Life Forsaken

No Life Forsaken is the second book in Steven Erikson's Witness Trilogy.
STATUS: As of December 2023, Erikson says he was about 3/4 of the way through writing the novel when he "realised that I was writing two novels--not one. And so structurally, it was a mess. And so what I had to do was step back and reorder basically everything I had done up to this point. And then having reordered it, I realised I needed to start adding some bridging scenes and bridging chapters that could link them back up and make it a bit more of a cohesive storyline as opposed to two. So that's kind of what I'm hammering away at right now. It's weird to be working on Chapter 4 knowing I've got, I don't know, 17 chapters already written past that."Steven Erikson Discussion - Death in Malazan (Spoiler Warning) - Books with Banks - See 1:01:50
Once complete, the manuscript would be handed to the publisher for the editing process, which can take as long as a year before the book is released.Steven Erikson Live Q & A - Fantasy/Sci-Fi Focus - See 2:45 and 4:40 
==Publisher's summary==
==Front matter==
===Dedication===
===Acknowledgements===
===Maps=== 
==Editions==
==Plot Summary==
==Trivia==
*Erikson announced the title of the book on his Twitter account on 18 December 2021.Steven Erikson Twitter - 18 December 2021 The title "came out of a rough poem I'd written, actually, and I don't particularly like the poem as a whole, but it had certain phrases that I thought might be useful, and so I took one which was "No Life Forsaken". And as soon as I wrote it as the title...on the title page, it just fit. Prior to that, I'd had two or three titles for the second book and I wasn't happy with any of them."Steven Erikson Live Q&A - Fantasy/SciFi Focus - See 1:11:30
*Erikson planned to start the novel on Genabackis, but commentary from a fan on YouTube convinced him that Book One should all take place in Seven Cities.Steven Erikson Live Q&A - Fantasy/SciFi Focus - See 1:29:15 The Reader's Legacy (with excerpt from No Life Forsaken)
*Erikson says he had so much fun writing the Malazan marines in this book that he had to "drag myself out of those scenes to get on with the story."Conversation on Malazan with Steven Erikson and AP Canavan (aka A Critical Dragon) - Green Team of the Legendarium - See 56:45
*Erikson says one of the things he discovered in the book's writing process was that the Malazan Book of the Fallen and the Kharkanas Trilogy had already "tackled the heavy stuff, they carried all that weight" and he did not "feel inclined to repeat myself". So No Life Forsaken features "more of a comedic element" and he was "fighting myself in a sense that I'm trying to keep that reined in...because I don't know if I have the wherewithal to go for the heavy shit anymore...It plays out, yes, in The God is Not Willing. It will play out in this book, and certainly the third one. But everything that's leading up to that is in a little bit lighter vein, I think."Steven Erikson Discussion - Death in Malazan (Spoiler Warning) - Books with Banks - See 1:03:05
==External links==
*The Reader's Legacy (with excerpt from No Life Forsaken)
==Notes and references==
02
Category:No Life Forsaken