On Compassion and Its Absence: Erikson vs. Martin
When talking to people about what kind of books I like, it often comes as a surprise to others that I despise GRRM's writing. When they ask why, it's hard to properly put it into context. "It's bleak" holds little water; I love Wolfe's the Long Sun and the Broken Sword. "It's morally grey"; that's true for a huge range of science fantasy I love, from Conan to Nine Princes in Amber. "Everyone dies" well... So do so many characters in Malazan. But it doesn't bother me there.
But I believe in Malazan it's where the contrast shows why. One of them feels like an act of love, while the other feels like an act of contempt.
Both write worlds saturated with violence, betrayal, and the grinding indifference of power. Both are happy to kill characters you care about. Both reject the sanitised moral clarity of pulp fantasy. And yet reading Malazan feels fundamentally different from reading A Song of Ice and Fire. And it's not just in texture, prose or setup. There seems to be an underlying and fundamental divide in what they believe about people.
Both works have a tragedy and a darkness to them, but the quality of them is entirely different.
Martin's darkness is deflationary. The Red Wedding, Ned's death, the systematic punishment of honour, competence and caring. The world doesn't care about your narrative desires. In fact: it seems to all but resent you for caring about the people in it.
Arguably, these work by destroying the reader's genre expectations, but the problem is it becomes its own formula. Virtue is reliably punished. Scheming is reliably rewarded. After a few cycles you realise Martin has simply inverted the pulp fantasy moral universe he argued against, rather than make any nuanced statements about it.
In contrast, Erikson's darkness is tragic in the classical sense. Characters suffer and die, often pointlessly and preventably, looking from the outside in. However, the narrative voice never stops caring about them. There's a persistent, almost aggressive humanism running through the Malazan books, most visible in the Bridgeburners and the Bonehunters, that insists on the dignity of the ordinary person ground up by history. It's a tale where you feel for and with a skeleton as he grieves over the dark elf's story.
The love and pity are structural; it's the argument the series is making: there is immense power in the act of witnessing and caring in spite of the doom you know is coming.
And from that comes what I think is the inherent difference underlying the two writers' philosophies, and why I love one but couldn't finish the other. It's about what each author assumes human beings fundamentally are and how the world is.
Martin exhibits a profound pessimism about the human nature. People are self-interested, corruptible, and almost entirely defined by their political goals. The rare genuinely good person (Ned, Robb and a few others) is destroyed precisely because of their goodness, as if the world has an immune response to virtue. This is a coherent, if utterly nihilistic, worldview. It's also one that quietly forecloses its own resolution, which is why Martin has been unable to finish the series and, I'd argue, structurally cannot , but that's worth a separate post.
Erikson's pessimism is located elsewhere: in systems, not souls. Institutions grind people up. Gods decay, and when they care for humans, are limited to action or inaction in the same way as them. Empires are machines trample over humans without any regard, even when they are part of that same empire.
But individual people, in Erikson's universe, are generally capable of decency, loyalty, even grace. Take for example the soldiers of the Fourteenth. They aren't noble in any Arthurian sense. They are cynical, they are mercenary, and frequently awful to each other. However, in spite of that, they are good. Good in the way that humans are: imperfectly, situationally, but most of all: stubbornly.
And that difference makes, well.... All the difference.
The nihilism of Martin makes a nihilist of the reader, and in that bleak view, what does a death more or less really matter? Why get attached to something temporal that you know is doomed?
Erikson's answer is simple: if the people we are reading about are capable of virtue, the tragedy matters. We care for these people because we have grace for them. The loss means something because the value of what was lost feels real.
It reminds me of the most poignant line of Pratchett's essay Let There Be Dragons:
Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.
And that's why the comparison between the two always felt wrong to me. Calling them both "grimdark" is like calling both a funeral and a war crime "sad events". Technically accurate, entirely missing the point. One asks you to grieve. The other asks you to stop caring. I know which one I'd rather spend a thousand pages with.