Literary Influences and Intertexts

Introduction

Steven Erikson is an unusually candid writer on the subject of his own influences. Across many hours of recorded interviews he has named specific works, authors, and films whose techniques or atmospheres he has consciously borrowed, imitated, or inverted, and the resulting catalogue is wider than the usual fantasy writer's lineage by a considerable margin. The Malazan Book of the Fallen draws on classical epic (Homer, Beowulf), Renaissance drama (Shakespeare), twentieth-century American modernism (Hemingway, Faulkner), hard-boiled and action cinema (Paul Newman, John Huston adaptations), pulp sword-and-sorcery (Howard, Burroughs), historical fantasy (Kay, Donaldson, Hobb), science fiction's single most consequential epigraph-and-worldbuilding template (Herbert's Dune), metanarrative television (Dennis Potter), French historical romance (Dumas), popular history-of-mind (Jaynes), and the craft tradition of the modern American short story workshop (Carver). The list is not a boast of eclecticism; it is the documentation of a specific working method — one Erikson has described in his own terms as "stealing freely" from whatever he admired, on the understanding that what works in fiction works regardless of the genre compartments in which it is ordinarily quarantined.

This essay examines the principal sources under seven headings: Homer's Iliad as the classical substrate of the series and the specific literary device (the "wine-dark sea") that opens Memories of Ice Chapter 7; Shakespeare as the breath-length compositional unit of Forge of Darkness; Hemingway and Faulkner as the two competing twentieth-century prose philosophies between which Erikson positions his own style; Glen Cook and Stephen R. Donaldson as the two contemporary fantasy poles between which the series is calibrated; Frank Herbert's Dune as the epigraph template and anti-nihilistic foil; Dumas's Three Musketeers (and the 1973 Lester film adaptation) as the concrete model for the Bridgeburners; and Julian Jaynes's Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind as the non-fiction work whose thesis shaped the series' treatment of gods, voices, and interiority.

Homer: The Iliad as Classical Substrate

Of all the non-fantasy influences Erikson has named, Homer's Iliad is the one he has returned to most often as the structural template against which the series was calibrated. The influence is at its most explicit in the opening of Memories of Ice Chapter 7, which Erikson has discussed at length in the Critical Conversations 03 close-reading episode:

"This section opens with evocations of the Iliad, and I mean that's not accidental at all. I used the wind to permeate the entire scene on top of the parapet, and it's sort of the background noise of history... because I do love that 'born on a sea dark as spiced wine,' that the wine-dark sea being that classic example from the Greek epics... And one of the reasons for choosing that — I mean I've often said the Iliad was a huge inspiration for the entire series, but for this novel I chose it. I got as close to it as I've ever gotten in terms of referencing the Iliad. This is probably the closest I get anywhere. But I wanted to convey that there is an element of almost antiquity, or there's something unusual about the Grey Swords in their mannerisms, and there is something of the Greek heroic element to them — where warfare is their calling in the same fashion that a religion would be to someone else. So with the Grey Swords you've got a holy order, you've got the Templars, and I wanted that meshing of the sacred and the profane, which is all through the Iliad in terms of the relationship of the warriors with the gods." (Critical Conversations 03: Chapter 7 Memories of Ice transcript)

The "wine-dark sea" is the most famous single-phrase inheritance from Homer in all of English literature, and Erikson's transposition of it to the opening of his Grey Swords introduction is precise. He is not using the phrase to decorate; he is using it to claim, at the level of prose, a lineage for the chapter. The Grey Swords are being framed as Homeric figures — warriors whose calling is simultaneously religious and martial, whose relationship with their gods is direct and strategic, and whose inevitable last stand (as Erikson's interlocutor notes) makes them the novel's Trojans rather than its Greeks. The epic substructure of the chapter is not hidden beneath the fantasy surface; it is deliberately surfaced so that readers with a classical education will recognise the register while readers without one will simply experience the register as unusually formal and resonant.

Erikson has extended the Iliad analogy beyond Memories of Ice:

"How long have you stood there, Shield Anvil? ... How long, in your cold closed-in fashion, have you stared upon your high priest, black-mantled Itkovian? ... This is all Iliad, you know, this is all Homeric. Bear in mind that the Iliad and the Odyssey, but especially the Iliad, employ mnemonic devices because they were originally oral tradition — they were told as a story, and the oral tradition invokes a kind of repetition, transition phrases that are..." (Critical Conversations 03 transcript)

The reference to oral-tradition mnemonic devices is analytically important. Homer's distinctive epithets ("swift-footed Achilles," "grey-eyed Athena," "rosy-fingered Dawn") are not merely decorative; they are functional — they gave the oral performer line-length units of fixed metrical value that could be assembled on the fly during recitation. Erikson's borrowing of the form ("black-mantled Itkovian") is therefore not a cosmetic reference but a structural one: he is importing the epithet-grammar of the oral tradition into the written prose of a chapter whose tonal ambition is to feel older and more formal than the rest of the book. The reader experiences the chapter as having the cadence of a recited epic, and the cadence is produced by devices whose original function was precisely to sustain recited epic.

Shakespeare: The Breath-Length Sentence

For the prequel trilogy beginning with Forge of Darkness, Erikson adopted a radically different stylistic register, one he has explicitly attributed to a period of reading Shakespeare straight through:

"I wanted to do a stylistic shift, a tonal shift, in everything — to move away from the Malazan ten books. I downloaded the collected works of Shakespeare and I just read everything. And that gave me an interesting way to approach this thing. Forge of Darkness is — I remember the guy who did the reading for the audio books, he even commented on how easy it was to read out loud, and the reason is breath. It's breath length. It's all breath length. It's as if the characters are standing on a stage and pontificating, if you will. That's a very seductive style once you get into it." (A Conversation with Steven Erikson transcript)

The "breath length" principle is the specific compositional unit Erikson extracted from his Shakespeare reading. The principle holds that a sentence should be calibrated to the length a single human breath can sustain when spoken aloud — not an arbitrary grammatical unit but a physiological one. Shakespeare's blank verse is organised around breath partly because it was written to be performed, and actors need to be able to deliver speeches without running out of air. A prose style modelled on this unit inherits a theatrical quality whose distinctive feature is that every sentence is, in effect, performable: the reader can hear the sentence spoken even when reading silently, and the sentence's length has been constrained so that the hearing is natural rather than strained.

The consequence for Forge of Darkness is that its prose feels stylised in a way the Malazan-proper prose does not. Characters in Kharkanas speak as though they are aware they are being heard; their speeches have the dignity and elevation of theatrical declamation; and the overall register of the novel is elevated above the colloquial tone common to the ten-book series. Erikson has noted that recapturing this register has been difficult for the later volumes of the Kharkanas trilogy, because the breath-length discipline is demanding and the habit of writing in it has to be re-acquired each time he returns to the project.

Hemingway and Faulkner: The Two American Poles

Erikson has repeatedly framed his own prose as positioned between the two dominant twentieth-century American prose traditions, represented by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner:

"Hemingway approaches the craft of writing as he would in his reporting — so it's a very journalistic style, but he also plays with sentence structure in a way that you wouldn't see in a newspaper or magazine article. Hemingway sort of did this paring-down style, reducing his diction level. The language is very sparse, very clinical, understated... Faulkner went the other way — very lyrical, very poetic stuff. And Cormac McCarthy, if you read The Road, that is kind of Hemingway brought to an absurd level stylistically, where everything is pared down so it almost becomes devoid of any kind of human content... I've stolen freely from both of them. I love some of the sentence structures that Hemingway messes around with, especially when he creates settings — he does his way of loading everything into a single sentence, which I really quite like. Faulkner is more the lyrical turn of phrase. It's fecund as a writing style, very very rich, and I steal from both." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The "stealing from both" position is characteristic. Erikson is not aligning himself with either pole of the American tradition; he is claiming licence to deploy either, depending on the demands of the specific section or scene. A battle scene might call for Hemingway's loaded compression (single sentences that carry a great deal of setting and tone with minimal apparatus); a lyric passage might call for Faulknerian fecundity. The flexibility is itself a stylistic commitment — the commitment to matching style to scene rather than maintaining a single house register across the entire work — and it explains the puzzling variety readers sometimes notice in the series' prose, which can shift within a single chapter from the terse Marine banter of a squad on the move to the elaborately periodic sentences of a philosophical passage delivered by Kruppe.

Erikson has further framed his own position within the contemporary fantasy field:

"If we were to put it in context for fantasy fiction, it's somewhere between Glen Cook's Black Company and Donaldson's Covenant series. Somewhere in between, because I stole from both of those too." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The Cook-Donaldson bracketing is diagnostic. Cook represents the sparse, military-journalistic pole — first-person soldier narrator, short sentences, minimal ornamentation, a Vietnam-style scepticism about heroic rhetoric. Donaldson represents the Latinate-lyrical pole — elevated vocabulary, grammatically complex sentences, sustained philosophical apparatus in the mouths of characters who have existed in their worlds long enough to have acquired the diction of classical rhetoric. Erikson is between them in the technical sense that his prose can move in either direction within the same text, and the movement is always motivated by the demands of the current scene rather than by loyalty to a single register.

Paul Newman, the Long Hot Summer, and Quick Ben

A more specific influence, and one that illustrates the small-scale mechanism by which Erikson's borrowings enter the text, concerns the origin of the name Quick Ben. The source is William Faulkner's story "Barn Burning," adapted for film as The Long Hot Summer (1958, directed by Martin Ritt) starring Paul Newman as the character Ben Quick. Erikson has described the inheritance:

"The origins of Quick Ben was the fictional character Ben Quick in the Faulkner novel The Long Hot Summer. I just inverted Ben Quick — Quick Ben... Cam and I were roommates going to university here in Victoria, and we were watching a lot of classic films. One of them was The Long Hot Summer with Paul Newman — that version. It's been a remake that's not quite as good, but the Paul Newman one is a fabulous film, and we were watching that at the time when Quick Ben was created as a character. So that basically sprang straight from the film we were watching." (Conversation with Steven Erikson 6: The Bonehunters transcript)

The anecdote matters because it reveals the practical mechanism by which many of the series' smaller intertextual elements entered it. Erikson and Esslemont's tabletop gaming sessions (the origin of most of the series' cast, as discussed elsewhere in these lessons) were interleaved with the cultural consumption habits of two university roommates who watched a lot of black-and-white films, and the names, atmospheres, and situations of those films leaked into the gaming as a matter of course. Ben Quick is the clearest documented case because Erikson has named it, but the general principle — that the contents of the Malazan world were porous to the media environment of its creators during their formative years — applies across the entire series. When readers notice echoes of The Three Musketeers, The Singing Detective, The Lion in Winter, or Lawrence of Arabia, they are probably noticing actual channels rather than coincidences.

Frank Herbert's Dune: Epigraphs and Anti-Nihilism

Frank Herbert's Dune has been identified by Erikson as a key early influence on two specific features of the Malazan series. The first is the use of in-world epigraphs at the beginning of chapters:

"You've mentioned [Dune] in a recent interview as well, and something you brought up here as a major inspiration. I hope so, yeah. I didn't love Dune the first time I read it, and now that I'm a more experienced reader I read it again and I appreciate the ideas much more, and I can definitely see how it's something that's influenced people like myself because, especially for its time, something that had to have just been — it was huge in and of itself. And the epigraphs at the beginning of chapters and stuff, I just adored that. It never even occurred to me that that would be problematic in fantasy, so I just stole it." (Steven Erikson Talks Building Malazan transcript)

The epigraph technique, which Dune brought into mainstream English-language genre fiction through its use of Princess Irulan's histories as chapter headings, became one of the signature features of the Malazan series. Erikson's epigraphs are discussed at length in the essay on exposition and info-dumping; their historical provenance in Dune is worth recording here, because the influence is direct and acknowledged.

The second feature of Dune that Erikson has discussed at length is its ending, which he describes as "hollow" — the sense that the savior figure Paul Atreides has triumphed but that the triumph has brought with it the threat of enormous consequent violence. Erikson's anti-nihilism project in the Malazan series (discussed in the essay on compassion and anti-nihilism) was in part a direct response to this ending:

"I really enjoy the ending of Dune and how it left me feeling very hollow... So I consciously set out — I did not want to create a nihilistic ending to the Malazan Book of the Fallen. I wanted to set it up as if we were heading that way and then to flip it." (Steven Erikson Talks Building Malazan transcript)

Dune is therefore both a formal model (for the epigraph apparatus) and an ethical foil (for the anti-nihilistic reversal). The relationship is characteristic of Erikson's intertextual practice: the influence is specific, attributed, and partially oppositional. He is not imitating Dune; he is drawing a specific device from it and using the rest of it as the position against which his own commitments can be defined.

Dumas and the 1973 Three Musketeers: The Bridgeburners as Musketeers

The most direct cinematic source for the Bridgeburners and the dinner-party sequence at the end of Gardens of the Moon is Richard Lester's 1973 film of Dumas's The Three Musketeers, starring Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay, and Raquel Welch. Erikson has been explicit about the inheritance:

"You even see the parallel with Lady Simtal as Milady de Winter. Those storylines from The Three Musketeers but adapted and placed into the context of the Malazan setting — an homage to The Three Musketeers. I do this a lot as a critic or when I'm doing academic analysis." (Critical Conversations 08: Character Agency in Gardens of the Moon with Steven Erikson transcript)

Erikson has further noted that the specific tonal qualities of the 1970s Lester adaptation — its balance of comedy and violence, its willingness to present its heroes as simultaneously ridiculous and competent, its treatment of political conspiracy as both deadly and farcical — were central to the Bridgeburners' distinctive register:

"For me, that's always been the very best — particularly even the character of Kruppe and how he interacts with the world, and Crocus falling through the clotheslines all the way down. Those things always reminded me of that comedy-action-comedy version of The Three Musketeers, rather than the Dumas novel." (Community Malazan Questions with Esslemont and Erikson transcript)

The distinction between "the Dumas novel" and "the comedy-action-comedy version of The Three Musketeers" is significant. Erikson is crediting the film more than the novel, because the film's specific tonal combination — theatrical, witty, simultaneously farcical and brutal — is the one that mapped best onto the Bridgeburners' voices. Readers who have seen the Lester adaptation will recognise the Bridgeburners' distinctive blend of gallows humour, professional competence, and loyalty-to-each-other under catastrophic conditions as direct transposition.

Julian Jaynes and the Bicameral Mind

The most intellectually unusual of Erikson's acknowledged influences is Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) — a work of speculative psychology arguing that pre-classical humans lacked a unified sense of interior selfhood and experienced their own mental processes as external voices (the voices of the gods). Erikson has described the work's effect on him in considerable detail:

"Sometime in the midst of writing the ten books, somebody directed me towards Julian Jaynes and his phenomenal work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. And that is — to this day I still reread the opening chapter — so beautifully written and so evocative, and it poses a very interesting thesis... that was certainly playing on my mind in terms of the relationship of an external mediator between our consciousness and the real world. The voice in our head that shouts out." (A Conversation with Steven Erikson transcript)

The relevance of Jaynes's thesis to the Malazan cosmology is direct. Jaynes argued that the shift from the Iliad (in which the characters routinely experience their own thoughts as the speech of gods) to the Odyssey (in which the characters possess the interior deliberative space modern readers recognise as consciousness) corresponds to a historical transition in the structure of the human mind itself — a transition from a "bicameral" arrangement (two-chambered, with one chamber speaking and the other listening) to the modern unified self. The theory is controversial and not generally accepted in cognitive science, but it has had significant influence on writers interested in the phenomenology of religious experience, and Erikson's reading of it is visible in the Malazan series' treatment of gods as beings who are simultaneously external agents and internal voices.

Erikson has connected Jaynes's thesis directly to his own reading experience of Homer:

"The shift in voice between the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the fact that when I was reading the Iliad even as a young person I was baffled by it — something did not make sense. It took until reading Jaynes's book to sort of have it pointed out to me that what's missing is interiority, interior landscape of characters. It just wasn't there." (A Conversation with Steven Erikson transcript)

The observation is significant for the Malazan cosmology because it suggests that the series' treatment of gods as belief-constituted agents who can inhabit mortal consciousnesses is not merely a fantasy device but a deliberate engagement with a specific cognitive-historical thesis. If Jaynes is right, then the transition from Homeric to modern consciousness was real, and some of the phenomenology of the older mode would have included the experience of one's own thoughts as divine speech. Erikson's cosmology preserves this possibility by making the gods real in the way Jaynes's pre-classical humans believed their gods to be real: as voices that can enter and direct a mortal consciousness without the consciousness being deluded or psychotic.

Conclusion: Stealing Freely as Method

The catalogue of influences assembled above is not a curiosity; it is the documentation of a method. Erikson has summarised the method in a single phrase: "I stole everything I liked." The method rests on three underlying convictions. First, that no genre boundary is legitimate when the craft is at stake — a Shakespeare breath-length sentence can be imported into a fantasy chapter, a Hemingway compression can be deployed in a battle scene, a Faulkner lyric flight can carry a philosophical passage, and all of these can coexist within the same book without incoherence. Second, that the influences one has absorbed while not consciously looking for them (the films watched during university, the epigraphs from Dune encountered as a teenager, the Iliad read in a classics course) are often more consequential than the influences one cultivates deliberately, because the unconsciously absorbed influences have been digested rather than merely noted. Third, that citation is unnecessary within the fiction itself — the borrowings need not be flagged for the reader, and in most cases Erikson does not flag them — but that the willingness to acknowledge them in interviews is part of the writer's professional honesty, a refusal of the mystification that pretends fiction arrives ex nihilo from an individual genius.

The method has consequences for how the series should be read. A reader who approaches the Malazan Book of the Fallen as a work of genre fantasy in isolation from its influences will miss most of the registers the prose is using. A reader who attends to the influences — who recognises the Homeric cadence of the Grey Swords' introduction, the Hemingway compression of the Marine banter, the Faulknerian lyric turns in Kruppe's monologues, the Musketeer farce-and-violence of the Bridgeburners, the Dune-derived epigraphs, and the Jaynes-inflected treatment of gods as voices — will have access to a series that is far richer than it appears when read as unmarked fantasy. The influences are not decoration; they are the cultural vocabulary in which the series is written, and fluency in that vocabulary rewards the attentive reader with layers of meaning that less informed reading simply cannot retrieve.

The final implication is that the Malazan series is one of the clearest contemporary demonstrations of the thesis that genre fiction, when taken seriously by a writer with broad cultural formation, can operate at the same level of intertextual density as any work in the literary tradition. Erikson has not been interested in arguing this thesis explicitly — his comments on postmodernism have tended toward polite scepticism — but his practice demonstrates it without argument. A reader who finishes the ten volumes has encountered a fiction in conversation with Homer, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Faulkner, Herbert, Dumas, Jaynes, and a dozen other figures, and the conversation has been carried out at the level of technique rather than reference. The influences are in the prose, not in the footnotes, and the prose is what reading the Malazan series consists of.

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