The Reintegration of Women and Class Conflict into Epic/Grimdark Fantasy

Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon (1999) is a well-received novel grounded in the Secondary World traditions of both epic and grimdark fantasy, that may – upon a first read – appear like any other fantasy novel set in its own world – featuring humans and nonhuman characters, giants and dragons, swords and sorcery, floating castles and continent-spanning empires. The use of these fantasy elements creates a wonderfully immersive first novel for the wonderfully evocative Malazan Book of the Fallen series, but the series accomplishes more than that; Erikson’s novel is set in a Secondary World that is distinct from the other grimdark and epic fantasy settings that came before it in that the Malazan world is a setting in which patriarchal norms and misogyny have never existed. Furthermore, Erikson’s text, as both epic fantasy and participating in grimdark fantasy tropes, acts to distance these subgenres from the critiques sometimes leveled at earlier such works. Where pre-Erikson (and still some post-Erikson) epic fantasy has been critiqued as misogynistic and entrenched in notions of patriarchal hierarchies – and pre-Erikson (and still much post-Erikson) grimdark fantasy has been critiqued for subjecting the female characters therein to excessive violence, often sexual in nature, and wallowing in graphic depictions of said violence -- Erikson reverses course and reintroduces women into epic fantasy as human beings rather than objects of male domination. This reintroduction allows for notions of class conflict to permeate the text.