Steven Erikson confirms his Malazan WITNESS trilogy is now a quartet

Steven Erikson has confirmed that his in-progress Witness Trilogy, a sequel to his classic Malazan Book of the Fallen sequence (1999-2011), will now be a quartet.

Erikson published the first book in the series, The God is Not Willing, in 2021 to considerable acclaim and success. His previous two Malazan novels had been the first two books in the Kharkanas Trilogy, Forge of Darkness (2012) and Fall of Light (2016), but had sold relatively poorly, necessitating a shift to a new project.

Erikson had planned to conclude the Kharkanas sequence, writing several hundred pages of the third book, Walk in Shadow, before his publishers convinced him to return to the Witness sequence. Erikson was hundreds of pages into the second book, No Life Forsaken, before realising it was really two books. After this realisation came about, Erikson pressed on to complete both books before submitting them to his publisher.

This process is almost complete (he had two months' work left to do two months ago), and Erikson is hopeful this means that No Life Forsaken and the as-yet-untitled third book can be released in relatively quick succession (though I suspect it'll be in subsequent years) in the near future.

His plan is to then finish Walk in Shadow (which Erikson was also hinting some time ago might also become two books) and the fourth and final Witness novel. Erikson reiterated that Karsa Orlong will only appear in the final book in the series. He also has two additional Malazan novellas under contract.

Possibly not coincidentally, several of Erikson's publishing houses have put up the same placeholder date for No Life Forsaken recently: 28 August 2025. This seems fairly achievable based on Erikson's current progress.