Wellspring of Chaos, L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
May. 9th, 2005 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienModesitt's Recluce fantasy series is a solid buy-in-paperback for me; I don't expect wonders or an elegant style from him, but I think he's doing something more interesting than the flat prose and repetitive plots suggest at first glance. As I said once in a comment on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
green_knight's journal, the books -- and maybe the series too -- are almost like a magic eye picture; squint just right at the repetitive image and a different, 3-dimensional picture pops into view, if usually a rather crude and stylized one. The novels are often built up mostly in a series of repetitive scenes where it's the changes in detail -- the price of food, the seating arrangements at table -- that tell the larger story. There's usually some attempt to deal with halfway realistic economics, too: war causes inflation; authorities setting tariff rates have to worry about deterring trade. (It is a little odd that the relative values of copper, silver and gold coins remain at a tidy 1:10:100 ratio over multiple countries and several centuries, and no-one ever seems to think of making any different denominations.)
This one is a bit of a departure from pattern. As far as I can tell, it fits into the history somewhere after The Magic Engineer; I haven't crosschecked the politics closely enough to determine whether it comes before, after or contemporary with The Magic of Recluce. Justen the Grey Wizard, who isn't my favourite character though he seems to be the author's, puts in a brief appearance. After four books where the viewpoint characters were sympathetic users of the white chaos-magic that the earlier ones depicted as evil, we're back with yet another character learning to use black order magic, usually associated with 'good'. This one, though, isn't a young lad starting out and learning a trade, but a successful middle-aged craftsman who falls foul of corrupt authority , befriends a young order-user who then gets murdered in his shop, and has to rebuild his life while teaching himself to use order magic. He spends a fair bit of the book aboard ship, so the eating establishments he patronizes are a bit more varied than usual. The story ends with the usual battle, more or less, though this is a fairly small-scale one, but doesn't resolve a lot of the hero's issues. I wasn't surprised to find that the next book in the series is a direct sequel; there were just too many loose ends.
In so far as I can judge, this may not be one of the stronger entries in the series. It seems to be trying to go in new directions, but being so tightly wedged into the history doesn't leave it a lot of room to maneuver. I wouldn't normally spell that in American, but I can't get the English way to look right.
green_knight's journal, the books -- and maybe the series too -- are almost like a magic eye picture; squint just right at the repetitive image and a different, 3-dimensional picture pops into view, if usually a rather crude and stylized one. The novels are often built up mostly in a series of repetitive scenes where it's the changes in detail -- the price of food, the seating arrangements at table -- that tell the larger story. There's usually some attempt to deal with halfway realistic economics, too: war causes inflation; authorities setting tariff rates have to worry about deterring trade. (It is a little odd that the relative values of copper, silver and gold coins remain at a tidy 1:10:100 ratio over multiple countries and several centuries, and no-one ever seems to think of making any different denominations.)This one is a bit of a departure from pattern. As far as I can tell, it fits into the history somewhere after The Magic Engineer; I haven't crosschecked the politics closely enough to determine whether it comes before, after or contemporary with The Magic of Recluce. Justen the Grey Wizard, who isn't my favourite character though he seems to be the author's, puts in a brief appearance. After four books where the viewpoint characters were sympathetic users of the white chaos-magic that the earlier ones depicted as evil, we're back with yet another character learning to use black order magic, usually associated with 'good'. This one, though, isn't a young lad starting out and learning a trade, but a successful middle-aged craftsman who falls foul of corrupt authority , befriends a young order-user who then gets murdered in his shop, and has to rebuild his life while teaching himself to use order magic. He spends a fair bit of the book aboard ship, so the eating establishments he patronizes are a bit more varied than usual. The story ends with the usual battle, more or less, though this is a fairly small-scale one, but doesn't resolve a lot of the hero's issues. I wasn't surprised to find that the next book in the series is a direct sequel; there were just too many loose ends.
In so far as I can judge, this may not be one of the stronger entries in the series. It seems to be trying to go in new directions, but being so tightly wedged into the history doesn't leave it a lot of room to maneuver. I wouldn't normally spell that in American, but I can't get the English way to look right.