Dear readers, if you thought to yourself that you don't have enough rereads of fantasy series in your life, have I got a treat for you! By treat, of course, I have the pleasure to announce that I'm launching a reread of L.E. Modesitt, Jr's Recluce Saga. The series spans 26 novels and a story collection, and I'll be upfront that a full series reread would require far more ambition than I have in me.
The plan is to for sure push through the first six books of Recluce, with a probable endpoint of The Fall of Angels and a potential to go one more with The Chaos Balance since it is linked to The Fall of Angels. That will almost certainly be it.
If you asked me on the right day, I would tell you that I have many favorite series, because there's so much great stuff out there and I've been reading science fiction and fantasy since the early nineties, and this is a genre built on series. This one is among my favorites, so let's just get right to it.
The Magic of Recluce and the fifth book in the series, The Death of Chaos, are chronologically the last books of the series. I recently (at the time of writing this) finished Sub-Majer’s Challenge, the twenty-fifth Recluce novel and part of a sub-series of the earliest books in the chronology—to the point that The Magic of Recluce is set some 2100 years after what Modesitt is writing now.
I first discovered Recluce sometime in the mid ’90s, but it wasn’t this book that hooked me. I’ll write about this more when I write about the next book, but I discovered the series with The Towers of the Sunset and was swept away and blown away by the story of Creslin leaving Westwind in the snow and everything that followed. That was my introduction to this world, but The Magic of Recluce (originally published in 1991) is the book that actually started it all.
Here’s the introduction: Lerris is a young man on the island of Recluce who seemingly doesn’t know or care much about anything. As a result, because the society on the island is built around a concept of Order as a fundamental force (might as well use capital letters here), anyone who cannot fully commit to Order and who in turn may inadvertently invite Chaos into that society is exiled from the island and sent out into the rest of the world to find their way and ultimately figure out if they can truly belong as part of Recluce. Few return.
A motley group of disaffected not quite youth must undertake a “dangergeld”—a.k.a. the semiformal exile quest with a purpose. Each of the seven have their own reasons (or causes) for not fitting into Recluce society, but since the novel is mostly told from a pretty tight first-person perspective of Lerris, we only get his perspective on the others.
Lerris is, according to the internet, only 15 when we first meet him, which does explain why he is an absolutely annoying git for almost half the book. Lerris is someone who wants to understand, but he wants to be told why in a way that he can understand and without being lectured, which is perfectly reasonable, and it doesn’t appear that Recluce has a modern education system, so he never quite internalizes an understanding of the fundamental nature of Recluce. Since we see everything through the eyes of Lerris, neither do we.
It’s not a bad setup for a novel: boy who doesn’t know shit about shit is exiled until he can figure his shit out, and in the meantime we (the reader) learn how the world and its inherent magic system of Order and Chaos overall works. Things eventually go boom.
I’ll admit that I never loved The Magic of Recluce as much as most of the rest of the series. It’s Lerris, and also because I fell for Creslin and Westwind, and then went back to this first book, and Lerris isn’t Creslin (though I’m prepared to be disappointed by Creslin after all these years). The good news is that even if, on reread, it’s still not going to ever be one of my favorites in the series, it’s a reasonably good introduction that sets up a truly climactic fifth novel that doesn’t actually end the series, because there’s still twenty novels after that, which take place at various points in the overall chronology.
The Magic of Recluce sets the template for just about every novel in the series that follows: regardless of the age of the protagonist, there is a need to develop an understanding of either order or chaos and its underlying principles and to deeply internalize it as they go through the day-to-day mundanity of their lives, and often they will be sent away from their home and end up in conflict with other powers that be, as they are or become deeply competent and moral, and it’s that competence and morality that forms the core conflict. If that works for a reader, it’ll really work.
As someone this deep into the series, the parts of The Magic of Recluce that I most appreciated are when he settled down in a town for about a year and just worked as a woodworker/crafter, and avoided romantic entanglements with the daughter of the crafter who took him in, because he knows he’ll still need to venture out eventually and do magic, all the while gaining the respect of those around him for his young age and skill. We get versions of this in almost every Recluce novel, whether it is competence at a trade or as a military professional, and I am an absolute sucker for it.
I don’t remember how I reacted to the novel when I first read it and what bits I latched onto. It might have been some of the same lore that I’m digging today, but today it’s nostalgia. It’s the melted city of Frvn that used to be Fairhaven that was once the greatest city and power center of the white wizards. There were pictures in the city of Nylan in Recluce of two “magisters” from long ago. Those were Creslin and Megaera from Towers of the Sunset. Nylan itself, the black city, was kind of a counterpoint to Fairhaven, but also was named after another legendary figure. Justen will feature in a couple of books coming up. I don’t even know where to begin with the fairly minor character of Cassius. There’s overall less lore that pulls across the span of novels, but the bits that are here are all stuff that I just really enjoy.
That’s where I land on The Magic of Recluce and Modesitt’s fantasy novels: it’s just compelling stuff that I’ve been reading for thirty years now, and while I’ve kept up on the franchise, I don’t think I’ve revisited anything in possibly twenty years now. I’m going to enjoy this ride.
Related Short Story: “Black Ordermage”
Before Lerris leaves for his dangergeld, he is trained by a number of magisters. One of them is a man named Cassius, a black mage who we are given hints that he might not be from the world of Recluce. I don't mean from the island, I mean literally not from the same world. There are suggestions that he might be from our (the reader's) world.
“Black Ordermage” is the origin of Cassius arriving in the Recluce universe. Like those angels and demons of legend, he is not from that world. He is a Vietnam-era American sailor fighting a fire on the flight deck of his ship and is… somehow… transported to the middle of a battle on a Recluce ship, which ends with him in captivity, accepting that he really isn't in his world anymore, and a gradual understanding that he might be an order mage and what that means.
The story is set around 20 years prior to the start of The Magic of Recluce. It doesn't add all that much to the lore or understanding of the world or even this novel. What it really does is confirm a small bit of speculation that yep, Cassius is from Earth, just like later novels will feature characters also not native to this world.
One thing that I do find interesting is that the various transports to this universe are not all pulled from the same time. Cassius is from the 1970s, but others had more large-scale military spacecraft. I'm curious once again at the mechanism for how some of these transfers occured.
PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.
