Welcome dear readers to the third installment of the Recluce Reread! Today we’re going to talk about The Magic Engineer, which is the book that sort of answers the question you probably were not asking when reading The Magic of Recluce and wondering “where does Recluce get those wonderful toys?”. It starts here, some 300 years after Creslin and Megeara founded Recluce in The Towers of the Sunset.
Chronology only matters to a point in the Recluce series and that point is just how much the reader cares how everything fits together. I *mostly* care how everything fits, by which I mean I like to see the connections between novels but because Modesitt jumps around so much in time through the 25 (so far) published novels that those connections are often little more than threads.
For example, The Magic Engineer is set 300 years after The Towers of the Sunset and the founding of Recluce. Creslin has already passed into legend and is spoken about in magely circles but also in the sense of “Recluce doesn’t have a Creslin” and there are thin hints about descendents. The Magic Engineer is also a good 1500 years after the Alyiakal novels, which are thus far the earliest set and still 650 years before The Magic of Recluce and the final books of the setting.
The novel begins very similarly to The Magic of Recluce. Dorrin is not Lerris facing the dangergeld (terrible name, by the way), but he’s not not Lerris facing the dangergeld. Those who can’t accept Recluce’s rules in their core will face exile, but those whose parents can afford to pay for Academy schooling, they can be trained to have a greater opportunity for success. That’s Dorrin, a young blacksmith who doesn’t quite fit in, doesn’t accept the answers that he is given, and really all he wants to do is just make his machines that he is insistent are order based but the magisters of Recluce say otherwise. So away he goes.
I’ll confirm as I re-read more of the series, but this is likely to be my least favorite Recluce novel. It’s not that I dislike Dorrin, he’s a fairly standard Recluce hero, but I much less enjoy reading about Dorrin than I do most other protagonists. I liked it him far less early on than I did Lerris, impressive as that is, and only really settle in to Dorrin’s story once *he* is settled into Diev and doing the mundane work of smithing and trying to a) figure out how to make his giant engines and b) how to earn enough gold to be able to do so. As far as that goes, it’s a fairly standard Recluce story: Try to live a peaceful life, forced by circumstances to live in interesting times, feel forced to act, explosive conclusion. Rinse, wash, repeat.
I do find it interesting that Dorrin is the one who wrote The Basis of Order, the small tome (presumably small) that underpins so much of subsequent order teaching - though it only appears in a few books. Maybe it’s because it’s so prominent in The Magic of Recluce and I only read that a couple months ago so it feels fresh, important and ever present.
Otherwise, we get the founding of Nylan the city and more importantly (maybe), the origin of the black warships used in The Magic of Recluce and what seemed in that novel to be the true foundation of the power of the island nation.
But what I’d really like to read and am almost certainly not going to get is something set in and around Recluce in the 200+ years between The Towers of the Sunset and The Magic Engineer to see how Recluce developed after Creslin and Megaera passed away. I know not every period has the bits of explosiveness that Modesitt likes to build towards - but given that he tells stories that lives in the mundanity of the day to day, I’d like to read that story.
Related Short Story: Artisan: Four Portraits and a Miniature
This story runs concurrently with The Magic Engineer and is a series of glimpses into the life of another the not-a-dangergelders who started with Dorrin, Jyll, a painter. It starts with her inability to accept the Recluce life (from the perspective of the magisters, of course), her semi magical violence, and her gradual maturation through the episodes of the story until it intersects back with Dorrin at the end of the novel.
I wouldn’t say so much that it fills in gaps as much as it just shows that other lives are continuing and weaving in and out of the narrative viewpoint that we are given in The Magic Engineer. It’s not one of my favorites from Recluce Tales
PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.
