The Recluce Reread: The Order War

Welcome back dear readers to the fourth installment of the Recluce Reread! Today we’re going to discuss The Order War, in which we learn a lot more about the nature of order and chaos, have more political Recluce drama, and end with a world changing finale - though if we’re being fair, a number of these early books have world changing finales.

If you’re keeping up with the series chronology, and I certainly wouldn’t blame anyone for just going with the flow, The Order War is set 400 years or so after the previous book, The Magic Engineer, which means it is around 700 years after the founding of Recluce in The Towers of the Sunset. The Order War is still some 200 years before we meet Lerris in The Magic of Recluce, though if you’ve read *that* book you’ll note very quickly that this is the same Justen that Lerris meets and Gunnar is Lerris’s father.

Modesitt changes up the Recluce formula a bit in The Order War. This time our protagonist Justen is not exiled from the island of Recluce (or functionally driven from Westwind as Creslin was) but as a magic engineer joins a small military detachment traveling to Sarronnyn to help defend it against the White Wizards of Fairhaven. Oh, those chaos mages. They just want to take over the whole world and there’s always some order mage getting in their way. 

To simplify a good amount of plot, In the battles against the Fairhaven wizards and troops, Justen is separated from the rest of the Recluce and while hunted by the white wizards eventually travels a decent way across Candar to the forest of Naclos (after being rescued by a druid who has been talking to him in his dreams)

In various novels we’ve encountered mentions of the druids, Naclos, the Great Forest, The Accursed Forest - but here we are introduced to the actual community that lives in the forest and in balance (always the balance) with nature and order and chaos. I may have to push the re-read farther than I was planning to see how deep into the Naclos lore we actually get. 

When we first met Justen in The Magic of Recluce we meet him as a Grey Wizard, one who embodies (sort of) both Order and Chaos. The rest of our protagonists and heroes have been fairly pure black (order) mages thus far - but what the novels have been hinting at to various degrees is that excessive order concentrated in one place or machines will only breed more chaos across the world, which is how the white wizards of Fairhaven have grown so powerful even as Recluce itself has become a world power. 

To the druids that accumulation of excessive order and chaos in the world is, well, unbalanced for how the world should be and is a harbinger of great conflicts to come. In Justen they see a potential druid who is at the cusp of understanding his own balance but who can also be a tool for stepping back into the world to “do something” about Fairhaven and respect the balance at the same time. Recluce has since learned that building a stronger fleet of order based ships or doing mighty deeds with massive amounts of order magic may achieve their short term strategic aim but will long term increase concentrations of chaos across Candar. Also - I kind of wonder how the island nations of Hamor and Nordla feel about all of that. Like, they are just minding their business and all of sudden, bam, there’s more powerful magicians in their land?

The thrust of all of this is a big climactic battle and mighty deeds and Justen (and his brother Gunnar, a weather mage like Creslin, along with a guard from Recluce) takes his newly built “land engine” and floats a giant magnifying glass in the sky and melts Fairhaven like an ant. It’s much more traumatic than that, both in the experience of it as well as the Frvn we first discovered in The Magic of Recluce.

The Order War is a significantly more satisfying book than The Magic Engineer was and Justen is a more enjoyable (less dangergeld whiny) protagonist to follow than Dorrin could ever hope to be, though there is still a pattern of not explaining things in this book as has been in the previous three. I suspect it’s because there is a greater maturity to Justen and he generally accepts Recluce and Order as they are, though we are not without conflicts with Recluce as the three person ruling council includes an incredibly corrupt trader and two other councilors who seem to not want to go against said councilor. It’s never smooth sailing. Conflict from within. Conflict from without. 

There is an ancient druid in Naclos. I don’t know when we learn who she is, but internet sleuthing tells me that she is Ayrlyn, one of the original “angels” who ended up in this world in the events we read about in The Fall of Angels and The Chaos Balance - which is approximately 1200 years in the past, if we’re wondering how long lived some of those druids can be. We also revisit Werlynn, a singer and druid, who mentions his long dead children, which we know are Creslin and Llyse from Westwind (if you remember The Towers of the Sunset).

Well - that’s it for The Order War. When we meet again we’ll talk about The Death of Chaos, in which everything ends even though Modesitt will write 20 more Recluce novels, but none set after that book.


Related Short Story: The Price of Perfect Order. 

Set 8 years after The Order War, the story doesn’t so much deal with the fallout of the climactic melting of Fairhaven and reduction of chaos and order as show some consequence of what it means to be truly ordered and how Recluce deals with those who don’t live up to that ideal.

What is interesting and not successful reading this right after The Order War is there is a trader named Ryltar, which unless I am getting twisted up character names, which is the same name as one of the antagonists of The Order War and in the same profession but is a 20ish year old trader who still seems wrong. Maybe I have the name wrong, but I read this right after finishing the novel and that aspect read incredibly discordant.

This is also probably my least favorite of the short stories I’ve read while pushing along the re-read.

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PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.

The Recluce Reread: The Magic Engineer

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.

The Recluce Reread: The Towers of the Sunset

 

When I wrote about The Magic of Recluce I mentioned The Towers of the Sunset was my entry point into Recluce and was the novel that hooked me enough to begin a now thirty year fandom for the series and of L.E. Modesitt, Jr’s various fantasy series (Recluce obviously being the most prominent). All these years later I can still feel Creslin skiing off into the snow just as clearly as I can with June Morrissey walking off into the snow in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, which is a foundational literary moment fundamentally burned into my memory.

All of that is why I was concerned when I started re-reading The Towers of the Sunset and didn’t immediately feel whatever I felt decades ago - which I realize is impossible because I was a teenager thirty some years ago and now I’m pushing 50 and have two kids, one of which is only two years away from becoming a teenager himself. I have changed immensely, the book remains a moment in time.

When the novel starts Creslin is a young man being pushed into an arranged political marriage. He is the son of the Marshall of Westwind, the military outpost that is its own community and under its own rule. Westwind follow The Legend, which is to say that there were once angels and demons and it was men’s hubris that led to the fall of the angels and as such, only women should have true power and rule.

Creslin is resentful about all of that. Not the legend so much as that he knows what his fate is and he wants no part of it. Because the Marshall allowed him to train with the famed Westwind guards who are truly the best of the best, Creslin is a far more accomplished warrior than he understands and has skills to slip away in the aforementioned snowstorm in order to find a different path for his life than that arranged marriage and subservience.

That path involves a whole lot of pain and a surprising amount of wizards trying to kill him because of where he comes from and what he represents to them - which is some sort of perceived threat to the existence of the White Wizards of Fairhaven. Creslin, of course, is an untrained black wizard. It is noted later in the novel that if the council at Fairhaven just allowed for Creslin to be trained by their black wizards all of what happened later could have been avoided because Creslin was only in opposition to them because he was fighting for his life.

Instead what the white wizards of Fairhaven get is the founding of Recluce as its own entity to stand on its own for Creslin and Maegaera (more on her in a moment) to have a place of their own. Creslin, it turns out, was an untrained black mage and possibly an even stronger storm mage. Magaera was a powerful white wizard who is bound to pain to her sister but who will eventually become an equally powerful black mage. They are bound together, not by choice, but in their desire / need / drive to find a place where they can just exist.

The two of them are the arranged marriage I’ve mentioned a few times. Megaera is the sister of the Tyrant of Sarronnyn and their marriage was to solidify an alliance, but the path to that connection is perhaps harder than anything the white wizards could throw at them, which includes Creslin having his mind wiped and being made a slave doing heavy labor.

Until Creslin and Megaera are finally brought together and even for a bit after that, the magical connection of the not-a-relationship is probably the most frustrating part of the novel because they are magically connected to the point that Megaera can feel everything that happens to Creslin, resents his existence, somehow comes to him in what feels like a dream and even though it’s real he has no reason to think it’s anything other than a dream and through Creslin’s actions Megaera resents him even more for being an animal or a brute - and then when they get together for their survival she makes clear how much disdain she has for him because the two of them are collectively bad at communicating or coming to an understanding. All the while they are fighting for survival against the white wizards and not really coming together. 

It’s not a great time and remains not a great time until they begin to come to an understanding much later in the novel when we get closer to their escape to and founding of Recluce. Everything comes together then and the novel really starts to build to a more satisfying resolution. It’s just a little frustrating until we get there because a core part of the novel is the two protagonists sort of being dicks to each other because they are hurting and don’t understand the other is also hurting.

Thinking back to how The Towers of the Sunset was one of the most foundational fantasy novels for the younger me, even through nostalgia, it doesn’t hit remotely the same as it did thirty years ago. I suppose it never could have.

I’m not disappointed, exactly, but I do acknowledge that even as the series has remained a constant over those three decades that not all of the moments that were so meaningful once will be as they were.

What does hit just as hard as it did the first time I read it was the fall of Westwind, which still feels so intensely powerful even though it was only introduced in this book and was a relatively small part of the story. Westwind looms large, possibly because of how it was targeted and also because Recluce is, in some ways, built upon the bones of Westwind.

Another thing that I really appreciate in this book, but also across the full series is the little bits of lore that are doled out. There are legends of the angels and demons, of Ryba, mentions of Nylan (which we know as a city in The Magic of Recluce), and just little bits that I just enjoy.

I’m also pretty sure the idea of the Balance was discussed in The Magic of Recluce, but it is more called out here.

“Klerris thinks that Creslin is a creation of the balance, that too much chaos necessitates a greater focus on order. Theoretically the opposite would be possible, of course. If, for example, Recluce became a home to order, too much emphasis on order could create an imbalance and empower of a few great Chaos Wizards.” She shakes her head. “That’s just speculation. We really don’t know”

Between this book and then The Magic Engineer, it seems pretty clear that is an accurate guess of how the world works.


Related Short Story: Songs Past, Songs for Those to Come

The stories collected in Recluce Tales fill in gaps or provide a bit of added color to the universe. “Songs Past, Songs for Those to Come” is one of the stories that (sort of) answer questions raised in the books. In this case, about the silver haired singer who came to Westwind and fathered Creslin before disappearing, as well as a suggestion that he was sent by the White Wizards to do so?

He’s not named in the story, but the singer here is Werlynn - he’s a druid (we don’t really know much about that yet) from the Great Forest, the absentee father of Creslin, and sort of a legendary figure who has dreams and visions of all sorts of events that he needs to nudge the world into bringing to occur - so where he is said to have been sent by the whites to go make a baby and reduce the amount of order in that part of the world it’s really his idea, or the idea of his dreams.

“Song Past, Songs for Those to Come” is a glimpse into the person who really set everything in motion for the eventual founding of Recluce and destruction of Fairhaven (all things in his visions) - so one can reasonably say that all of this is his fault, but the presumption is also that by acting Werlynn is preventing a greater imbalance of order and chaos. As I said, it’s a fill in the gap story without being truly satisfying.


Related Short Story: Sisters of Sarronnyn, Sisters of Westwind

I had read this story at least once before, likely more, but it hit like I remember The Towers of the Sunset hitting. “Sisters of Sarronyn, Sisters of Westwind” is told from the perspective of Shierra, a guard captain at Westwind. The story mirrors that of The Towers of the Sunset, starting just before Creslin skis off into a snowstorm and ends reasonably close to when the novel does. It just jumps in time for how the events impact Shierra, how she ends up volunteering to be the first Westwind guard contingent to travel to Recluce to help Creslin, her relationship with the male guard commander there, her relationship with Megaera, her perspective on her broken relationship with Fiera (the Westwind guard that Creslin kisses early in the novel who brings the last remnant of Westwind to Recluce late in the book).

Somehow the jumping in time to follow where the events of the book more directly intersect with Westwind and Shierra, the story is far more effective than “Songs Past, Songs for Those to Come” or even “Black Ordermage”. In the novel Shierra is just the guard who trains Megaera and builds the Recluce guards into a stronger force. Here there is real heart. 


PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.

The Recluce Reread: The Magic of Recluce

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.