Modesitt’s The Magic of Recluce was one of my first forays into fantasy, and while I gave up on Modesitt’s Spellsong series after the second book, and for me his science fiction has proven fairly uneven, I have generally enjoyed the subsequent Recluce books.

There are two things I particularly like about this author. First, he creates worlds in which conflict is driven by complicated and deep-seated economic, social, and demographic causes, not simply by evil guys trying to do bad things to innocents. This feels a lot like the real world. While the first seven books of the series all followed a protagonist from the Recluce/Black/Order side of this world, they generally faced just as many challenges from selfish and misguided people on their own side as from the Fairhaven/White/Chaos enemy. And so it felt reasonably natural when Book 8 of the series, The White Order, gave us the early adventures of a sympathetic white protagonist, Cerryl (much more so than had, say, Tolkien stuck in a couple of chapters about a noble orc). Colors of Chaos gives us the rest of Cerryl’s story, a white perspective on the same events Modesitt had described earlier in The Magic Engineer. Cerryl is a likable, if perhaps overly cautious fellow, who grows to view the geopolitical situation largely, and ultimately quite insightfully, in economic terms.

The second thing I really like about Modesitt’s books is that he also gives his protagonists hard decisions, ethical dilemmas that frequently call on them to choose between the lesser of several evils—and then these people have to live with the consequences of their choices. There’s very little “happily ever after.” Again, this feels much more like the real world than the challenges faced by most fantasy heroes.

Having said all that, there are a couple of things about Modesitt’s writing in general and in this book in particular that I’m not crazy about. The pacing tends to be slow (there was no good reason for this to be the longest Recluce book to date), and there is rarely any humor whatsoever. The economic structure of the world felt overly simplistic. For me, Cerryl ended up being a harsher and less sympathetic protagonist than his predecessors. There is also something quite repetitive about Modesitt’s novels; I always seem to feel like I’m reading the same book over and over again. The names may change, the places may change, and the era may change, but the personality of the protagonist, the way he views the world, and the overall shape of the story feels like a constant. ( )

Livejournal entry ( )

Cerryl, from The White Order, is all grown up here and in a position of power. In this book, we see a lot of the same important events of The Magic Engineer, but from the Chaos Side.

It seems that diplomacy is something that will be important in his future. Politics and taxes, all that sort of thing.

What is interesting is that despite the Black and White names, it is all just grey, depending on whose viewpoint is shown at the time.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/02... ( )