Cyador's Heirs, L.E. Modesitt Jr.

I've mixed feelings about this book, Cyador's Heirs. It is a wonderful story, well-written as is all L. E. Modesitt Jr.'s work, but it is published by one of the industry giants,TOR. Quite frankly, the EBook book is outrageously over-priced, and there are numerous, severe formatting and editing errors that make going the rough at times. Proof-reading may have been skimped on in the hurry to publish, because I read many Indie novels that are far better proofed and formatted than this book, every week. Despite those flaws, I loved the story, and Modesitt's handling of the young Lord Lerial's coming of age.


FIRST, THE BLURB:

Decades after the fall of Cyador, its survivors have reestablished themselves in Cigoerne, a fertile country coveted by hostile neighbors in less hospitable lands. Young Lerial, the second son of Duke Kiedron, lives in the shadow of his older brother Lephi, the heir to their father's realm. Lerial’s future seems preordained: He will one day command his brother’s forces in defense of Cigoerne, serving at his older sibling’s pleasure, and no more.

But when Lerial is sent abroad to be fostered by Major Altyrn to learn the skills and wisdom he will need to fulfill his future duties, he begins a journey into a much larger world that brings out his true potential. Lerial has talents that few, as yet, suspect: He is one of those rare beings who can harness both Order and Chaos, the competing natural forces that shape the world and define the magic that exists within it. And as war finally engulfs the fringes of Cigoerne, Lerial’s growing mastery of Order and Chaos is tested to its limits, and his own.

MY REVIEW:

As always, L.E. Modesitt Jr. manages to tell a gripping tale that makes you have to think, have to guess at the motives and thoughts of the people around the main character. Lerial is the younger son of the Duke of Cigoerne, and is expected to lead the Mirror Lancers when his brother, Lephi, ascend's the throne.  His grandfather was the last Emperor of Cyador, and upon the fall of Cyador and the loss of their empire in Candar, the surviving Empress escaped with their son, fleeing to the continent of Hamor where she carved out a duchy for her her son, Duke Kiedron, to inherit.  These deeds and misdeeds of the ancestors loom heavily in Lerial's life.

His relationship with his brother, Lephi, is strained. Lephi openly regards him with jealous condescension. Their mother seems to care more for Lephi than Lerial, but that could be his perception. Due to the tense family currents, Lerial's younger sister, Ryalah, is his most cherished family member, followed closely by his aunt, Emerya.

Though Lerial has the talent to use both Chaos and Order magic, he tends to to Black of Order, and he must struggle to educate himself in his mastery of that craft. This really begins when he is sent away to be fostered at Major Altyrn's estate, which though it hurts his feelings as first, turns out to be the best thing. It is there, working on the family estate, that young Lerial begins to feel a part of a family, and to have a sense of who he is. His new guardian was well acquainted with his grandparents, and was the leader of the palace guard in Cyad. He made possible the Empress's dream of carving some kind of empire for her son, Duke Kiedral, to inherit, and now makes the education of Lerial his top priority.

Great things are expected of Lerial, and he feels the pressure. Being young, he sometimes tries too hard, and discovers that mistakes cost lives. Lerial's sense of Duty and his strict code of ethics keep him going when he at his lowest points. The story is well-crafted and thought provoking. Lerial is a wonderful character, and his struggle is compelling.

Again, I recommend you do not buy the EBook as it is outrageously priced  at $12.99 and too poorly formatted. I suggest you buy the paperback, or wait until it is available in the 2nd-hand bookstore, as the publisher may have taken better care with formatting and proofing the print version. 

This lack of respect for the author's work and for readers like me who prefer EBooks is disturbing, but it seems to be a volley in the war against progress within the industry. I'm just sorry the author is caught in the middle. 

The One-Eyed Man, by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

The One-Eyed Man: A Fugue, With Winds and Accompaniment, by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

The Blurb:

In The One-Eyed Man: A Fugue With Winds and Accompaniment,  by L. E. Modesitt, Jr., the colony world of Stittara is no ordinary planet. For the interstellar Unity of the Ceylesian Arm, Stittara is the primary source of anagathics: drugs that have more than doubled the human life span. But the ecological balance that makes anagathics possible on Stittara is fragile, and the Unity government has a vital interest in making sure the flow of longevity drugs remains uninterrupted, even if it means uprooting the human settlements.

Offered the job of assessing the ecological impact of the human presence on Stittara, freelance consultant Dr. Paulo Verano jumps at the chance to escape the ruin of his personal life. He gets far more than he bargained for: Stittara’s atmosphere is populated with skytubes—gigantic, mysterious airborne organisms that drift like clouds above the surface of the planet. Their exact nature has eluded humanity for centuries, but Verano believes his conclusions about Stittara may hinge on understanding the skytubes’ role in the planet’s ecology—if he survives the hurricane winds, distrustful settlers, and secret agendas that impede his investigation at every turn.

My Review:

One thing you can always count on L.E. Modesitt Jr. to give you is a real morality tale.  He asks the tough questions about how far we are willing to go to and what we are willing to sacrifice, pointing out as always, that there WILL be sacrifices. Deciding what the sacrifices will be is never easy, but that tension makes for a great tale.

In a move that is a bit unusual, L.E. Modesitt Jr. begins this sci-fi fantasy in a divorce court. Dr. Paulo Verano is left wondering what to do with his share of the nothing, wondering if he will even be able to keep his business alive.  Also, most unusually, one of the supporting characters speak in cryptic rhymes.  The subtle use of short snippets of poetry at the beginning of some chapters serves to create an image of a wealth of culture in the mind of the reader, building the world without resorting a boring infodump.

Paulo, as a protagonist, is a real departure for Modesitt, in that he is not the naïve likeable young man usually found at the beginning of a Modesitt tale. Instead we meet a bitter, cynical and paranoid man. Paulo jumps at the opportunity his job offers him, glad to leave his selfish, ungrateful daughter and exwife behind, both in terms of distance and time. His reasoning is, during the short (to him) time he is gone,  145 years will have passed on his home world. They will have grown old and forgotten him, and his financial holdings will have recouped his losses.

Paulo’s cynicism and inability to trust affects each of his relationships. Of the passengers he travels with on the ship, none are what or who they appear to be. Several are lying as to their identities. Once on Stittara, he can’t be sure who is lying, and he is not sure who will harm him. He is not sure what his investigation will uncover, or how far those affected will go to protect their empires.

The world is vividly drawn in small strokes, emerging gradually as the tale progresses. The plot never stalls, and the action is both believable and engrossing. As always in Modesitt's work, music and the quest for love are a large part of the tale.The events that unfold, taking Paulo to the final crisis had me obsessively clicking to the next page, unable to put my Kindle down.  A wonderful read for true sci-fi lovers.

My only issue with this book is the incredibly high price the publisher set for the Kindle download. $10.99 in today’s market is highway robbery and may well keep the eBook sales down, which may be the publisher’s misguided intention.

The Towers of the Sunset by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

One of my favorite books of all time is The Towers of the Sunset by L.E. Modesitt Jr. First Published in 1992, it was for me a watershed book, introducing me to the world of Recluce. Though it is the second installment in the series, it is a stand alone book and is a prequel to the classic, The Magic of Recluce.  I am a huge fan of Modesitt's style. He writes with an economy of words, and yet you are drawn into his world, to the exclusion of everything else. 

The Blurb:

Okay, there is no blurb. This is one of those Big 6 published books where, in their wisdom, they quit putting blurbs on books and instead put glowing comments from Interzone, Publisher's Weekly, and the (now) late Jo Clayton on the back cover instead. I do think a blurb helps to sell a book. This is the only fault I could find with the book, but I bought it for the cover art, because, hey, it's what I always do. The cover art is awesome, and in this case it introduced me to an amazing author. (Of course the cover is awesome--it's published by Tor and they do great covers.)

My Review:

In the world of Recluce there are two different kinds of magic, White (chaos magic), and Black (order magic).  Depending on the book in this series, you find yourself on either side of the magic issue, and in this book it is the Black that is the “good-guys”.

Creslin is the unwanted son of the powerful Marshall of Westwind, an all-female military city-state. Creslin has begun to show the signs of being strong in the Black magic of Order. He is betrothed against his will to Megaera, the sister of the Tyrant of Sarronnyn. She is a powerful White Wizard, and is considered an abomination, as the female societies are very much Order based and Sarronnyn is similarly a female military-run country. Creslin flees eastward to the lands where men are free to make their own rules, but where he is captured by the White magicians, and forced to labor building the great highway.

He is aided by two Black wizards. He is finally forced into a corner and must marry his less-than-thrilled fiancée, Megaera. She has been manipulated by her sister and by magic into the marriage herself. The two are forced into exile and undertake the regency of the desolate isle of Recluce. Although it’s barren, they hope to turn it into a prosperous haven free of the White wizards. Creslin and Megaera bicker constantly, and she is downright cruel to him, but they are tied to each other magically and they must somehow learn to live together, or they will die. The wizards of Fairhaven have other plans, and Creslin must master his own powers, make the desert Recluce bloom, and defeat the Chaos magicians if he hopes to survive.

Creslin and Megaera have many ordeals to overcome, not the least of which is Megaera’s horrible treatment of him.

This is a big, sweeping epic fantasy and yet it is an intimate story of love and strong women and men learning to coexist when there may be no common ground, no middle for them to meet.  This is the real story, for me.

I absolutely love Modesitt’s magic system. It is unique, and completely believable. His social system is quite detailed and amazing too. Modesitt spends time building the worlds his characters must live in and the world of Recluce is clearly defined and easily visualized as you read any of the many books in this series.

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Some people have disparaged this particular book because of the way Megaera treats Creslin, and also the way Modesitt builds the first half of the book. Some people don't like the present tense point of view. I liked it for precisely ALL those reasons, even though I am not normally a fan of this p.o.v.. If you are looking for a real fantasy adventure, with a unique world and engaging characters this is it. I am a huge fan of +L.E. Modesitt Jr., not just of his Recluce series, but of ALL his work. Nearly all of Modesitt’s science fiction works, such as the Parafaith War and the Time Diver duology  are also books that have become classics in my library.

The Magic of Recluce

The Saga of Recluce is a series of fantasy novels written by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.. The first novel in the series, The Magic of Recluce (from which the series derives its name), was published in 1991, and I fell under the spell of Modesitt’s ability to convincingly build a world and people it with amazing characters when I first read that story. The series is still available, and I am currently enjoying reading the most recent installment, Arms-Commander which was published in January of 2010 on my Kindle. That book sparked my interest in re-reading the whole series again, in the order that they were published in, which is the way that the author himself suggests that they are read, despite the fact that the books are published out of chronological order. As of the 16th novel, Arms-Commander, the saga covers 7 different time periods and 10 major storylines, and many of them are stand-alone novels.

This series describes the frequently antagonistic relationship between the descendants of two technologically advanced cultures which have been marooned on a sparsely inhabited world. The two cultures which populate the world are the same space-faring cultures who refer to themselves as Angels and Demons and who are featured in many of Modesitt’s hard-science-fiction books, such as ‘The Parafaith War’; one of my favorite Modesitt sci-fi tales. The way that he transitions the cultures for which he has already established a sci-fi fan-base into this fantasy series is masterfully done, although that transition is not made clear until later in the series.  In ‘The Fall of Angels’ we discover that because of a terrible accident with their weapons of war knocking them out of the ‘normal’ universe and into a strange parallel universe, small groups of the two cultures have found themselves stranded on a world where gradually their technology has failed. With no way to communicate with their commanders, they are as completely lost to their families and friends as if they were dead.

At the time of ‘The Magic of Recluce’ their descendants have had a low-technology agrarian-based culture with a heavy reliance on magic for so long that their roots have assumed a mythical place in the collective memory.  With Modesitt’s flair for style, themes of gender stereotyping, sexism, ageism, racism, ethics, economics, environmentalism and politics are explored in the course of the series, which examines the world through the eyes of all its protagonists.  Both sides of the conflict are represented well within the series; Modesitt argues for both magics with equal enthusiasm.

Recluce itself is an island off the coast of the continent called Candar. The planet never is given a name that I have ever seen, but in that universe, the Angels' technology does not work at all, although the Demons' technology does for a while. The magic is expressed as a person's ability to harness the natural order or chaos; the basic building blocks of the world. The feats of magic that are possible rely on the user's understanding not only of order or chaos, but in the interaction between the two and how they occur in balance in nature. Modesitt’s unique style of writing in his sci-fi tales is perfected in his fantasy writing in the way that he shows how the use of the two magics, order and chaos, affects all aspects of society. For example, his Black (or Order) wizards have regular jobs, such as a carpenter or as a smith; jobs in areas where the comprehension of order in the work environment improves the finished product. There are rules and if you don’t fit perfectly into their society they exile you to a place where you are more likely to fit.  The White or (chaos wizards) like a safe, tidy, clean environment but they impose rules and social constraints upon their citizens, and enforce that civil order in the role of the police.

In 1992 I purchased the paperback of ‘The Magic of Recluce’ and I was completely hooked, and have followed the series avidly ever since.  Within the series there are several books that I have ‘read-to-shreds’, such as 'The Fall of Angels', 'The Magic Engineer', 'The Colors of Chaos' and 'Scion of Cyador'. I have also read and enjoyed each and every science-fiction book written by Modesitt and consider him to be not only one of the most prolific writers of the last thirty years, but one of the finest.  If he writes it, I will probably read it!  His work has been one of the guiding influences on my own writing.

And now to the main course:

‘The Magic of Recluce’ By L. E. Modesitt Jr.

In L.E. Modessitt Jr.’s world, magic is divided into two categories – Order (which is represented by black) and  Chaos (which is represented by white).  The two do not coexist well.

Recluce is an island country that was founded by those who follow Order, the ‘black wizards’. When the story opens, Lerris is a bored, dissatisfied fifteen-year-old woodworker who has just been apprenticed to his Uncle Sardit, who is a Master Woodworker of world renown although Lerris is unaware of his uncle’s fame. He is also unaware of both his father's high position in the community and of his own magical potential.  Because of his dissatisfaction with the eternal, static perfection that the mages who govern his country insist upon, Lerris’ family enrolls him in a training program that allows him to develop his basic mage-skills and a rudimentary understanding of Order.  During the training he develops a love-hate relationship with Tamra, another ‘blackstaffer’ as he is, and also develops an attachment to Crystal, an older woman who is an adept swordswoman.  They and most of the people in their class are eventually exiled to Candar to undertake a ‘dangergeld’. Exile is how the ‘Blacks’ deal with dissatisfied individuals living in Recluce, especially those who have an affinity or ability for either order or chaos.  When Lerris completes his training, he is given a quest and told that he cannot return to Recluce until he completes it.  

During his exile in Candar, Lerris makes some unfortunate choices and runs into trouble. He meets his uncle Justen, and travels with him for a while, but is forced to run and hide after a series of misadventures that are his own stubborn fault. During the course of his adventures he discovers his father's ulterior motives for sending him off, when he meets Antonin, a powerful white wizard. Centuries of dominance by Recluce and their order engineers has once again led to increasingly more powerful chaos mages in Candar, with Antonin in particular rising to great prominence. Gunnar, Lerris’ father, has sent Lerris to Candar because he knows that a strong order mage and strong chaos mage will ultimately be drawn into direct conflict, and that Lerris will have to kill Antonin; and Recluce will win without being directly involved.


At times Lerris is a sulky teenager, and at times he is a compassionate adult.  As the story progresses, Lerris grows more settled.  His love-hate relationship with Tamra is central to the story, and the tension between the two adds a bit of spice to the tale, as is his wistful longing for Crystal.  The three dangergelders all have character flaws that they overcome while fulfilling their quests.

Lerris finds a position as a journeyman woodworker to Destrin, a low-ranking master woodworker who is in failing health, and whose business is failing.  He rebuilds his master’s business and falls in love with his master’s daughter, Dierdre. As time passes Lerris learns to understand Order, and as he does so, he learns to be more brutally honest with himself about his motives.  He realizes that he can’t marry the girl because of what he is as an order-master and what he must still do in regard to the white wizard. Lerris does the only thing he can think of to keep her safe.  He takes an apprentice, Bostric, whom he trains to both take over her father’s business and be her husband. 

There is an incident in which he manages to accidentally infuse too much order into some chairs that he crafts for a highly placed official.  When the chairs create problems Lerris finds himself once again on the run, but not before he discovers how Antonin is turning ordinary soldiers into mindless slaves of chaos, and destroys the means by which Antonin is accomplishing it.

This time Lerris ends up in Kyphros, where Crystal is now a well respected and highly placed military officer. His feelings for Crystal resurface, but he cannot act on them until he has completed his dangergeld.  He offers his services to the leader of the country, a competent woman who rules a prosperous but threatened country.  Meanwhile, Tamra has simply vanished and Lerris suspects that she is tied-up somehow to Antonin and his mate, Sephya, whom he has heard is a body-changer.  Lerris realizes that he must complete his quest before he can settle down with Crystal.  During the course of completing his dangergeld he discovers what happened to Tamra.

Lerris’ journey to learn what he must know about his magic and the process of developing his skills so that he will survive the completion of his dangergeld make for a tale that is engrossing and well written. This tale is told in the first person from Lerris' point of view, which I usually do not enjoy, but I was quickly drawn into the tale despite that annoyance.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves a well crafted coming of age tale.  It is not a tale simply of good and evil or black and white.  It is the tale of a complex, dangerous world and the men and women who inhabit it.