Despite the imminent possibility of destruction, the lands of Candar will not unite and Recluce will not heed the peril.
Saga of Recluce
Lerris is faced with the challenge of becoming the greatest wizard of all time - or seeing his whole world destroyed. Nylan is the engineer and builder whose job it is to raise a great tower on the plateau known as the Roof of the World. Here the exiled women warriors will live and survive to fulfill their destiny. Here a revolutionary new society will be born And if Nylan can learn to control the magical powers that are growing within him.
But the angels are a matriarchal band, and so Nylan must leave his companions and seek a life elsewhere. He travels down from the plateau into the world of warring kingdoms and strange magics with his companion, Ayrlyn, the healer, and his infant son. The White Order is the story of Cerryl, a boy orphaned when the powerful white mages killed his father to protect their control of the world's magic. Cerryl, raised by his aunt and uncle, is a curious boy, attracted to mirrors and books, though he is unable to read.
When he is old enough, Cerryl is apprenticed to the local miller. The miller's daughter teaches Cerryl to read his father's books, and it seems that the talent for magic has been passed from father to son. Whether it be the threat of assassination, the effective governance of occupied territory, or the fearless and clever direction of troops in battle, Ceryl faces many harrowing obstacles, not the least of which is Anya, the plotting seductress who's the real power behind the scenes of the white wizards.
With his wits, his integrity, and the support of his love, the Black healer Leyladin, he must survive long enough to claim his rightful spot within the ruling hierarchy of the White Order. Magi'i of Cyador marks the beginning of a new tale from deep within the rich depths of the history of Recluce.
The Order War
This is the story of Lorn, a talented boy born into a family of Magi'i. A diligent student of remarkable talent, Lorn lacks only the single most coveted attribute required of a Magus of Cyador: Lorn is too independent for his own good. So Lorn is forced to become a lancer officer, and he's sent to the frontier to fight off the all-too-frequent barbarian raids. Exploring the rich depths of the history of Recluce, Magi'i introduced Lorn, a talented boy born into a family of Magi'i. A fastidious student mage who lacked blind devotion, Lorn was made into a lancer officer and shipped off to the frontier.
Having survived an extended stint fighting both barbarian raiders and the giant beasts of the Accursed Forest, Lorn has proven himself to be a fine officer - perhaps too fine an officer. As his prowess has grown, so has his number of enemies and rivals.
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Kharl is the best cooper in Brysta, and his life has been as snug and regular as his barrels. But in the course of just a few days, it's all staved in. When a young blackstaffer from Recluce is mysteriously murdered in his cooperage, Kharl is summarily jailed. Then, in a shocking turnaround at the trial, his innocent consort is blamed for the killing and quickly executed. Kharl ends up destitute and on the run, but he does take the slain woman's black staff and the book "The Basis of Order", which explains the principles of its power. The cooper Kharl has no sooner taken possession of the estate bestowed upon him by Lord Ghrant of Austra when he is summoned back to the capital.
After a bloody campaign, in which Kharl discovers and is forced to use even more deadly order magery, civil order is restored and Ghrant's throne firmly secured. But Kharl is now a famous and feared public figure, the Lord's Mage, and his notoriety makes him uncomfortable. To his surprise, Kharl is soon called upon again by Lords Ghrant and Hagen. Rahl, a young apprentice scrivener on the island of Recluce, likes life to work out in his favor. And he has a bad attitude, too.
To make sure things go his way, he uses a small amount of order magic at opportunistic moments-but his abilities are starting to get the attention of the Council magisters. So the Council sends him to the mage training school for testing, and through misuse of his powers, which are getting stronger all the time, Rahl gets himself banished to the continent and empire of Hamor. Rahl was a young apprentice on the island of Recluce who was sent to the mages' training school for testing, then banished to Hamor. His education now continues under dangerous circumstances.
The Order War (The Saga of Recluce #4) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
In Hamor, his powers have increased but so has the amount of trouble he attracts. The whole society of Hamor is a new culture for L. Rahl is a mage now, powerful and still just as dangerous to himself and to others. Published February 15th by Tor first published January To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Order War , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This is book 4 of the Saga of Recluce.
The internal chronology of the series looks to be pretty whacked, since this is apparently ranked as book 9, with the first published book Magic of Recluce ranked as book 10, according to some. Anyway, confusion aside, the book works perfectly well as a standalone, although it took me a while to get up to speed on the back story and the history of the world. Who This is book 4 of the Saga of Recluce. Who else can spend pages and pages on simple acts such as the drinking of beer or the cutting of cheese?
This was the only real gripe I had with this novel, although some people are sticklers for detail and will likely appreciate this kind of thing. The Orbit edition, which is the one I own, does not have a map, and considering the geographical displacement of the characters in this novel, this was a bit of a bummer. In all truth, though, this is a really good book.
Its main strength is, arguably, the world-building. As a coming of age fantasy novel leaning heavily towards magic use, this was not an entirely new idea when it was published in the s. I understand that the other novels in the Saga of Recluce follow much the same pattern. I am tempted to seek them out, especially The Magic of Recluce. So, four stars, because I really enjoyed it, but with a single reservation: View all 7 comments. Aug 21, Jim rated it really liked it Shelves: This is the 4th book in published order, the way Modesitt likes people to read this series.
One of the neatest things that Modesitt does is garble history slightly in the first book. It This is the 4th book in published order, the way Modesitt likes people to read this series. It adds a dash of realism into the fantasy. View all 4 comments. In some ways this is an excellent piece of the Recluce saga. It really fills in a lot that is just hinted at in the first book published, The Magic of Recluce , so great for advancing the story.
It also sets the stage very well for those books later in the chronology, even though they were written first. OTOH, it's the one I like least in the series. The device used to bring everything to fruition seem In some ways this is an excellent piece of the Recluce saga. The device used to bring everything to fruition seems particularly clunky.
This is the 14th chronologically, but 4th book published C14, P4. It starts a new arc about a Recluce mage in when read chronologically that will get interrupted by another. For a list of the current chronology of this series, see my review here: Jul 17, Ben Babcock rated it liked it Shelves: My previous reviews of the Recluce saga have been brutally honest when it comes to how L.
So I want to begin this review by praising The Order War for being the best book so far in the series, in terms of both story and writing! After three repetitive, somewhat dull books, Modesitt has finally produced a volume that drew me into the conflict, made me care about the characters, and found a balance between his intriguing magical syst My previous reviews of the Recluce saga have been brutally honest when it comes to how L.
After three repetitive, somewhat dull books, Modesitt has finally produced a volume that drew me into the conflict, made me care about the characters, and found a balance between his intriguing magical system and the drama around its usage. I knew The Order War would be unlike its predecessors almost from the beginning. Justen begins the book as an experienced engineer in Nylan, the city that Dorrin founded back in The Magic Engineer. No, Justen leaves as part of a detachment to help an independent country in Candar resist the White Wizards. The detachment fails miserably, and Justen is stranded in a particularly inhospitable part of Candar.
He manages to find his way to the Druids of Naclos, where he meets his soul mate and becomes a Gray wizard. I love that Modesitt begins this book with a healthy amount of action. No, we begin with Justen on Recluce, learn about his family, then join him on the mission to Candar. There are plenty of battle sequences and some political machinations on both sides. The Balance has been a common thread running through all of the Recluce books.
Sometimes it has been addressed explicitly, particularly by Justen himself in The Magic of Recluce. I feel like The Order War serves a very important role in this series, because it ties together all of these ideas about the Balance and closes the circle first opened by The Magic of Recluce. One of the reasons this series is so compelling is that there are two oppositional groups, one of which uses chaos and the other order.
Yet according to the Balance, that is a self-defeating proposition, like global thermonuclear war. Increasing chaos only increases—and concentrates—order, and vice versa. So the more order that the Black Mages concentrate in Recluce, the more chaos foci who appear in Candar. It might seem like a somewhat trite and obvious conclusion, but Modesitt develops the theme in potent, poignant way. The Order War still suffers from many of the same flaws as the previous books. And of course, there are the White Wizards. Oh, the one-dimensionality of the White Wizards!
As it stands, they remain moustache-twirling caricatures, barely worth taking the time to discuss them. Like the Chronicles of Narnia , we could have some heated debates about this, drag in the spectre of authorial intent and publishing constraints and that pesky thing about time being linear.
If one has the inclination, one could read the series in several orders, of course. Had I read this alone, or as the first book to the series, I might have been less charitable. It does not improve my opinion of Modesitt as a writer by much. Yet considered as part of the larger series, this book contributes a lot to the ongoing mythology, and I actually managed to stay interested for most of it.
My reviews of the Recluce Saga: Mar 17, Mark rated it it was ok Recommends it for: The Order War is the fourth book in Modesitt's Recluce series. The events in this book take place subsequent to the events in the previous book, The Magic Engineer, but before the events in the first book, The Magic of Recluce. To sum this book up, it has a lot of good information regarding the nature of the balance between order and chaos and it introduces a philosophical element extoling the virtues of balance and the evils of extreme order or extreme chaos.
The problem with this book is that it doesn't have much else. His brother, Gunnar, is a weather wizard, like Creslin. Gunnar and Justen are tasked to go to Candar to act as advisors in helping a country fight off the ever-increasing white hordes of chaos from taking over all of the continent. After this mission, Justen is separated from the rest of the Recluce task force and wanders into Naclos, a place of perfect balance. It is there that he becomes the first gray wizard the world has seen in ages. His new mission is to reduce both Order and Chaos in the world and restore balance, so that the world is not torn asunder between the two extremes.
The Good As far as the magic system of Recluce goes, this book finally addresses a lot of questions I have had. Is chaos always evil and order always good? Wouldn't some kind of maintained balance be the best situation? These questions are satisfactorily answered in this book. First of all, evil or at least corrupt leaders are introduced into Recluce, making at more realistic place.
The Chaos wizards are still mostly evil, but at least some individuals exist who seem to wistfully question the morality of destroying large numbers of people instead of rubbing their hands together in delight at the prospect of so much destruction. The concept of gray magic is also very intriguing and it seems to be more powerful than either Order or Chaos alone.
The idea of sealing chaos within order to create a gray balance in things is very interesting and, like all of the magic in the Recluce series, makes a lot of sense.
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The action scenes in the novel are well done and capture the attention of the reader, as they should. The technological aspects and advances depicted over the course of the novel are very interesting also. The answer is that, even though the book depicts the virtues of balance, the novel itself lacks balance. More specifically, the characterizations of the novel are dry and not very compelling.
The character of Justen was the most interesting and he was rather dull. He wasn't written to be all that different from any other main character I've read in a Recluce novel. The only effect of him being a gray wizard instead of a black wizard had on his personality was that he drank beer and had a bit of a happy go lucky attitude that quickly disappeared as the novel's plot progressed. Over the course of the novel he gets falsely accused of being "order-mad".
If he were "balance-mad" the book would have been a whole lot more interesting. He would have been a much more compelling character if he got some kind of strange glee out of destroying both chaos and order.
There was a romance in the novel, as there has been in most of the Recluce novels, but it was rather dull. There was no conflict or romantic tension that would make a literary romance interesting. The two people concerned just meet and fall in love. While this is perhaps more true-to-life, it doesn't make for a good read. The romantic aspects of a novel should match the scope of the roles of the characters in the fictional world. Naclos This deserves its own section, because I feel that Modesitt's description of Naclos may have been the "point" of the book.
Naclos is a place of pure balance. The inhabitants of Naclos follow a pattern of complete balance. Basically it works like this: If someone consumes a produced good, a service, or a natural resource, they balance out their consumption deficit by providing a produced good, service, or resource in turn. No actual currency changes hands.
On the surface it seems very similar to Thomas More's "Utopia", and it also seems to have the same flaw: What if someone consumes without replacing or in any way compensating for their consumption? If someone consumes without compensating for it, the land "takes them" or "gets rid of them". They'll get eaten by a forest beast or killed by a man eating tree or something like that. This suggests some kind of intelligence that must exist behind the maintenance of balance, keeping tabs.
However, this is sort of shrugged off and not addressed. It's a little too convenient. Also, why is it this way in Naclos alone and not in any other area of the world? I can only hope these questions and criticisms would be addressed in a later book, but I doubt it. The world of Recluce seems blissfully absent of any kind of organized Religion other than order- or chaos- based expletives Demons of Light! Conclusion I can only hope that the series gets better. I kind of doubt it, though, and I'm toying with leaving it altogether This book was a tough read. For non-Recluce fans I say avoid like the plague.
For fans of Recluce, I say know what you're getting into. For fans of the Recluce series' magic system, I say prepare to have a lot of your questions answered If you're still on the fence about the series, I say you can probably end your involvement with this book. Jun 12, Bryan Brown rated it it was ok Shelves: This book was much harder to get through than most of the others, and that has sunk my rating a bit. At times reading this story even felt a bit like a chore, which was funny because this story is a pivotal point in the history of this world, one that changed both Recluse, and Fairhaven and all the lands on the planet.
I am pleased to say that it picked up towards the end of the book. First of all the hero of the book, Justin, starts out This book was much harder to get through than most of the others, and that has sunk my rating a bit. First of all the hero of the book, Justin, starts out friend zoned whiney. I hate the whole friend zoned character. I recognize that most of us go through a period in our lives where we are in a situation like that but most people grow out of it pretty quickly by facing reality and from this story it looks like Justin has been this way a long time and manages to stay in it for most of the story.
In fact this bothered me even more when later on in the book he goes home and we are introduced to his family. They are practical, intelligent and caring. That would have really been all that was needed and he would have grown up a bit and moved on. Second, I was really bothered by the relationship that was forced upon Justen. About midway through the story he is rescued by a druid from Naclos, Dayala or something like that, who has been chosen for him by person or persons or forces unknown. This was never explained, but it was stated that neither he nor she had any choice in the matter.
It was similar to the pair bonding that Creslin and Maggie remember I just call her Maggie because the name in the book is silly were forced into. Third, the concept of balance was a principle part of this story and not in the same way that it was important to what I have been calling grey mages throughout all these reviews. The grey mages were usually primarily either black or white, but were able to sense and use the opposite power in order to strengthen their primary power. This story posits that the true masters of balance are the druids of Naclos.
The real druids have the power to live for nearly forever a wildly unbalanced power I think , and can see both white chaos and black order and can in same way use these abilities simultaneously to do magical things like talk to the animals, or make trees grow into boxes without any seams. They are ruled by a collection of ancients who seek to preserve the balance between order and chaos.
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- Lily Naiad and the Extraordinary Pearl.
They seek to preserve it so much that they force Justin unto an unasked for alliance, and then condition him through that link to pursue his conflict against the whites of Fairhaven. Justin becomes a druid in the process learning how to use chaos as well as order and then after a brief excursion dabbling in what could only be uranium, decides to build a focused light weapon, a rudimentary tank and then proceeded to destroy Fairhaven. This is one of the first four recluse books written in external chronological order and so may be a weaker effort by Modesitt Jr.
In fact I think for the next four books I have to read in internal chronological order they are mostly the older books in the series. I will be curious to see if the other older books are as hard to read as this one was. It does make me long for the latest Imager book. Feb 07, Kathi rated it it was amazing Shelves: Romance, magic, subterfuge, war, characters that were not quite as stubbornly naive or dense as in some of the other books.
I like the Recluse books and got sucked into the series as soon as I read the first. They unfortunately tend to run a little hot and cold and while this one didn't "pull me in" as much as some others, it's a good read in it's way. The rating fluctuates as I think of it, so maybe 3. Jul 20, Thor Arne rated it liked it. Strong finish, but most of the book was dragging on a fair bit.
Feb 21, Ken Weeks rated it it was amazing. I absolutely LOVE this series. Jun 07, USOM rated it really liked it. I received this free book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest. Whenever I read epic fantasy I am always floored by the sheer size of plots and characters who have to come together. It includes a forethought and mastery of elements I just have no clue about. But what I loved about The Order War is just how epic it is.
Not only does this occur as part of a series, which you can seriously still jump into because I had absolutely no problem, Disclaimer: Not only does this occur as part of a series, which you can seriously still jump into because I had absolutely no problem, but the sheer scale is epic. All of these perspectives are inching together in an unhurried way. It never feels slow, it just feels like we're taking the time to mature. I think true good epic fantasy doesn't feel slow or hurried. Mar 05, Anne rated it really liked it Shelves: This appears to be the first book in the saga chronologically -- which may be why the airport bookstore had this one and not book 1 on their shelves.
The downside of starting here is that there's a lot of stuff from book 1 The Magic of Recluce which is assumed knowledge in this one. I was continually disoriented by missing information and that made it hard to really suspend my disbelief. It also made me question some of the blurbs on the cover which universally proclaim it to be innovative an This appears to be the first book in the saga chronologically -- which may be why the airport bookstore had this one and not book 1 on their shelves. It also made me question some of the blurbs on the cover which universally proclaim it to be innovative and deeply thought provoking.
It was not until I read book 1 that I understood that the title is a pun from the perspective of the world itself. How could "Order" start a war? How could it pursue one? What would that look like? I enjoyed the book. The characters were well drawn and the story was engaging fantasy which does not rely on routine tropes to drive the plot.
Jul 08, Zach rated it really liked it. A much better book in this series, I feel like L. The book still started out painfully slow and I contemplated giving up the series as I have on most of the books thus far but eventually the story really got roiling. Elements of Homer's the Odyssey and dashed with a bit of philosophy under bedding the story really held my interest. I guess this will be a short review because that's really all I have to say. I am looking forward A much better book in this series, I feel like L.