RogerBW's Blog: A Succession of Bad Days, Graydon Saunders

2015 military fantasy. In the new Second Commonwealth, five apprentices learn to use their magical power.

It's like the first book, but even more so. There's still an aggressive refusal to use personal pronouns; there's still a prose style full of horrible incoherent tortured sentences laden with false starts and shotgunned full of commas. It's all like this:

We're going by, I don't think it's a thorpe, as such, it's a big orchard, the trees look old, there's a cluster of substantial buildings a hundred or so metres from the road, with low garden, some kind of herbs, probably flavouring, between the road and the buildings. Two old stone gateposts, they've got lichen, but no gate.

Saunders is of course a fan of golden-age science fiction, and like many books of that time, the ideas are sometimes great, but you don't half have to wade through the terrible writing just to work out what the author is trying to say, never mind actually engage with it.

Being 180,000 words long in this turgid style doesn't help the book, but the near-total lack of plot and pacing and tension are greater sins. Yes, the characters are decent – though they all have the same voice and the ones other than our protagonists blur into each other. Yes, there's occasional humour. But more and more this felt to me like being preached at by the sort of Very Smart Guy who just knows that he's got the answers to everything, his idea is the only way it can possibly work, never mind any actual subject knowledge people might have, don't you know he's Very Smart? (I've been that guy. I got better. You can too!)

Lots of sorcerers in the Bad Old Days seem to have worried excessively about escaped slaves hiding in swamps, or being snuck up on by frog warriors, or something. Around Wending, there were three distinct species of venomous duck, two with rending teeth so they could eat stuff too big to swallow in one go. Westcreek has a species of enormous diving duck, too big to fly, that's venomous and breathes fire. I suppose the fire helps them deal with the leeches. They're certainly prosperous enough; during the winter there were rafts of them, fifty and a hundred a time, in the turning basin at the end of the West-East Canal. Everyone local considers them sort of half-lucky, despite the occasional worry about kids getting too close. "Keeps the swans off," everyone says, in judicious, on-the-balance-of-consideration sorts of tones.

I liked the basic idea of trying to build a society in a world where people randomly get huge magical power, and the default state is a sorceror-king plus as many people as he can enslave. But I was never engaged. And because I'm not distracted by anything else I notice that there's no conflict, no challenge; everything is just handed to our heroes, so they never have any hard decisions to make. I liked the descriptions of how to do large-scale civil engineering with magic, but really that wasn't enough to sustain me.

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