WAYNE'S 2024 BOOKS (ADDENDUM): BOOK 21

Overcaptain
by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

I was creating my 2024 read list for a recap and realised that I'd missed reviewing this one; fortunately it followed directly after another 2024 read in the sprawling Saga of Recluse by L.E. Modesitt Jr., and I remembered I'd continued reading the exploits of Alayiakal, one of the Emperors of Cyador. From the Forest and Overcaptain (and two more unreleased novels) tell his story, and Overcaptain details his early military career.

I mentioned in my review of From the Forest that there's a sameness about each of Modesitt Jr's Recluse novels: most of them feature a young man, usually polite, whose powers with order or chaos make him a misfit or threat or outcast. The protagonist develops their powers over the course of the story, usually picks up a significant other with whom they share a largely chaste or secret romance, and concludes with mass death at the protagonist's hands using a new development, invention, or use of order/chaos magic. For their sins, the protagonist typically ends up blinded, aged, or otherwise humbled by their (mis)use of magic.

Overcaptain follows this model, aside from the eventual maiming of the hero – Alayiakal has to struggle through two more books after all! – concluding in rather lacklustre fashion with a redeployment of Alayiakal to another part of the country so he can fulfil more of the destiny alluded to in Book 10 of the Saga of Recluse: Magi’i of Cyador. The inevitable deployment of a death-weapon is foreshadowed halfway through the book, and you're left knowing and waiting to see him finally use it, even though Alayiakal has no idea that he will. Like From the Forest, this isn't a bad book, but it's workmanlike and I wouldn't recommend it to those that haven't read (and enjoyed) more of the now 24-book Saga of Recluse.

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WAYNE'S 2024 BOOKS: BOOK 11

From the Forest
by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

Okay, this is book 23 in L. E. Modesitt Jr.'s Saga of Recluse, so if you don't know what I'm talking about you can either skip this review... or maybe you just found yourself with a whole mess of new books to read. The Saga of Recluse is fantasy that skews a little differently from most; there's magic, but it's more like bending from Avatar than book-learned wizarding, and there's heroes, but they're more likely to me craftspeople than sword-swingers. Okay, some of them are swordspeople or soldiers, but it's a rare series where a carpenter or cooper gets top billing as the protagonist.

There's a kind of sameness to each of the books in the series. Most of the protagonists are male, most are young, and most have a serious demeanour that lends itself to introspection and quiet attention to detail. You may be forgiven for wondering if talent with order and chaos - the two powers that fuel the magic in the world - tends to manifest in characters that are perhaps a little away from the vanilla end of the autism spectrum. Order mages and chaos wizards butt heads in a Jedi/Sith kind of way, men are usually bastards unless they're a main character, and the plot usually wombles along with the protagonist developing shiny new powers before engaging in an apocalyptic finale with a high body count.

That's not to say the books are bad, but there are definite and deep furrows that each book follows. I tend to read them for the slow development of the world's timeline - the publishing order is not the chronological order - and to see what new tweaks on order/chaos Modesitt Jr. can squeeze out of his story. I've read 23 books in the series, so either there's something entertaining about them, or I'm a very slow learner about what constitutes a good book.

Oh, that's right. This is a book review, not a series review. This book introduces a new character, Alayiakal, and takes us back further into the past than any of the preceeding novels. Alayiakal is a Mirror Lancer (think cavalryman with a laser lance) in the empire of Cyador. He slowly develops his order/chaos powers, and at the end (not quite spoiler alert because this happens in literally every one of the Saga of Recluse books) there's a big fight with a spectacular new use of magery that slaughters a heap of people at the end. I can't wait to see the creative ways Alayiakal finds to kill people in the future, as his story will continue for the next three books in the Saga.

Oh, and the cover to From the Forest was perhaps the least interesting I've seen on any of the Saga books. I've seen some bland and/or unrepresentative drek on the covers of this series, but this one looked like someone used generative AI with the prompt: "Give me something really uninspiring involving a forest and a wall" and then send it straight to the printer.

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