A Succession of Bad Days
Jun. 8th, 2015 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeImagine that not too many years in the future, a Lovecraftian Elder God with a nasty sense of humour decides to give humanity a capacity to manipulate large amounts of power using symbolic or psychic means, with a mechanism guaranteeing power-law style distributions of Power and some traps regarding compulsion to use it or die if the levels of Power are large enough, and then wanders off after a few millennia of observation. (Some other explanation may be educed: that's the best I can come up with, other than "Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill is for their sport".) Oh, and if you are powerful enough, and can survive your first forty years or so, you're effectively immortal, unless another more powerful individual intervenes. In practice, the latter is probably going to be the case, unless you are very powerful indeed or ally yourself with someone who is.
Let a quarter of a million years pass of recurrent anarchy and continent-spanning empires. By this time there are multiple forms of human, and an accumulation of millennia of the fallout of wars fought with magical bioweapons. At this point an enchanter (Laurel) works out, for the first time, that there is a power-magnifying effect when power is used cooperatively rather than in a mode of hierarchy or compulsion, and learns to create foci allowing it to be used in this way.
He assists in founding a polity with a magical binding enforcing an egalitarian / cooperative ethos (required to make effective foci) and then, possibly because he's bored, toddles off somewhere else.
500+ years later, after the implications of the Commonweal have worked themselves out into customs, the events of The March North and A Succession of Bad Days take place.
The story of the latter is a rather fun, if unconventional one - a group of older-than-usual (which means less likely to survive, given traditional training practices) potential sorcerers begin an unconventional course of training and manage, in its course, to disturb their compatriots' expectations with works of civil engineering. But it's also a chapter in an extended meditation by Graydon on what is implied by a genuinely egalitarian society. (In particular, how does it deal with the "tall grasses" problem which will concern an egalitarian polity as much as it concerned Thrasybulus of Miletus[1]; but there are a great many smaller details -- how work is organized, for example, when almost everything makes sense to do by means of foci -- which make up the warp and weft of the background of the story.)
Graydon has been thinking about this sort of thing for a very long time, and the gradual revelation of deep background, both of the fantasy details if the magical ecology and the civil dynamics of the society is part of the enjoyment of reading these works.
In addition, the story works through some of the really impressive things you can do with a limited set of capabilities in handling materials, applied to a set of varied situations – what you'd expect with people learning to do things effectively: limited techniques, but a myriad of applications.
Some novels are all surface, all up front. John Scalzi's Locked In begins with a brief historical recap giving the history behind the Hayden's disease in the book, but it's all about a not-very different society and some reasonably rounded characters. (Plot resolution is also driven by one big coincidence.) In Graydon's work, the meat of the work is under the surface, and you have to work to piece details together, but it's worth it. (It's not always clear that what Graydon has to say about things is always right -- it may be described as idiosyncratic -- but it's always worth paying attention to.)
The novel (like its predecessor) can be obtained via several sites listed on Graydon's blog post. As with the prior book, the venues do not include Amazon.
[1]Note that this doesn't just apply to the really powerful sorcerers; they have a ... creative way of handling the problem of military leaders as well.
Let a quarter of a million years pass of recurrent anarchy and continent-spanning empires. By this time there are multiple forms of human, and an accumulation of millennia of the fallout of wars fought with magical bioweapons. At this point an enchanter (Laurel) works out, for the first time, that there is a power-magnifying effect when power is used cooperatively rather than in a mode of hierarchy or compulsion, and learns to create foci allowing it to be used in this way.
He assists in founding a polity with a magical binding enforcing an egalitarian / cooperative ethos (required to make effective foci) and then, possibly because he's bored, toddles off somewhere else.
500+ years later, after the implications of the Commonweal have worked themselves out into customs, the events of The March North and A Succession of Bad Days take place.
The story of the latter is a rather fun, if unconventional one - a group of older-than-usual (which means less likely to survive, given traditional training practices) potential sorcerers begin an unconventional course of training and manage, in its course, to disturb their compatriots' expectations with works of civil engineering. But it's also a chapter in an extended meditation by Graydon on what is implied by a genuinely egalitarian society. (In particular, how does it deal with the "tall grasses" problem which will concern an egalitarian polity as much as it concerned Thrasybulus of Miletus[1]; but there are a great many smaller details -- how work is organized, for example, when almost everything makes sense to do by means of foci -- which make up the warp and weft of the background of the story.)
Graydon has been thinking about this sort of thing for a very long time, and the gradual revelation of deep background, both of the fantasy details if the magical ecology and the civil dynamics of the society is part of the enjoyment of reading these works.
In addition, the story works through some of the really impressive things you can do with a limited set of capabilities in handling materials, applied to a set of varied situations – what you'd expect with people learning to do things effectively: limited techniques, but a myriad of applications.
Some novels are all surface, all up front. John Scalzi's Locked In begins with a brief historical recap giving the history behind the Hayden's disease in the book, but it's all about a not-very different society and some reasonably rounded characters. (Plot resolution is also driven by one big coincidence.) In Graydon's work, the meat of the work is under the surface, and you have to work to piece details together, but it's worth it. (It's not always clear that what Graydon has to say about things is always right -- it may be described as idiosyncratic -- but it's always worth paying attention to.)
The novel (like its predecessor) can be obtained via several sites listed on Graydon's blog post. As with the prior book, the venues do not include Amazon.
[1]Note that this doesn't just apply to the really powerful sorcerers; they have a ... creative way of handling the problem of military leaders as well.
