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Commonweal #1
The March North
Egalitarian heroic fantasy. Presumptive female agency, battle-sheep, and bad, bad odds.
297 pages, ebook
First published March 6, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 58 reviews
May 27, 2014
Graydon Saunders is one of those ancient Usenet RASFW refugees, like me. Some of that crowd wandered off to other parts of the Net and continued their commenting ways. A few wound up as SF writers (Jo Walton, Ryk Spoor, etc). Graydon is one of the former who has abruptly become one of the latter.
(If you're reading this post *on* Usenet, joke's on everyone who left, right?)
(If you're Graydon, sorry about that "abruptly". Seems that way to the rest of us, mostly.)
This is a strange book, and not just because it is cliche-looking military fantasy that veers without warning into the murky waters of "What kind of society are we fighting for?" and "What does an emergency backup plan for a civilization look like?" And then wanders back to the grueling magical warfare.
The writing style is that very particular brand of prose beloved of software geeks who learned people as a second language. It is careful, structural, recursive, and you sometimes need to read a line three times to see where it came from. I write this way. I *try* to go back and stick in periods and knock everything down to no more than three layers deep. I am being less careful in this review, because I've just read all of _The March North_ in a sitting (long train ride) and it's sunk in some.
I don't usually quote in these reviews but I think I need to give the flavor:
"Passing for a Creek just to look at is tough, and if you look like a Creek, being anywhere near here without being able to explain where the previous six generations of your ancestors lived and what they did is impossible."
Got that? Good. And you *will* need to read those lines three times, because the author tells you everything exactly once. *Maybe* twice, for foreshadowing and resolution, but then one of them will be indirect. Blink and you'll miss major plot elements.
Blink and you'll miss the fact that the prose is entirely free of gendered pronouns. I noticed halfway through the last chapter -- I suspect the author deliberately stopped making it unnoticeable, there at the end. It's not a gender-free *story*; the narrator occasionally describes someone as a man or a woman; it just doesn't come up that often because this is the army and they're soldiers first. Without the pronouns, if it doesn't come up, it's not in the book. Take a lesson.
I haven't said what the book is about. Consider a world where magical talent has been popping up in the population for hundreds of thousands of years -- with a power law. So in a nation of (referring to the book) seven and a half million people, you might have two thousand sorcerers powerful enough to be effectively immortal and therefore become *more* powerful sorcerers. Fifty-odd who are powerful enough to subjugate the nation. A dozen who could wrap the nation around their pinky fingers and move on to the rest of the planet without breathing hard.
Dozens of better-known fantasy series match this template, if you strip off the fake-Euro-medieval assumptions and look at the guts. Few of them go on to the obvious question, which is *why do you have a nation still standing?* You should have a flaming wreck of a slave-holding ruled by one sorcerer-king and whatever demons, monsters, and slightly-lesser sorcerers he's bothered to brain-ream rather than kill. Or she. Doesn't matter to the slaves.
This book pulls an answer out of one additional assumption: that it's more efficient to pool power voluntarily than to coerce it. (Philosophically palatable to you and me, I hope.) Thus, the Line: a volunteer army that marches under a standard sworn to the Law and serving the Peace. With staff thaumaturges.
(Why does the Peace need an army? Because they're surrounded by militant sorcerer-autocracies, and also demons and monsters galore. Magic has not left a lot of friendly terrain on the planet.)
The slant of the military lifestyle is convincing (at least to me); the protagonist knows what both sergeants and COs care about. The protagonist also knows what an ox cares about, which is relevant both to the military (no army without supply wagons!) and the greater picture (armies fight, but someone's gotta grow the food).
The author is up-front about drawing inspiration from Glen Cook's Black Company stories. I'd also trace lines to Steven Brust (see the enchantress older than recorded history), John M. Ford ("he had a horror of being obvious"), and Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" chemistry blog.
There is also a five-ton war-sheep named Eustace. If I haven't sold you by now, I don't know what the hell you think you're looking for in speculative fiction.
(_The March North_ is self-published as an e-book. If you buy it from Google Play you can download a DRM-free EPUB file. I think it's in the Kobo store too.)
(If you're reading this post *on* Usenet, joke's on everyone who left, right?)
(If you're Graydon, sorry about that "abruptly". Seems that way to the rest of us, mostly.)
This is a strange book, and not just because it is cliche-looking military fantasy that veers without warning into the murky waters of "What kind of society are we fighting for?" and "What does an emergency backup plan for a civilization look like?" And then wanders back to the grueling magical warfare.
The writing style is that very particular brand of prose beloved of software geeks who learned people as a second language. It is careful, structural, recursive, and you sometimes need to read a line three times to see where it came from. I write this way. I *try* to go back and stick in periods and knock everything down to no more than three layers deep. I am being less careful in this review, because I've just read all of _The March North_ in a sitting (long train ride) and it's sunk in some.
I don't usually quote in these reviews but I think I need to give the flavor:
"Passing for a Creek just to look at is tough, and if you look like a Creek, being anywhere near here without being able to explain where the previous six generations of your ancestors lived and what they did is impossible."
Got that? Good. And you *will* need to read those lines three times, because the author tells you everything exactly once. *Maybe* twice, for foreshadowing and resolution, but then one of them will be indirect. Blink and you'll miss major plot elements.
Blink and you'll miss the fact that the prose is entirely free of gendered pronouns. I noticed halfway through the last chapter -- I suspect the author deliberately stopped making it unnoticeable, there at the end. It's not a gender-free *story*; the narrator occasionally describes someone as a man or a woman; it just doesn't come up that often because this is the army and they're soldiers first. Without the pronouns, if it doesn't come up, it's not in the book. Take a lesson.
I haven't said what the book is about. Consider a world where magical talent has been popping up in the population for hundreds of thousands of years -- with a power law. So in a nation of (referring to the book) seven and a half million people, you might have two thousand sorcerers powerful enough to be effectively immortal and therefore become *more* powerful sorcerers. Fifty-odd who are powerful enough to subjugate the nation. A dozen who could wrap the nation around their pinky fingers and move on to the rest of the planet without breathing hard.
Dozens of better-known fantasy series match this template, if you strip off the fake-Euro-medieval assumptions and look at the guts. Few of them go on to the obvious question, which is *why do you have a nation still standing?* You should have a flaming wreck of a slave-holding ruled by one sorcerer-king and whatever demons, monsters, and slightly-lesser sorcerers he's bothered to brain-ream rather than kill. Or she. Doesn't matter to the slaves.
This book pulls an answer out of one additional assumption: that it's more efficient to pool power voluntarily than to coerce it. (Philosophically palatable to you and me, I hope.) Thus, the Line: a volunteer army that marches under a standard sworn to the Law and serving the Peace. With staff thaumaturges.
(Why does the Peace need an army? Because they're surrounded by militant sorcerer-autocracies, and also demons and monsters galore. Magic has not left a lot of friendly terrain on the planet.)
The slant of the military lifestyle is convincing (at least to me); the protagonist knows what both sergeants and COs care about. The protagonist also knows what an ox cares about, which is relevant both to the military (no army without supply wagons!) and the greater picture (armies fight, but someone's gotta grow the food).
The author is up-front about drawing inspiration from Glen Cook's Black Company stories. I'd also trace lines to Steven Brust (see the enchantress older than recorded history), John M. Ford ("he had a horror of being obvious"), and Derek Lowe's "Things I Won't Work With" chemistry blog.
There is also a five-ton war-sheep named Eustace. If I haven't sold you by now, I don't know what the hell you think you're looking for in speculative fiction.
(_The March North_ is self-published as an e-book. If you buy it from Google Play you can download a DRM-free EPUB file. I think it's in the Kobo store too.)
May 30, 2018
This is basically a military SF story but set in an unusually gonzo fantasy world. The protagonist, a brigade captain out in the boondocks, gets some cryptic orders and a transfer of some unusual units, the combined message of which being "there might be an invasion happening but we're not sure; here's 100% of the power we could spare without panicking the whole country and/or wrecking our ability to survive the OTHER ongoing crisis. Hopefully it's overkill, glhf." Spoiler alert, there is definitely an invasion going on. Anyway, the plot has that classic mil-SF bad-odds/high-competence formula which is VERY satisfying when you're in a certain mood (and I was).
The magic here has a certain rigorous physicality to it that reminds me a bit of Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. It's definitely fantasy rather than SF (this is often a squirrelly question of methods and starting points and aesthetics, but I am pretty sure about this one), but their magic interacts with familiar natural laws in entertaining ways. For example, after a brief detour to Wikipedia to find out if samarium was a real material or not (yes, it is a lanthanide element), I realized that their magically-powered "artillery tubes" were actually straight-up magnetic railguns.
There's also a certain rigor to following down the consequences of what magic can do in this place. None of this "medieval life plus fireballs" shit; it gets integrated into every layer of life and industry, in a very satisfyingly thorough way. Or put another way, stories where magic works as reliably as technology are common, but stories where people develop and innovate magic the way they do technology are much rarer. For example, a particular sorcerer back in the bad old days invented this way to loop a bunch of middling magical talents into a conditional partial hivemind, as part of a campaign to knock over a series of Dark Lord-level rivals. That's still in use for military purposes, but it's also been adapted for mining and refining, sheep shearing, excavations and public works, food preparation, you name it. It kind of drives the entire economy at this point. That's neat.
Another thing that I liked, but where I think mileage will vary wildly: it's under-written in certain ways. Saunders leaves many important things un-stated, for the reader to puzzle out or just wait for. Done well, that's a thing I'm super into. Here, it's done decently; I think some additional editorial eyes might have improved it, but the book works. It might not work for everyone, but I was very into it.
The magic here has a certain rigorous physicality to it that reminds me a bit of Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. It's definitely fantasy rather than SF (this is often a squirrelly question of methods and starting points and aesthetics, but I am pretty sure about this one), but their magic interacts with familiar natural laws in entertaining ways. For example, after a brief detour to Wikipedia to find out if samarium was a real material or not (yes, it is a lanthanide element), I realized that their magically-powered "artillery tubes" were actually straight-up magnetic railguns.
There's also a certain rigor to following down the consequences of what magic can do in this place. None of this "medieval life plus fireballs" shit; it gets integrated into every layer of life and industry, in a very satisfyingly thorough way. Or put another way, stories where magic works as reliably as technology are common, but stories where people develop and innovate magic the way they do technology are much rarer. For example, a particular sorcerer back in the bad old days invented this way to loop a bunch of middling magical talents into a conditional partial hivemind, as part of a campaign to knock over a series of Dark Lord-level rivals. That's still in use for military purposes, but it's also been adapted for mining and refining, sheep shearing, excavations and public works, food preparation, you name it. It kind of drives the entire economy at this point. That's neat.
Another thing that I liked, but where I think mileage will vary wildly: it's under-written in certain ways. Saunders leaves many important things un-stated, for the reader to puzzle out or just wait for. Done well, that's a thing I'm super into. Here, it's done decently; I think some additional editorial eyes might have improved it, but the book works. It might not work for everyone, but I was very into it.
December 17, 2015
If David Weber's endless infodumps make you want to scream, this might be the military fantasy for you.
Here's an author who doesn't coddle the reader, telling him exactly what to think and feel and expect. On page one, you're dropped into weirdness squared -- something extra bizarre is happening to people that you would already consider bizarre enough. Explanations happen, but in bits and snippets. A picture builds. You discover that words that you thought you understood (Line, Standard, weeds, focus, ...) don't actually mean what you thought they did, not here. You are thrown into a cataclysm, viewed through the eyes of people whose job is to be ready for cataclysm. Just as you're figuring out how the world works, you figure out that the _rest_ of the world doesn't work like that at all, and that your local corner is the weird one. About to get weirder. The phrase "made of solid despair" will occur. Very Scary People will do things; some of them will be on our side. Probably.
This is a superb work of worldbuilding, an introduction to a place you will want to return to time and again. It's also an exciting story, so far as it goes, but that's not the real point. Welcome to the Commonweal. Other works of fantasy will seem somewhat more mundane after this.
I would give The March North 4.5 stars if that were an option; it's biggest flaw is that it isn't quite as good as the sequel, A Succession of Bad Days.
Here's an author who doesn't coddle the reader, telling him exactly what to think and feel and expect. On page one, you're dropped into weirdness squared -- something extra bizarre is happening to people that you would already consider bizarre enough. Explanations happen, but in bits and snippets. A picture builds. You discover that words that you thought you understood (Line, Standard, weeds, focus, ...) don't actually mean what you thought they did, not here. You are thrown into a cataclysm, viewed through the eyes of people whose job is to be ready for cataclysm. Just as you're figuring out how the world works, you figure out that the _rest_ of the world doesn't work like that at all, and that your local corner is the weird one. About to get weirder. The phrase "made of solid despair" will occur. Very Scary People will do things; some of them will be on our side. Probably.
This is a superb work of worldbuilding, an introduction to a place you will want to return to time and again. It's also an exciting story, so far as it goes, but that's not the real point. Welcome to the Commonweal. Other works of fantasy will seem somewhat more mundane after this.
I would give The March North 4.5 stars if that were an option; it's biggest flaw is that it isn't quite as good as the sequel, A Succession of Bad Days.
November 1, 2021
Sometimes I read books that make me very happy, so that I have to focus a lot to find reasons why other people would not be into them. *The March North* is not that kind of book.
Don't get me wrong: I like *The March North* a lot – but it's also immediately clear why people would not agree with me. The good part is: If you make it past the first page with a smile, you'll get through the book and possibly even like it. If you bounce off the first page, you won't miss out on anything. Saunders is clever and not above showing off. After finishing the second chapter I started the book over, because at that point some things had started to make sense. I'm in love with this feeling of discovery.
The prose is dense, observations by a captain in a semi-magical army in a gruesome, deep fantasy world. Blink, and you'll miss a minor or even major plot point that only exists in a snarky aside and then later an opaque short dialogue. Maybe comparable to early Charly Stross (also a Usenet person, by the way) – but more skillful, more consistent, and above all more confident in the lack of mass appeal. His characters may be a little flat, but there's an in-text, in-perspective excuse, so I'll hold out for the next book to see how that goes.
Plot-wise, it starts out as generic military fantasy, if such a thing exists, and then doesn't give you any warning (Saunders really doesn't do warnings) before throwing you headfirst into questions like "What would you do if you could foresee a civilisation collapse? What can you save?", in a world where magical talent exists along exponential lines, with the really powerful being absurdly, unbelievably powerful, along the lines of "Hi, I'm Halt, I ruled for ten thousand years, but we don't have records, that was before writing was invented." The story takes place in the *one and only* non-demon non-autocracy nation in this world. Their concept is to pool power, and they have managed to beat or cajole enough immensely powerful beings into it that it's been working out for a couple hundred years. So far.
That's all there is to say, really.
Wait, two more things:
There is a five-ton war-sheep named Eustace, ridden by an immensely powerful being that takes shape as the generic adorable grandmother, complete with constantly knitting socks. Yes.
The other thing is that there is a linguistical gimmick to the book, and depending on how much you pay attention, you may notice it late, or not. I won't tell you here, because it's much more satisfying to figure it out yourself, but if you don't see it, feel free to ask. It's … weird, but I'm told that later books will hint at a reason.
Don't get me wrong: I like *The March North* a lot – but it's also immediately clear why people would not agree with me. The good part is: If you make it past the first page with a smile, you'll get through the book and possibly even like it. If you bounce off the first page, you won't miss out on anything. Saunders is clever and not above showing off. After finishing the second chapter I started the book over, because at that point some things had started to make sense. I'm in love with this feeling of discovery.
The prose is dense, observations by a captain in a semi-magical army in a gruesome, deep fantasy world. Blink, and you'll miss a minor or even major plot point that only exists in a snarky aside and then later an opaque short dialogue. Maybe comparable to early Charly Stross (also a Usenet person, by the way) – but more skillful, more consistent, and above all more confident in the lack of mass appeal. His characters may be a little flat, but there's an in-text, in-perspective excuse, so I'll hold out for the next book to see how that goes.
Plot-wise, it starts out as generic military fantasy, if such a thing exists, and then doesn't give you any warning (Saunders really doesn't do warnings) before throwing you headfirst into questions like "What would you do if you could foresee a civilisation collapse? What can you save?", in a world where magical talent exists along exponential lines, with the really powerful being absurdly, unbelievably powerful, along the lines of "Hi, I'm Halt, I ruled for ten thousand years, but we don't have records, that was before writing was invented." The story takes place in the *one and only* non-demon non-autocracy nation in this world. Their concept is to pool power, and they have managed to beat or cajole enough immensely powerful beings into it that it's been working out for a couple hundred years. So far.
That's all there is to say, really.
Wait, two more things:
There is a five-ton war-sheep named Eustace, ridden by an immensely powerful being that takes shape as the generic adorable grandmother, complete with constantly knitting socks. Yes.
The other thing is that there is a linguistical gimmick to the book, and depending on how much you pay attention, you may notice it late, or not. I won't tell you here, because it's much more satisfying to figure it out yourself, but if you don't see it, feel free to ask. It's … weird, but I'm told that later books will hint at a reason.
August 19, 2016
Okay. This was not the easiest book to get a grip on, and it's probably not going to be the easiest book to describe, but I'm gonna give it a shot! Cause it's worth reading.
First, imagine that you're reading Master & Commander, except without any of the introduction to workings and terminology of a Napoleonic war era British navy sailing ship provided to the viewpoint character dr Stephen Maturin. Instead, it would be like reading the first person account of the operation by captain Jack Aubrey, written for people who are already familiar with both the world he exists in and the structure and organization of a military outfit.
Second, also imagine that instead of Europe around year 1800, this takes place in a high fantasy world where plantlife can eat you, rivers can flow with blood, fire or acid (alternating depending on the day of the month) and a sorcerer can ride on creatures like a giant, firebreathing sheep or a ghost horse.
Third (and this is where it all starts to come together, the following is hidden for mild spoilers), imagine:
The story of the book is fairly simple and straightforward, military fantasy more concerned with logistics, efficiency and professional soldiering than melodrama. It's not all dry, but it can be challenging to read, thanks to its strict adherence to in-world perspective. But I quite enjoyed that! It's a fascinating premise, and it was an interesting to put the pieces together as I read. Almost like a puzzle-book.
I haven't mentioned characters, though not because the book is devoid of characters, but, well.. they're really more the focus through which the story is told than what the story is about: The account of how a volunteer batallion was raised from the people of the West Creeks to march north and prevent an invasion of their homelands.
First, imagine that you're reading Master & Commander, except without any of the introduction to workings and terminology of a Napoleonic war era British navy sailing ship provided to the viewpoint character dr Stephen Maturin. Instead, it would be like reading the first person account of the operation by captain Jack Aubrey, written for people who are already familiar with both the world he exists in and the structure and organization of a military outfit.
Second, also imagine that instead of Europe around year 1800, this takes place in a high fantasy world where plantlife can eat you, rivers can flow with blood, fire or acid (alternating depending on the day of the month) and a sorcerer can ride on creatures like a giant, firebreathing sheep or a ghost horse.
Third (and this is where it all starts to come together, the following is hidden for mild spoilers), imagine:
The story of the book is fairly simple and straightforward, military fantasy more concerned with logistics, efficiency and professional soldiering than melodrama. It's not all dry, but it can be challenging to read, thanks to its strict adherence to in-world perspective. But I quite enjoyed that! It's a fascinating premise, and it was an interesting to put the pieces together as I read. Almost like a puzzle-book.
I haven't mentioned characters, though not because the book is devoid of characters, but, well.. they're really more the focus through which the story is told than what the story is about: The account of how a volunteer batallion was raised from the people of the West Creeks to march north and prevent an invasion of their homelands.
March 10, 2023
This novel was really polarizing.
On one hand, it contains magic magic. I love that. Sorcerers in this universe are forces of nature by themselves, immortality is basically a given, and they could and have in the past destroyed armies, landscapes and nations by themselves.
On top of that exposition is kept to a minimum, which turns many aspects of this setting into intriguing pieces that I enjoy putting together.
That being said, there are too many things that remained confusing, that I missed, or straight out didn't understand. Parts that are important and essential to the plot. This left a bad taste in my mouth, like a missed opportunity. I mean, I was able to get enough of a picture of many things in order get this rewarding feeling of accomplishment that comes with novels of this nature, but some parts remained so obtrusive and oblique that it feels like this novel could have used a few more beta readers.
Adding to that, the last ~15% contain a sort-of tacked on exposition and conclusion which served as a way to flesh out the world. Lots of tell, little show. Not great, excusable because the setting is so interesting, but it should have been part of the main narrative.
This book is definitely worth a read just because how freaking awesome the magic in this universe is. The author nailed the potential of limitless power and possible weirdness that comes with that, plus how each act of magic has its own smell or feel kind of added to that mysterious but mesmerizing vibe.
It's one of these outstanding things which is going to stay with me for quite a while. This book was a breath of fresh air in a genre which is desperately trying to come up with one exceedingly boring magic system after another.
On one hand, it contains magic magic. I love that. Sorcerers in this universe are forces of nature by themselves, immortality is basically a given, and they could and have in the past destroyed armies, landscapes and nations by themselves.
On top of that exposition is kept to a minimum, which turns many aspects of this setting into intriguing pieces that I enjoy putting together.
That being said, there are too many things that remained confusing, that I missed, or straight out didn't understand. Parts that are important and essential to the plot. This left a bad taste in my mouth, like a missed opportunity. I mean, I was able to get enough of a picture of many things in order get this rewarding feeling of accomplishment that comes with novels of this nature, but some parts remained so obtrusive and oblique that it feels like this novel could have used a few more beta readers.
Adding to that, the last ~15% contain a sort-of tacked on exposition and conclusion which served as a way to flesh out the world. Lots of tell, little show. Not great, excusable because the setting is so interesting, but it should have been part of the main narrative.
This book is definitely worth a read just because how freaking awesome the magic in this universe is. The author nailed the potential of limitless power and possible weirdness that comes with that, plus how each act of magic has its own smell or feel kind of added to that mysterious but mesmerizing vibe.
It's one of these outstanding things which is going to stay with me for quite a while. This book was a breath of fresh air in a genre which is desperately trying to come up with one exceedingly boring magic system after another.
January 21, 2017
I read this book, then read the two sequels, then reread the two sequels, then reread the trilogy - so, retrospectively, five stars.
The main attraction is the world-building: Take our world, add magic that lets a small number of people be Evil Overlords - and let a quarter-million years pass. The resulting world is *not* a medievaloid world with a thin patina of plot device. It's a world that's had a long time to evolve, and societies that have had a long time to learn how to survive a toxic mix of whatever long-dead sorcerers left behind them. It's a sophisticated world, whose scientific understanding appears to be slightly ahead of ours.
The author doesn't club the reader over the head with his world-building. The story retains center stage, and it's up to the reader to notice the strands connect the story to the world in which its embedded.
"The March North" is, frankly, not as engaging as the next two books. It is useful to think of it as the prequel that introduces the Commonweel, its world, and some important characters. Still well worth the ride. The Commonweel is a society that trying to live without sorcerous overlords, and it's been doing so for half a millenium. (Five centuries is a drop in a bucket of a quarter-million years. We have no reason to believe that this is the first such attempt.) Now the sorcerous overlords next door are paying a visit.
The main attraction is the world-building: Take our world, add magic that lets a small number of people be Evil Overlords - and let a quarter-million years pass. The resulting world is *not* a medievaloid world with a thin patina of plot device. It's a world that's had a long time to evolve, and societies that have had a long time to learn how to survive a toxic mix of whatever long-dead sorcerers left behind them. It's a sophisticated world, whose scientific understanding appears to be slightly ahead of ours.
The author doesn't club the reader over the head with his world-building. The story retains center stage, and it's up to the reader to notice the strands connect the story to the world in which its embedded.
"The March North" is, frankly, not as engaging as the next two books. It is useful to think of it as the prequel that introduces the Commonweel, its world, and some important characters. Still well worth the ride. The Commonweel is a society that trying to live without sorcerous overlords, and it's been doing so for half a millenium. (Five centuries is a drop in a bucket of a quarter-million years. We have no reason to believe that this is the first such attempt.) Now the sorcerous overlords next door are paying a visit.
May 10, 2023
I respect this more than I like it. Don't get me wrong, I liked it a fair amount. But sometimes Saunders could have dialed back the terseness just a tiny bit to make it much clearer what was actually going on.
The blurb from the author is an example of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. It is extraordinarily terse. It probably would work a lot better if it just even just a little bit less terse.
Absolutely nothing is spoonfed to you. This book is devoid of infodumps and clunky expositional dialogue. You will very, very slowly piece together how the world (probably) works and what is (probably) doing on. But the result is that you sometimes feel like maybe you were supposed to have read an RPG sourcebook or wiki before diving in to this.
It doesn't help that the narrator is, without giving too much away, not really able to feel or have normal human emotions. So there's an emotional flatness and distance to everything.
Still, what's here is one of the most impressive bits of fantasy worldbuilding I've ever read along with a very credible military fantasy story. It tries to something very different from the usual "it's basically like the real world but there is a bit of magic" ... and mostly succeeds.
It is apparently a series of some sort but the story here is self-contained so you could easily read just this as a standalone.
The blurb from the author is an example of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. It is extraordinarily terse. It probably would work a lot better if it just even just a little bit less terse.
Absolutely nothing is spoonfed to you. This book is devoid of infodumps and clunky expositional dialogue. You will very, very slowly piece together how the world (probably) works and what is (probably) doing on. But the result is that you sometimes feel like maybe you were supposed to have read an RPG sourcebook or wiki before diving in to this.
It doesn't help that the narrator is, without giving too much away, not really able to feel or have normal human emotions. So there's an emotional flatness and distance to everything.
Still, what's here is one of the most impressive bits of fantasy worldbuilding I've ever read along with a very credible military fantasy story. It tries to something very different from the usual "it's basically like the real world but there is a bit of magic" ... and mostly succeeds.
It is apparently a series of some sort but the story here is self-contained so you could easily read just this as a standalone.
August 8, 2018
I feel like I'd better review this book after the author was nice enough to walk me through how to buy it from him. (Google Play is occasionally extremely unintuitive.)
This one actually took me several tries to get into -- I can imagine people bouncing off it -- but when I actually sat down and tried to read it today I read it straight through. It's military fantasy with no gendered pronouns (no, really), an interesting look at systems of government, obvious affection for the smallest details (you like logistics? get yer logistics here) that meant I came away feeling like I knew a whole lot more about artillery than I did when I started. Also I was definitely here for the war-sheep.
The pacing felt a little off in that I hadn't expected quite so much of the book to be devoted to the time after they got home from the north, but now that I think about it it feels like that's really the best way for it to have gone. I loved the sorcerers, and Twitch, and, hey, the main character wasn't bad either.
It probably won't be everyone's thing, but it was reasonably priced and I was willing to take a chance on it, and, hey, I'm happy. It was good, and I'm glad I read it.
This one actually took me several tries to get into -- I can imagine people bouncing off it -- but when I actually sat down and tried to read it today I read it straight through. It's military fantasy with no gendered pronouns (no, really), an interesting look at systems of government, obvious affection for the smallest details (you like logistics? get yer logistics here) that meant I came away feeling like I knew a whole lot more about artillery than I did when I started. Also I was definitely here for the war-sheep.
The pacing felt a little off in that I hadn't expected quite so much of the book to be devoted to the time after they got home from the north, but now that I think about it it feels like that's really the best way for it to have gone. I loved the sorcerers, and Twitch, and, hey, the main character wasn't bad either.
It probably won't be everyone's thing, but it was reasonably priced and I was willing to take a chance on it, and, hey, I'm happy. It was good, and I'm glad I read it.
April 5, 2025
Sometimes uniqueness is a benefit in and of itself, simply by bucking the trend and giving the reader something novel, a book can stand out in language or style or concept what have you - the pure novelty holds attention where otherwise someone might falter, and you end up feeling generous towards the story. Sometimes, uniqueness is a backhanded curse, and having braved its own trail doesn't mean it actually got any farther than someone just sticking to the damn road. I don't know what these metaphors mean, just - this is a unique, unique book.
I think for a particular type of reader, for a particular set of interests, this is going to be a guaranteed hit, no question - the world and imagination on display here is impressive, Saunders playing around so much with simple assumptions that everything feels off and strange and magical - what is at its heart a simple story of a border skirmish becomes this netherworldly, surreal trip. Basic words are turned on their head, used differently, obfuscated. You will inevitably be confused as fuck for the first 20% of the book (minimum). Some people will love this. Some will not.
In all the confusion, there's a great core, but I feel like Saunders chooses to avoid the method of Glenn Cook's Black Company (Definitely the most direct comparison possible) - expanding on a chaotic war by focuses on the characters of the soldiery - instead here he realizes the characters mainly through acts of logistics and strategical minutiae. Magic feels real, vivid, and powerful. The land feels strange and warped. Demons, razor-blade butterflies, bronze bull artillery, a 5 ton battle sheep... and a bunch of characters who are generally one or two notes, and who don't have clear motivations beyond 'exist' and 'continue existing'. We get backstory for laws, and all sorts of military structure, but rarely do we get moments with people.
This is confounded by the odd structure of the book, with basically the main conflict over 2/3 of the way through, and then there's a long long section of falling action in which nothing happens because everyone is just doing a job and getting along and... the end? Did I miss something? Very entirely possible here, but though I'm left wanting more, I'm also somewhat skeptical I'll get it in the sequels - Saunders has shown his world, its climates strange and alien... but now I've seen it, and don't know what else there is to draw me back next time. If any of this sounds like it's your thing, if you desire the obtuse, the arcane, magic that feels truly magical, or really really really like soldiering then run, don't walk to this book. Otherwise... I'm not sure.
I think for a particular type of reader, for a particular set of interests, this is going to be a guaranteed hit, no question - the world and imagination on display here is impressive, Saunders playing around so much with simple assumptions that everything feels off and strange and magical - what is at its heart a simple story of a border skirmish becomes this netherworldly, surreal trip. Basic words are turned on their head, used differently, obfuscated. You will inevitably be confused as fuck for the first 20% of the book (minimum). Some people will love this. Some will not.
In all the confusion, there's a great core, but I feel like Saunders chooses to avoid the method of Glenn Cook's Black Company (Definitely the most direct comparison possible) - expanding on a chaotic war by focuses on the characters of the soldiery - instead here he realizes the characters mainly through acts of logistics and strategical minutiae. Magic feels real, vivid, and powerful. The land feels strange and warped. Demons, razor-blade butterflies, bronze bull artillery, a 5 ton battle sheep... and a bunch of characters who are generally one or two notes, and who don't have clear motivations beyond 'exist' and 'continue existing'. We get backstory for laws, and all sorts of military structure, but rarely do we get moments with people.
This is confounded by the odd structure of the book, with basically the main conflict over 2/3 of the way through, and then there's a long long section of falling action in which nothing happens because everyone is just doing a job and getting along and... the end? Did I miss something? Very entirely possible here, but though I'm left wanting more, I'm also somewhat skeptical I'll get it in the sequels - Saunders has shown his world, its climates strange and alien... but now I've seen it, and don't know what else there is to draw me back next time. If any of this sounds like it's your thing, if you desire the obtuse, the arcane, magic that feels truly magical, or really really really like soldiering then run, don't walk to this book. Otherwise... I'm not sure.
August 1, 2025
Nice, interesting read with a very unique world and complex magic/military system. At times I struggled a little bit with the too technical explanations the reader just kinda gets dropped into, and the jarring paragraph spacing, but overall a fun experience.
March 12, 2025
The March North is an extremely specific book for an extremely specific kind of person. Fortunately, I'm that kind of person. The Commonweal series was a common punchline in the Something Awful forums scifi/fantasy book thread, at the intersection of "brilliant" and "unreadable" and "we are all Graydon Saunders". So when I found out that Saunders, in a fit of pique at American tech companies, was planning to remove his books from sale on all platforms, I decided it was put up or shut up time.
The plot of The March North is pretty simple. The commander of a military unit in a fantasy nation recalls a mission where he links up with a couple of wizards and goes off to defend the realm from an invasion of an enemy empire. There are some battles, the unit takes heavy casualties, but they win the day and return home heroes.
The tone of the narrator, the unnamed Standard-Captain, is terse and clinical. The other characters are named things like Twitch and Rust and Halt and Blossom, and military/magical jargon is thrown around like you already know how all of this works. The Black Company crossed with the Aubrey-Maturin series is a comparison I've seen elsewhere, and it's not wrong.
But what makes this book a treasure for that certain kind of person is the depth of Saunder's setting and how the implications of the worldbuilding unfold. The world of the Commonweal is far far stranger than the laconic writing conveys. The default state of life for most people has been nasty, brutish, and short due to the workings of generations of wizard-kings. Thousands of years of insane sorcerers feuding with each other has left the landscape haunted by demons and worse, river that turn to blood and fire and bile on a regular cycle, and meant that most political organizations end when some wizard decides to throw a mountain at the city.
Except in the Commonweal. About 500 years ago, the Commonweal figured out how to counter the power of wizards with collective action, something called the Focus, which is channeled through the Standards of the Companies of the Line. Prosperity in the Commonweal is protected by a magical binding called the Shape of Peace, which encourages people to work together, and offers a balance against the power of individual mages. Aside from the demonic invasions, life in the Commonweal seems almost utopian. They use the French Revolutionary calendar, and politicians who tell lies literally have their pants burst into flame.
So what this book is really about is learning how the Focus of the Companies work, what the accompanying wizards can do, and seeing that in action. Even with the cryptic style of the writing, some of the action is impressive. In an early scene, the Company and the accompanying battery play catch, with the battery firing black-black-black shot, simple iron rods, at cannon velocities, and the Company catching the shells with their Focus and ablating them to nothing in a shower of sparks, or deflecting them into the sky. The weapons of the battery go up to red-red-red, which has a "danger close" radius of 25 km. Assuming it's some kind of explosive (not a safe assumption), that puts red-red-red in the 20 megaton hydrogen bomb scale. The wizards have more subtle ways of killing: swarms of razor-winged steel butterflies, manipulation of air, heat, and minds, and compelling hosts of demons.
That said, there are a lot of flaws in this book. Characterization isn't. The three sorcerers assigned to the Company are some of the most powerful in the Commonweal, including the unquestioned most powerful magic user alive; Halt. We're told Halt and Rust don't get along in the opening chapter, some sort of long-running feud contained at the level of sniping in specialized journals and third-hand political maneuvering, but these two godlike beings just... do their jobs. The only character to get any generosity of description is Halt, who's corporeal form is someone's grandma, an old lady with her knitting and a ready cup of tea. Please ignore that she's riding on a firing breathing sheep-like creature the size of an elephant, or that she's older than reliably recorded history. As for the rest, I could tell you what they do, but not anything about their personality or character.
The Standard-Captain style also robs the climax of what should be it's tension. Taking a battered company on a suicide mission into a fortress containing the Archon of Reems, a sorcerer-king channeling the power of an entire empire of fire-priests and ashen victims, escaping a trap made of singularity-black antimagic cable and a whole amphitheater of demons, and undoing a binding powering an empire spanning road made out of crystallized despair, should be thrilling. But the writing is so detached it doesn't hit right.
Still, at the end of the day, I stayed up way too late finishing this book, which is the highest accolade I can give any novel. Saunders wrote the exact book he intended to write, and if it's not to your liking, well, you were warned up front.
The plot of The March North is pretty simple. The commander of a military unit in a fantasy nation recalls a mission where he links up with a couple of wizards and goes off to defend the realm from an invasion of an enemy empire. There are some battles, the unit takes heavy casualties, but they win the day and return home heroes.
The tone of the narrator, the unnamed Standard-Captain, is terse and clinical. The other characters are named things like Twitch and Rust and Halt and Blossom, and military/magical jargon is thrown around like you already know how all of this works. The Black Company crossed with the Aubrey-Maturin series is a comparison I've seen elsewhere, and it's not wrong.
But what makes this book a treasure for that certain kind of person is the depth of Saunder's setting and how the implications of the worldbuilding unfold. The world of the Commonweal is far far stranger than the laconic writing conveys. The default state of life for most people has been nasty, brutish, and short due to the workings of generations of wizard-kings. Thousands of years of insane sorcerers feuding with each other has left the landscape haunted by demons and worse, river that turn to blood and fire and bile on a regular cycle, and meant that most political organizations end when some wizard decides to throw a mountain at the city.
Except in the Commonweal. About 500 years ago, the Commonweal figured out how to counter the power of wizards with collective action, something called the Focus, which is channeled through the Standards of the Companies of the Line. Prosperity in the Commonweal is protected by a magical binding called the Shape of Peace, which encourages people to work together, and offers a balance against the power of individual mages. Aside from the demonic invasions, life in the Commonweal seems almost utopian. They use the French Revolutionary calendar, and politicians who tell lies literally have their pants burst into flame.
So what this book is really about is learning how the Focus of the Companies work, what the accompanying wizards can do, and seeing that in action. Even with the cryptic style of the writing, some of the action is impressive. In an early scene, the Company and the accompanying battery play catch, with the battery firing black-black-black shot, simple iron rods, at cannon velocities, and the Company catching the shells with their Focus and ablating them to nothing in a shower of sparks, or deflecting them into the sky. The weapons of the battery go up to red-red-red, which has a "danger close" radius of 25 km. Assuming it's some kind of explosive (not a safe assumption), that puts red-red-red in the 20 megaton hydrogen bomb scale. The wizards have more subtle ways of killing: swarms of razor-winged steel butterflies, manipulation of air, heat, and minds, and compelling hosts of demons.
That said, there are a lot of flaws in this book. Characterization isn't. The three sorcerers assigned to the Company are some of the most powerful in the Commonweal, including the unquestioned most powerful magic user alive; Halt. We're told Halt and Rust don't get along in the opening chapter, some sort of long-running feud contained at the level of sniping in specialized journals and third-hand political maneuvering, but these two godlike beings just... do their jobs. The only character to get any generosity of description is Halt, who's corporeal form is someone's grandma, an old lady with her knitting and a ready cup of tea. Please ignore that she's riding on a firing breathing sheep-like creature the size of an elephant, or that she's older than reliably recorded history. As for the rest, I could tell you what they do, but not anything about their personality or character.
The Standard-Captain style also robs the climax of what should be it's tension. Taking a battered company on a suicide mission into a fortress containing the Archon of Reems, a sorcerer-king channeling the power of an entire empire of fire-priests and ashen victims, escaping a trap made of singularity-black antimagic cable and a whole amphitheater of demons, and undoing a binding powering an empire spanning road made out of crystallized despair, should be thrilling. But the writing is so detached it doesn't hit right.
Still, at the end of the day, I stayed up way too late finishing this book, which is the highest accolade I can give any novel. Saunders wrote the exact book he intended to write, and if it's not to your liking, well, you were warned up front.
April 16, 2023
TL;DR: A front-line military story in a universe with viable magic. I ended up enjoying it but it's super-challenging to read from a sheer "mechanics of reading" perspective. You have been warned!
TL: This was a hard book to read. According to my logs (thanks Moon+ Reader Pro!) I read the first chapter...and then left it for a week. Then I read chapter 1 again, and remained as confused as I had been the first time around, but persevered and read all the way through to the end of chapter 3. Feeling like I might have a handle on a small portion of this new and unfamiliar universe I started again from chapter 1 and I read through to the end, only occasionally stopping to re-read a chapter when I got totally lost.
If you claim to be a fan of the "show, don't tell" school of writing, as I do, then this book will strongly test that claim! Grayson Saunders has a writing style that is unique in my experience, specfically:
1. There's almost no explanation of damn near anything and what explanation is available is almost always in the form of sentences interjecting themselves into other sentences via a "-" or, when they've the patience a ";". This results in a number of almost run-on sentence-like structures and quite frequently I had to stop and ingest the interjecting fact then go back to the beginning of the sentence-proper and start again in order to achieve peak-comprehension.
2. I think I could confidently state the gender of 3 characters in the whole book, personal pronouns are very rare! There're a fair few I's and we's but there's an almost tortuous avoidance of directly associating action or thought with anybody. For example:
That is the equivalent of "Twitch said" in other books. I actually just did a quick check: there are 0 instances of either she or he in the entire book 🙂
3. There were a lot of words I had to look up, and I learned a few things during the experience after having to look up howdah, tompion, extirpated (which I think I also ran into in Starfish recently), deliquescing, sophont, pennon, curvet and a few others. I think my favourite discovery was "merlon" which, it turns out, are the solid bits that make up crennelations on castle walls - turns out the gaps are the "crenels" and the not-gaps are merlons!
I don't have a problem with either anything above, but it really slowed me down! I normally average somewhere around 250 words-per-minute for general reading, The March North dropped me down to 151!
All that aside, the universe in which this story is set is fantastic! It (tangentially) references a history at least three-hundred thousand years long and our story here is specifically concerned with the "now" in which a social-grouping called the Commonweal (which I consistently had trouble not mentally reading as Commonwealth) has been formed in order to bring some semblance of order to a world which has been significantly impacted by thousands of years of sorcerer-based battles for supremacy and ownership of the non-magical peasantry.
The story itself is narrated from the perspective of a long-standing officer of the Line who's given command of a relatively green battalion (or a portion thereof, approximately 500 people) and several Staff Thaumaturgists. This group is then charged with determining if the Commonweal is under-attack or not and, if so, to do something about it.
There's so much that I loved about this book, but I don't think that you should discover it outside the bounds of the story! I think a significant portion of the joy that I got from this book was the hard-wrought comprehension, that *click* when I managed to combine to facts into a greater whole that suddenly shed light on an element of the world and its backstory.
So, with that said, I strongly recommend reading this if you're up for a change from relatively easy-reading (which I've been doing a lot of recently) and a little challenge, but you don't necessarily want to diverge into the terribly real world of non-fiction. If you're going to read it, stop here and go get started, because I'm just going to be excited about a couple of things I thought were really cool.
The Commonweal: we don't find out a lot of specifics, and in fact I'm still pretty confused about exactly how the Commonweal came to be, beyond the fact that it's at least as much a magical structure as it is an ethical/societal one. The fact that it does exist to try and make people behave "well" is happened upon occasionally in quotes like: sometimes it’s best to rely on the Commonweal’s ethics rules. If any of it is made from woodchuck spleens, they’ll be humanely obtained woodchuck spleens. There are so many little micro-mentions of the binding of the magical folk into a reliable, long-lived and liveable social harmony with the non-magical folk. My favourite one at the end involves someone deliberately testing one of the sociological/magical bindings by setting their pants on fire, as it appears the schoolyard-taunt "liar liar, pants in fire" has become political reality. There's just so much more to explore here and that leads into my next favourite thing.
The magic which, like Pratchett's, is all pervasive and is just another element of the universe. Although it's not explained in depth, the magic system seems underpinned by some rules about people's ability to use it (and that not being infinite - hard enough usage will squash your brains out through your ears). The magic isn't just fireballs being flung around though, there's an element of science to the implementation, and indeed a pretty good chapter devoted to the acquisition of raw elements (iron, and dragon's blood) from a river that, due to an unfortunate magical history, flows intermittently with venom, blood, fire and dragon's blood. There's also the Northern Terrane, a minor but pretty amazing character and, of course, Eustace the battle-sheep!
I'm definitely going to pick up the follow-up A Succession of Bad Days because I did enjoy this quite a lot. I'm giving it three-stars, because I can't do three-and-a-half and I think four is pushing it a little because having to re-read the first three chapters was a bit painful 😉
TL: This was a hard book to read. According to my logs (thanks Moon+ Reader Pro!) I read the first chapter...and then left it for a week. Then I read chapter 1 again, and remained as confused as I had been the first time around, but persevered and read all the way through to the end of chapter 3. Feeling like I might have a handle on a small portion of this new and unfamiliar universe I started again from chapter 1 and I read through to the end, only occasionally stopping to re-read a chapter when I got totally lost.
If you claim to be a fan of the "show, don't tell" school of writing, as I do, then this book will strongly test that claim! Grayson Saunders has a writing style that is unique in my experience, specfically:
1. There's almost no explanation of damn near anything and what explanation is available is almost always in the form of sentences interjecting themselves into other sentences via a "-" or, when they've the patience a ";". This results in a number of almost run-on sentence-like structures and quite frequently I had to stop and ingest the interjecting fact then go back to the beginning of the sentence-proper and start again in order to achieve peak-comprehension.
2. I think I could confidently state the gender of 3 characters in the whole book, personal pronouns are very rare! There're a fair few I's and we's but there's an almost tortuous avoidance of directly associating action or thought with anybody. For example:
"West Wetcreek isn't somewhere. Even back in the day, Westcreek wasn't anywhere." Twitch was born here, says this like the laws of the universe aren't being changed. Twitch don't like it.
That is the equivalent of "Twitch said" in other books. I actually just did a quick check: there are 0 instances of either she or he in the entire book 🙂
3. There were a lot of words I had to look up, and I learned a few things during the experience after having to look up howdah, tompion, extirpated (which I think I also ran into in Starfish recently), deliquescing, sophont, pennon, curvet and a few others. I think my favourite discovery was "merlon" which, it turns out, are the solid bits that make up crennelations on castle walls - turns out the gaps are the "crenels" and the not-gaps are merlons!
I don't have a problem with either anything above, but it really slowed me down! I normally average somewhere around 250 words-per-minute for general reading, The March North dropped me down to 151!
All that aside, the universe in which this story is set is fantastic! It (tangentially) references a history at least three-hundred thousand years long and our story here is specifically concerned with the "now" in which a social-grouping called the Commonweal (which I consistently had trouble not mentally reading as Commonwealth) has been formed in order to bring some semblance of order to a world which has been significantly impacted by thousands of years of sorcerer-based battles for supremacy and ownership of the non-magical peasantry.
The story itself is narrated from the perspective of a long-standing officer of the Line who's given command of a relatively green battalion (or a portion thereof, approximately 500 people) and several Staff Thaumaturgists. This group is then charged with determining if the Commonweal is under-attack or not and, if so, to do something about it.
There's so much that I loved about this book, but I don't think that you should discover it outside the bounds of the story! I think a significant portion of the joy that I got from this book was the hard-wrought comprehension, that *click* when I managed to combine to facts into a greater whole that suddenly shed light on an element of the world and its backstory.
So, with that said, I strongly recommend reading this if you're up for a change from relatively easy-reading (which I've been doing a lot of recently) and a little challenge, but you don't necessarily want to diverge into the terribly real world of non-fiction. If you're going to read it, stop here and go get started, because I'm just going to be excited about a couple of things I thought were really cool.
The Commonweal: we don't find out a lot of specifics, and in fact I'm still pretty confused about exactly how the Commonweal came to be, beyond the fact that it's at least as much a magical structure as it is an ethical/societal one. The fact that it does exist to try and make people behave "well" is happened upon occasionally in quotes like: sometimes it’s best to rely on the Commonweal’s ethics rules. If any of it is made from woodchuck spleens, they’ll be humanely obtained woodchuck spleens. There are so many little micro-mentions of the binding of the magical folk into a reliable, long-lived and liveable social harmony with the non-magical folk. My favourite one at the end involves someone deliberately testing one of the sociological/magical bindings by setting their pants on fire, as it appears the schoolyard-taunt "liar liar, pants in fire" has become political reality. There's just so much more to explore here and that leads into my next favourite thing.
The magic which, like Pratchett's, is all pervasive and is just another element of the universe. Although it's not explained in depth, the magic system seems underpinned by some rules about people's ability to use it (and that not being infinite - hard enough usage will squash your brains out through your ears). The magic isn't just fireballs being flung around though, there's an element of science to the implementation, and indeed a pretty good chapter devoted to the acquisition of raw elements (iron, and dragon's blood) from a river that, due to an unfortunate magical history, flows intermittently with venom, blood, fire and dragon's blood. There's also the Northern Terrane, a minor but pretty amazing character and, of course, Eustace the battle-sheep!
I'm definitely going to pick up the follow-up A Succession of Bad Days because I did enjoy this quite a lot. I'm giving it three-stars, because I can't do three-and-a-half and I think four is pushing it a little because having to re-read the first three chapters was a bit painful 😉
January 22, 2021
Dense and fascinating. Probably best reread.
December 3, 2019
I got this book recommended to me by a friend as the opposite of grimdark fantasy. I enjoyed quite a lot of it, but I did have some trouble with it at times. For a start, I understand the book was self-published, which is all very well, but I do feel like the author could have done with an editor at times; many passages felt obtuse and I had to read them several times before I had a decent idea of what they meant. Something else that I found grating was the deliberate refusal to provide genders for characters. I have no problem with this in principle, but please use constructs like "they/them" or one of the other sets of adjectives. Repeatedly using the characters' names in a sentence to avoid he/she just felt clunky. It also didn't help that Saunders is very fond of archaic or jargonistic language. I'm really glad that I was reading on a Kindle, so I could consult the built-in dictionary (which I found myself doing more frequently than I would have liked). Expanding one's vocabulary is all very well, but it did start to feel like hard work at times.
Speaking of hard work, Saunders really throws you in at the deep end and leaves you to sink or swim. There's no hand-holding going on here. We start with a military man of some kind expecting (sorcerous) visitors to his area and rapidly go on from there to repealing a military invasion from another country. What the Commonweal is, what a Standard-Captain is, or the focus, or the Shape of Peace are things you're left to figure out for yourself. There's no harm in making the reader work for their story, but this, combined with the editing issues I mention above mean that it took a while for me to get through this book. I still don't know if I'll go on to the others in the series.
But despite that, my friend was right: I did enjoy the shape of this story, in which an egalitarian, democratic nation exists in the midst of its more traditional fantasy neighbours. Where extremely powerful (basically immortal) sorcerers, who used to behave like Dark Lords in the past, agree to bind themselves into the nation for the greater good. In a world filling up with strongmen and "leaders" whose only goal in power is to stay in power, it's good to have examples to look up to.
Speaking of hard work, Saunders really throws you in at the deep end and leaves you to sink or swim. There's no hand-holding going on here. We start with a military man of some kind expecting (sorcerous) visitors to his area and rapidly go on from there to repealing a military invasion from another country. What the Commonweal is, what a Standard-Captain is, or the focus, or the Shape of Peace are things you're left to figure out for yourself. There's no harm in making the reader work for their story, but this, combined with the editing issues I mention above mean that it took a while for me to get through this book. I still don't know if I'll go on to the others in the series.
But despite that, my friend was right: I did enjoy the shape of this story, in which an egalitarian, democratic nation exists in the midst of its more traditional fantasy neighbours. Where extremely powerful (basically immortal) sorcerers, who used to behave like Dark Lords in the past, agree to bind themselves into the nation for the greater good. In a world filling up with strongmen and "leaders" whose only goal in power is to stay in power, it's good to have examples to look up to.
May 15, 2024
Eliezer Y. posted the question "What books will I enjoy reading?" on Manifold, and the top ranked result was A Succession of Bad Days by Graydon Saunders-- the sequel to this book. Since I had read and liked Unsong, A Fire Upon the Deep, Stories of Your Life and Others, The Expanse, Luminosity, and There Is No Antimemetics Division which were six of the eight next books on the list, I decided to give it a try.
If you've ever read any military SF, where the story is a military campaign, then this will feel familiar. It's fantasy rather than SF, but sticks very close to its own weird magical rules. It's all very masculine: the only way people feel toward each other is an earned respect; most of the humor comes from cowboy-like understatement; people in this society are unusually rational; there aren't any descriptions of clothes or faces.
The author drops you right into the world, without hand-holding, and it's a challenge to figure out what kind of a world this even is. Still, its no harder to figure out what's going on than, say, the Culture novels or Master and Commander or Blindsight.
I think part of the point of the story is to explore how and why cooperation and democracy are more successful than following god-kings by making it a feature of the magic system.
One interesting aspect is that the book never uses "he" or "she". The characters mainly have one-syllable names that can drop in for pronouns, and you don't really notice what it is that is making the language a little odd until quite a ways in. I read two of the Independent wizard characters as women (one was described in a way that made me think of Frau Totenkinder and the other was named Blossom), and everyone else as men, but that was just my impression.
If you've ever read any military SF, where the story is a military campaign, then this will feel familiar. It's fantasy rather than SF, but sticks very close to its own weird magical rules. It's all very masculine: the only way people feel toward each other is an earned respect; most of the humor comes from cowboy-like understatement; people in this society are unusually rational; there aren't any descriptions of clothes or faces.
The author drops you right into the world, without hand-holding, and it's a challenge to figure out what kind of a world this even is. Still, its no harder to figure out what's going on than, say, the Culture novels or Master and Commander or Blindsight.
I think part of the point of the story is to explore how and why cooperation and democracy are more successful than following god-kings by making it a feature of the magic system.
One interesting aspect is that the book never uses "he" or "she". The characters mainly have one-syllable names that can drop in for pronouns, and you don't really notice what it is that is making the language a little odd until quite a ways in. I read two of the Independent wizard characters as women (one was described in a way that made me think of Frau Totenkinder and the other was named Blossom), and everyone else as men, but that was just my impression.
June 11, 2015
Wow, how to describe this book?? Mostly it's a book about the following: battles; sorcery; magic; changeable and probably intelligent landscapes; demons; battles (again) and the aftermath of battles; sorcerers, but nothing you would see in Harry Potter, oh no; and a giant battle sheep named Eustace.
The first time I started reading, I was confused, and stopped. I could tell there was a story there I wanted to read. But the author drops you right into the story with almost no explanation or exposition. Common words (e. g. the standard) Mean Something Else here. You have to figure it out as you go. I was reminded of my first reading of Patrick O'Brian, another story where you're tossed into a different world with a different vocabulary and no hand-holding.
So I went at it again, and was rewarded by a pretty exciting battle story and some of the strangest and most interesting world-building I can remember in 50+ years of reading SF/F. I really want to know more about this world and these people.
The world building is the strongest part of this book. The characters are a little less distinctive than I personally like to see.
I think going back and rereading this book will be an enjoyable experience.
I'm another reader who has read Graydon on blogs and newsgroups, and always perked up when I saw his name. He always has interesting things to say. And he's written an interesting book, and now a sequel!! Woohoo!
The first time I started reading, I was confused, and stopped. I could tell there was a story there I wanted to read. But the author drops you right into the story with almost no explanation or exposition. Common words (e. g. the standard) Mean Something Else here. You have to figure it out as you go. I was reminded of my first reading of Patrick O'Brian, another story where you're tossed into a different world with a different vocabulary and no hand-holding.
So I went at it again, and was rewarded by a pretty exciting battle story and some of the strangest and most interesting world-building I can remember in 50+ years of reading SF/F. I really want to know more about this world and these people.
The world building is the strongest part of this book. The characters are a little less distinctive than I personally like to see.
I think going back and rereading this book will be an enjoyable experience.
I'm another reader who has read Graydon on blogs and newsgroups, and always perked up when I saw his name. He always has interesting things to say. And he's written an interesting book, and now a sequel!! Woohoo!
October 11, 2022
takes a while to get the rhythm of the book. But when you do, it is poetry.
July 27, 2016
There's a story about Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. It's said that, if you want him to like your presentation, you should write it up without including any background information -- just assume that he already knows everything about your chosen field. And then, after you've done the writeup, you should delete every third paragraph. He'll stay engaged by filling in the gaps in your story, and that way your presentation won't be boring for him.
This book reminded me of that story. The world of this book is deeply, deeply strange, and explanations are few and far between. You stay alert, you pick up context, and you figure things out as you go.
In terms of plot, this is a military novel with extensive use of magic: wizards can, and do, defeat armies. I think it's kin to the Black Company stories, or the Malazon stories, although neither of those series grabbed my attention past the first book.
Creative as this is, it also has some flaws. There's one part where . There's also the bit where the main plot resolves three-quarters of the way through the book; the last quarter of the book seems to be essentially slice-of-life.
I'll probably get the sequel.
This book reminded me of that story. The world of this book is deeply, deeply strange, and explanations are few and far between. You stay alert, you pick up context, and you figure things out as you go.
In terms of plot, this is a military novel with extensive use of magic: wizards can, and do, defeat armies. I think it's kin to the Black Company stories, or the Malazon stories, although neither of those series grabbed my attention past the first book.
Creative as this is, it also has some flaws. There's one part where . There's also the bit where the main plot resolves three-quarters of the way through the book; the last quarter of the book seems to be essentially slice-of-life.
I'll probably get the sequel.
gave-up
August 21, 2014Maybe it didn't help that when I started this I was reading in fits and starts on a research trip; but then I put it aside in favour of comfort reading during travel and never went back to it. Possibly just not the right book at the right time in the right circumstances rather than anything wrong with it.
May 13, 2019
I read this in 3 days, read the sequel, then immediately bought the other books in the series (4 total so far) and went back to re-read the first (this one). It is everything I like in military fantasy, and a very interesting look at how a decent society might survive in a setting plagued with sorcerer-kings.
Also, tea, knitting, and battlesheep.
Also, tea, knitting, and battlesheep.
December 12, 2019
This book is written in a style that's intentionally obscure and/or frustrating. Expect to go into it thoroughly confused and come out with a sort-of, almost complete understanding of it. But if you enjoy military fantasy and are okay with books that don't coddle you, you should really read this.
March 21, 2025
Yikes, actually finished this ages ago; have updated the date read to be roughly accurate and not look so weird.
Love this series. Some people argue one should start with the second book ( A Succession of Bad Days) and then back-track to this one, and I can see how that would work. But I started here, loved it, and kept on going, that worked for me.
Not even going to try a plot summary, there must be a dozen of those up by now. I'm going to ramble on about things I found interesting.
It's a magical world; it may or may not be a far-future version of our world (magical power appeared about 200,000 years ago and so the archeology gets a bit messy, they just don't know that much about the pre-power world). Many species of plants and animals are named the same as species now extant here on Earth, but that could just be authorial convenience (if you re-invent everything then you have to take the time to explain it). There are species not present on earth as well, some of which were clearly created by sorcerers (also many species using familiar names have been modified; the giant fire-breathing ducks come to mind). There are also multiple sapient species, at least most of which were created or heavily modified by sorcerer.
Measurements are consistently given in metric. Since the author is Canadian, this would be the simple default for him, and again could be explained by authorial convenience. Amusingly, as an American, use of metric gives me a feeling of science and precision, sometimes rather at odds with that bit of the story.
One exception; the calendar used seems to be the French Revolutionary calendar. I'm surprised I picked up on this; I got suspicious of the month names, googled them, and found where they came from. (The actual French Revolutionary calendar names the months for their agricultural significance around Paris, and the Commonweel books take place in the Southern hemisphere of that world. The month names are roughly right for Commonweel agriculture, so if it is our world, they're applying the month names backwards.) Use of these unusual month names with only one source is the strongest argument I've found for saying the world is a far-future version of ours; but it still could just be authorial convenience (or whim).)
The Commonweel holds the distinction of being one of very few fictional universes that I might consider voluntarily moving to. I mean, fictional universes tend to be places where lots of exciting stuff is going on, and living around too much exciting stuff going on gets challenging at best. A lot of the backgrounds these days are horrible dystopias, even less someplace I would choose to live. (No, I have no desire to be a hero. I hope I might step up if the need barreled down on me, but I certainly would not seek it out. I worry about people who do seek it out; also it's generally safer to maintain a considerable distance from such people.) (When I play "would I live there", it's on the basis that I'm assigned randomly to an individual in the world, not necessarily one that appears in the books. Most worlds have small areas or social strata that it might be okay or even pleasant to live in, far fewer would really justify taking the risk of random assignment. I mean, I don't think I'd really want to be randomly assigned into our world, never mind Dragaera, Barrayar, Pern, Darkover, the Lensman universe, or whatever.)
A peculiarity of the language in these books is that gendered pronouns are not used. (On the world, people use them in intimate discussion, but in the books we never have anything close to a sex scene, and even people explicitly tagged as lovers don't use the intimate pronouns in public talk, the only time we see the characters.) This means that sometimes number is slightly confused (singular "they"), but that others we avoid over-specifying gender and don't have to guess about individuals of unknown gender. After reading enough of these books (including re-reads), I start feeling that our common habit of using gendered pronouns when we know is in fact over-specifying. If you say "The plumber came into the kitchen. He carried a big tool box." you are either specifying sex where it doesn't matter (my view, most of the time), or else you're slipping some information to the reader in kind of a side-channel (if it's useful to specify the gender of the plumber, this does make it easy). (I would guess that this is much of the point of doing it the way Graydon chose.)
Love this series. Some people argue one should start with the second book ( A Succession of Bad Days) and then back-track to this one, and I can see how that would work. But I started here, loved it, and kept on going, that worked for me.
Not even going to try a plot summary, there must be a dozen of those up by now. I'm going to ramble on about things I found interesting.
It's a magical world; it may or may not be a far-future version of our world (magical power appeared about 200,000 years ago and so the archeology gets a bit messy, they just don't know that much about the pre-power world). Many species of plants and animals are named the same as species now extant here on Earth, but that could just be authorial convenience (if you re-invent everything then you have to take the time to explain it). There are species not present on earth as well, some of which were clearly created by sorcerers (also many species using familiar names have been modified; the giant fire-breathing ducks come to mind). There are also multiple sapient species, at least most of which were created or heavily modified by sorcerer.
Measurements are consistently given in metric. Since the author is Canadian, this would be the simple default for him, and again could be explained by authorial convenience. Amusingly, as an American, use of metric gives me a feeling of science and precision, sometimes rather at odds with that bit of the story.
One exception; the calendar used seems to be the French Revolutionary calendar. I'm surprised I picked up on this; I got suspicious of the month names, googled them, and found where they came from. (The actual French Revolutionary calendar names the months for their agricultural significance around Paris, and the Commonweel books take place in the Southern hemisphere of that world. The month names are roughly right for Commonweel agriculture, so if it is our world, they're applying the month names backwards.) Use of these unusual month names with only one source is the strongest argument I've found for saying the world is a far-future version of ours; but it still could just be authorial convenience (or whim).)
The Commonweel holds the distinction of being one of very few fictional universes that I might consider voluntarily moving to. I mean, fictional universes tend to be places where lots of exciting stuff is going on, and living around too much exciting stuff going on gets challenging at best. A lot of the backgrounds these days are horrible dystopias, even less someplace I would choose to live. (No, I have no desire to be a hero. I hope I might step up if the need barreled down on me, but I certainly would not seek it out. I worry about people who do seek it out; also it's generally safer to maintain a considerable distance from such people.) (When I play "would I live there", it's on the basis that I'm assigned randomly to an individual in the world, not necessarily one that appears in the books. Most worlds have small areas or social strata that it might be okay or even pleasant to live in, far fewer would really justify taking the risk of random assignment. I mean, I don't think I'd really want to be randomly assigned into our world, never mind Dragaera, Barrayar, Pern, Darkover, the Lensman universe, or whatever.)
A peculiarity of the language in these books is that gendered pronouns are not used. (On the world, people use them in intimate discussion, but in the books we never have anything close to a sex scene, and even people explicitly tagged as lovers don't use the intimate pronouns in public talk, the only time we see the characters.) This means that sometimes number is slightly confused (singular "they"), but that others we avoid over-specifying gender and don't have to guess about individuals of unknown gender. After reading enough of these books (including re-reads), I start feeling that our common habit of using gendered pronouns when we know is in fact over-specifying. If you say "The plumber came into the kitchen. He carried a big tool box." you are either specifying sex where it doesn't matter (my view, most of the time), or else you're slipping some information to the reader in kind of a side-channel (if it's useful to specify the gender of the plumber, this does make it easy). (I would guess that this is much of the point of doing it the way Graydon chose.)
February 14, 2019
This book is very popular in some circles; my feelings about it were very mixed, but I enjoyed it enough that I'm going to err on the side of that and give it four stars.
On the plus side, I did like being dropped into an unfamiliar world without explanation or context and having to glean what was going on by inference. It's also a very interesting world, with a lot of thought clearly going into the construction of it (although I thought it was interesting that Jane Fletcher explored some of the same general ideas in the Lyremouth Chronicles, to the extent that I wondered if it was an influence on this novel.) I appreciated the lack of gendered pronouns. And the storyline was generally interesting to follow, even if it went a little off the rails in the last few chapters.
On the minus side, the prose is sometimes frankly bad. Unnecessarily convoluted and confusing. There were times it sounded like an over-literal translation from a Latin text. And if the world-building didn't suffer from the author playing his cards so close to his chest, the character development did. I might have been very interested in the character arcs of, say, Blossom or Radish, but they ended up being barely sketched in. Grue is built up to be an important character, and then when she finally appears we end up learning almost nothing about her. Even the narrator is something of a cypher, with a history referred to a few times but never really explored.
So while I wouldn't say I disliked this book -- in fact, I'd say I had fun reading it -- I'm also not going to be rushing out to pick up the sequels.
On the plus side, I did like being dropped into an unfamiliar world without explanation or context and having to glean what was going on by inference. It's also a very interesting world, with a lot of thought clearly going into the construction of it (although I thought it was interesting that Jane Fletcher explored some of the same general ideas in the Lyremouth Chronicles, to the extent that I wondered if it was an influence on this novel.) I appreciated the lack of gendered pronouns. And the storyline was generally interesting to follow, even if it went a little off the rails in the last few chapters.
On the minus side, the prose is sometimes frankly bad. Unnecessarily convoluted and confusing. There were times it sounded like an over-literal translation from a Latin text. And if the world-building didn't suffer from the author playing his cards so close to his chest, the character development did. I might have been very interested in the character arcs of, say, Blossom or Radish, but they ended up being barely sketched in. Grue is built up to be an important character, and then when she finally appears we end up learning almost nothing about her. Even the narrator is something of a cypher, with a history referred to a few times but never really explored.
So while I wouldn't say I disliked this book -- in fact, I'd say I had fun reading it -- I'm also not going to be rushing out to pick up the sequels.
May 4, 2017
I really wish I could give this book a higher rating. The writer did some interesting things with magic, world building, and gender, but the lack of explanation, and the all around obscurity for the sake of being obscure makes it hard to be more enthusiastic.
The magic system is unique, and far more intriguing than the typical Tolkien-esque knock-offs. It feels like the writer did some deep thinking about what the world would really be like if magic was abundant, and could be used by nearly everyone. What would a world really be like if powerful magic-users were able to shape the universe to suit their whims over thousands of years? It certainly wouldn't look anything like medieval Europe, or any other place that this world has experienced.
Unfortunately, some of the world building didn't work for me because there was little to no explanation about what things were, or even what they looked like. I still have no idea how I was supposed to visualize a lot of the action, and objects that played an important role in the story. What does a Standard look like? I have no idea.
There were several characters that I liked, but many felt interchangeable because I had no idea how to visualize them. I get that the writer was downplaying gender (and that aspect did work for me to a certain extent) but I needed more than just an odd name to remember who these people were.
The plot was fairly straight forward, and there was a lot of fun magical stuff, but the reading experience was more difficult than it needed to be.
The magic system is unique, and far more intriguing than the typical Tolkien-esque knock-offs. It feels like the writer did some deep thinking about what the world would really be like if magic was abundant, and could be used by nearly everyone. What would a world really be like if powerful magic-users were able to shape the universe to suit their whims over thousands of years? It certainly wouldn't look anything like medieval Europe, or any other place that this world has experienced.
Unfortunately, some of the world building didn't work for me because there was little to no explanation about what things were, or even what they looked like. I still have no idea how I was supposed to visualize a lot of the action, and objects that played an important role in the story. What does a Standard look like? I have no idea.
There were several characters that I liked, but many felt interchangeable because I had no idea how to visualize them. I get that the writer was downplaying gender (and that aspect did work for me to a certain extent) but I needed more than just an odd name to remember who these people were.
The plot was fairly straight forward, and there was a lot of fun magical stuff, but the reading experience was more difficult than it needed to be.
April 28, 2022
I love being tossed into the deep end of some unique magi-physics, and this was delicious. (Things become clear! Some become clear in context and some eventually get explained.)
I also love some well-executed stunt writing: I was a goodly chunk into the sample pages before I realized no one had pronouns attached, and I only knew the gender of ONE person! (And later 3, but after being surprised by Halt, I was consciously withholding judgment on two others.) This is one-up on Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun, which just withholds the first person narrator's name for two short books, and I am impressed and pleased. (And it continues for the whole book: the culture/language simply doesn't have much use for gendered pronouns, apparently! There's a reference to "neeves" (plural of gender-neutral niece/nephew, in context), just about at the end of the book.)
My mental ability to keep track of some of the company names gave me a little confusion; pity there's not a Cast chapter at the end. This very likely on me, though.
I also love some well-executed stunt writing: I was a goodly chunk into the sample pages before I realized no one had pronouns attached, and I only knew the gender of ONE person! (And later 3, but after being surprised by Halt, I was consciously withholding judgment on two others.) This is one-up on Tanith Lee's Don't Bite the Sun, which just withholds the first person narrator's name for two short books, and I am impressed and pleased. (And it continues for the whole book: the culture/language simply doesn't have much use for gendered pronouns, apparently! There's a reference to "neeves" (plural of gender-neutral niece/nephew, in context), just about at the end of the book.)
My mental ability to keep track of some of the company names gave me a little confusion; pity there's not a Cast chapter at the end. This very likely on me, though.
May 3, 2022
Saunders, Graydon. The March North. Commonweal No. 1. Tall Woods, 2014.
Graydon Saunders is an independently publishing fantasy writer whose fan base goes back to the days when Usenet was the way fantasy fans and techies talked to one another. The March North combines the typical structure of a military science fiction story in which high-tech forces are attacking a high-tech city, but in this case, the technology is from the iron age, and the weaponry involves wizards casting power spells that work like artillery or other long-distance weapons. The city under attack is an egalitarian surrounded by powerful autocracies, so we know who to root for. Saunders seems interested in how magic would affect siege strategy. There was a lot of action, which I found repetitive. Like his heroes, Saunders is also egalitarian--scrupulously avoiding gendered pronouns. There are a lot of characters, and sometimes their relationships are hard to keep in mind. 3.5 stars for original genre and gender bending.
Graydon Saunders is an independently publishing fantasy writer whose fan base goes back to the days when Usenet was the way fantasy fans and techies talked to one another. The March North combines the typical structure of a military science fiction story in which high-tech forces are attacking a high-tech city, but in this case, the technology is from the iron age, and the weaponry involves wizards casting power spells that work like artillery or other long-distance weapons. The city under attack is an egalitarian surrounded by powerful autocracies, so we know who to root for. Saunders seems interested in how magic would affect siege strategy. There was a lot of action, which I found repetitive. Like his heroes, Saunders is also egalitarian--scrupulously avoiding gendered pronouns. There are a lot of characters, and sometimes their relationships are hard to keep in mind. 3.5 stars for original genre and gender bending.
March 22, 2024
Stuff that is cool about this book:
- It's a hopeful story set in a grimdark world.
- People with immense power levels hang out and interact with mere mortals (Malazan vibes).
- Magic and the way it's integrated in the world is well thought through and very cool.
- Multiple battles of such large scale that the bodies and viscera were described as being piled higher than knee height.
- Egalitarian society while not feeling utopian.
Stuff that's not cool about this book:
- It's a purportedly english language book that isn't written in english. I don't even mean in terms of fantasy names and concepts, I mean syntactically. I consistently had to re-read large swaths of the book to try and figure out what the hell was happening. Luckily I found a read along forum thread which I would turn to after every chapter to make sure I was actually comprehending what was going on. The style of writing is very intentional, but that doesn't make it any less a pain in the ass to read.
- It's a hard book to buy. It's self-published, and the author intentionally has not listed it on Amazon.
- It's a hopeful story set in a grimdark world.
- People with immense power levels hang out and interact with mere mortals (Malazan vibes).
- Magic and the way it's integrated in the world is well thought through and very cool.
- Multiple battles of such large scale that the bodies and viscera were described as being piled higher than knee height.
- Egalitarian society while not feeling utopian.
Stuff that's not cool about this book:
- It's a purportedly english language book that isn't written in english. I don't even mean in terms of fantasy names and concepts, I mean syntactically. I consistently had to re-read large swaths of the book to try and figure out what the hell was happening. Luckily I found a read along forum thread which I would turn to after every chapter to make sure I was actually comprehending what was going on. The style of writing is very intentional, but that doesn't make it any less a pain in the ass to read.
- It's a hard book to buy. It's self-published, and the author intentionally has not listed it on Amazon.
January 9, 2020
Fantastic. Egalitarian, optimistic, humanist fantasy, with military things but that isn't militarist. People trying to build and maintain a society you'd actually want to live in, in a real hellscape of a world (think nuclear post-apocalypse tropes but with magic, and you're in the right vein). It's a challenging read, it's first person, you jump straight in, and have to figure out the world because the characters generally don't stop to explain it, and the writer has a habit of writing long, multi-part sentences that I found myself having to read a couple of times to put together. They're perfectly clear and precise, but complex.
That said, I just really loved it. The world building is excellent, the idea is compelling, and it's got a real Broken Earth trilogy vibe, gritty and harsh and with a very physical feeling magic that feels real, but with a strong vein of pragmatic optimism in it I find utterly charming and refreshing.
That said, I just really loved it. The world building is excellent, the idea is compelling, and it's got a real Broken Earth trilogy vibe, gritty and harsh and with a very physical feeling magic that feels real, but with a strong vein of pragmatic optimism in it I find utterly charming and refreshing.
dropped
September 30, 2024I'm going to be honest: I don't understand how this is rated so highly. No, I don't mean the plot, or the characters, my issue with the book is much simpler: It's unreadable. And not slightly, but utterly goddamn unreadable.
There isn't a single paragraph that doesn't contain bizarre(and frankly, intentionally obtuse) sentence structures, riddled with an absurd density of fictional terms and phrases whose meaning is neither obvious nor explained. The sentences switch context incredibly abruptly, rather than flowing from one to the next naturally, and often contain whole other sentences inside them - one spliced into another - like this.
I don't want to resort to calling a book I dropped this early bad, but I have never, ever - not once - encountered something this painful to read, and that's saying something because the list includes Chinese video games brutally mangled by Google Translate. It eludes me how the author INTENTIONALLY wrote something harder to understand than that.
There isn't a single paragraph that doesn't contain bizarre(and frankly, intentionally obtuse) sentence structures, riddled with an absurd density of fictional terms and phrases whose meaning is neither obvious nor explained. The sentences switch context incredibly abruptly, rather than flowing from one to the next naturally, and often contain whole other sentences inside them - one spliced into another - like this.
I don't want to resort to calling a book I dropped this early bad, but I have never, ever - not once - encountered something this painful to read, and that's saying something because the list includes Chinese video games brutally mangled by Google Translate. It eludes me how the author INTENTIONALLY wrote something harder to understand than that.
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