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A Succession of Bad Days

(Commonweal)

Graydon Saunders

4.38 · Rating details · 80 ratings · 20 reviews

Egalitarian heroic fantasy. Experimental magical pedagogy, non-Euclidean ancestry, and some sort of horror from beyond the world.

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ebook, 529 pages

Published May 29th 2015 by Tall Woods Books

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Jun 19, 2015 Damien Neil rated it it was amazing

There are so many reasons I could give why this is not a good book: There's no plot to speak of--things happen, and then it ends. There's no conflict to speak of until the last chapter. Most of the book consists of detailed descriptions of civil engineering projects and the magical techniques used for them. The characters are ludicrously overpowered special snowflakes. The language is nigh-impenetrable, and the innocent comma is tortured beyond all reason.

But you know what? To hell a There are so many reasons I could give why this is not a good book: There's no plot to speak of--things happen, and then it ends. There's no conflict to speak of until the last chapter. Most of the book consists of detailed descriptions of civil engineering projects and the magical techniques used for them. The characters are ludicrously overpowered special snowflakes. The language is nigh-impenetrable, and the innocent comma is tortured beyond all reason.

But you know what? To hell all that. I loved it.

This is a story about where legendary sorcerers come from. Five young people (ages range from late teens to early thirties) with magical talent take part in a highly experimental training program. Talent is hazardous; absent training, none of them are expected to live to see fifty. Traditional training, which runs along the lines of "spend several years sweeping floors and learning control before moving on to lighting candles", has a roughly fifty percent survival rate. Their program, in contrast, starts with completely reconstructing a square mile or so of geography and scales up rapidly from there.

Most of them start out as reasonably normal people. None of them end that way. The story is about how we get from four kids and one respected military veteran to "there came a day when the Goddess of Destruction came to Morning Vale, bringing Death and Strange Mayhem along behind."

Along the way, there's civil engineering. The first third of the book (and this is not a short book) is occupied with the construction of a house. Great attention is paid to foundations, drainage, plumbing, HVAC, and other details that while vitally important to architects rarely play a significant role in fictional entertainment. There's a lot of detail about the magical techniques used: altering reality to get better bedrock, negotiating with fire elementals to build the structure, the proper use of magical gates in plumbing systems, and so forth. As David Weber is to military conflict in space, so is this book to magical engineering projects. This will not be to everyone's taste.

There's a line in the book that describes itself perfectly: "Like a fairy-tale lost in a civil engineering manual."

What saves it for me is the characters. There are some returning favorites from the previous book--I'm particularly fond of Halt, eons-old immortal sorceress, dread spider god, breeder of battle sheep, ceaseless knitter, and wearer of shapeless purple hats. The students introduced here are also a joy. Edgar, our narrator, who goes from "nice kid, but a bit slow" to "scion of the spider god". Chloris, kind and dutiful, terrifying necromancer. I loved hanging out with these people, their camaraderie, and their path to reconciling themselves with what they're becoming.

It's particularly refreshing how sane everyone is. This is Hogwarts without the Slytherins. Not just in the sense that the villains aren't conveniently labeled, but in that there are no villains at all. People get along. They sometimes disagree about methods, but not about goals. Some of the students would really rather be doing something else with their life than turning into a demigod, but none want to run off and become a dark lord or skip class to play Quidditch.

As I said, I loved it. I can't wait for the next book, and I hope Saunders keeps this up for a good long time to come. ...more

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Jul 07, 2015 FeepingCreature rated it it was amazing

This book lies at the intersection of three topics of influence.

The first is Magic, but not the kind of magic that works despite physics saying that it should. This is magic that is clearly deeply integrated in the physical laws of their world, and works with them instead of against them. Transhumanists will also appreciate the ideas set forth in the book - to them, I can sell this book in one sentence: part of the process of becoming a mage is that you literally upload your brain in ...more

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Feb 19, 2016 Sineala rated it it was amazing

Shelves: e-books, fiction, fantasy

Somehow I missed hearing that a sequel to The March North had come out until about last month, and then I had to rush to Google Books to buy it. And then it took me about a month to actually finish it, because (a) it is really good, (b) it is really dense, and (c) I didn't want it to be over. I really liked the first book, and this is... even better.

I seem to have a fondness for the kinds of books that get described as "this will probably be someone's favorite book, but not yours," i ...more

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May 31, 2015 Brian rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Brian by: Christopher

A Succession of Bad Days shares some characters and the setting with The March North, and picks up, timeline-wise, not long after the end of the previous book. Both books are reasonably self-contained and stand on their own, but reading in publication order seems advisable (a number of things will be easier to understand and more meaningful that way).

This is a (to borrow the phrase the author's blog) "go-to-sorcerer-school" book, but it manages to avoid retreading tired old ground in a number ...more

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Feb 14, 2016 Philonous rated it it was ok

It's a bit sad. There's so much potential, so much to love; the characters are likeable and interesting, the world-building is fantastic. there's a real sense of immersion and wonder. But the book just doesn't _go_ anywhere with it. The characters become students, learn, become stronger. And then it ends. No conflict to speak of, no actual plot. No opportunity for the characters to prove themselves. No hurdles to overcome or hard decisions to make. Everything is just handed to them, including th ...more

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Dec 15, 2015 David Tate rated it it was amazing

It's hard to explain exactly why I love this book so much.

I have been reading fantasy for 40+ years now. I have read any number of "learning to be a mage" stories, from James Schmitz to Patricia McKillip to Caroline Stevermer to Anne McCaffrey to Susan Cooper to P. C. Hodgell to Diana Wynne Jones to J. K. Rowling. This one is special. I liked The March North a lot; I really loved A Succession of Bad Days.

My high school English teacher would classify this one as "Man against nature", b It's hard to explain exactly why I love this book so much.

I have been reading fantasy for 40+ years now. I have read any number of "learning to be a mage" stories, from James Schmitz to Patricia McKillip to Caroline Stevermer to Anne McCaffrey to Susan Cooper to P. C. Hodgell to Diana Wynne Jones to J. K. Rowling. This one is special. I liked The March North a lot; I really loved A Succession of Bad Days.

My high school English teacher would classify this one as "Man against nature", but that's too simplistic. Yes, the primary conflict is that our group of youngish protagonists will surely die, through no fault of their own, without extraordinary intervention (and luck) on the part of the Independent mages of the Second Commonweal. The setting, though -- the setting makes it so much more. My English teacher didn't have a category for "some people against the rest of society for their own good, with nature fighting the whole thing".

Imagine that recorded history goes back tens of thousands of years, perhaps more. And it consists almost entirely of "a succession of bad days", in which one megalomaniac sorcerer after another establishes a god-king autocracy and enslaves (and alters) the populace. Until one unlikely sorcerer figures out a way to break the cycle, at least locally. The result is The Commonweal -- a communist polity in which all work for the common good, including the powerful Independent sorcerers. Or, at least, those who chose to submit to the new system, rather than be destroyed or banished.

This is the context in which our protagonists are attempting to become mighty wizards. (They have no choice; if they fail to train their talents, they will surely fry their own brains accidentally.) Even if they succeed at wizardry, they might still fail at social integration, and be destroyed. In a society where claims of special privilege are anathema, godlike powers are an uncomfortable fit at best.

None of this touches on the amazing coolness of the learning journey of the students, the thoughtful elaboration of the magical system, the astonishing originality of the political structure, the vast detail of civil engineering feats, the slowly revealed depth of history, the even slower discovery of how familiar words don't mean quite what you thought they did, and the distinct and moving personal quirks of the students. Oh, and the dozens of individual sentences that had me snorting or laughing out loud as I read. And I haven't even mentioned the biggest plot twist of all regarding our viewpoint character; you can have that one for free when you read it. ...more

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Jan 22, 2017 Dani rated it it was amazing

"For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like". I loved it, but my advice to friends has been to read the prequel ("The March North", which is also shorter and more-accessible), and if they enjoy it, they will enjoy this book considerably more. If they didn't enjoy it, well, this may not be the sort of thing they like.

The word-building is special. Take our world, add magic, and let a quarter of a million years go by. The received wisdom in this world is "For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like". I loved it, but my advice to friends has been to read the prequel ("The March North", which is also shorter and more-accessible), and if they enjoy it, they will enjoy this book considerably more. If they didn't enjoy it, well, this may not be the sort of thing they like.

The word-building is special. Take our world, add magic, and let a quarter of a million years go by. The received wisdom in this world is that the average Dark Overlord lasts a century or two before being replaced or getting too cocky or just slipping on a banana peel. That's a lot of Dark Overlords, and most of them had rotten judgment about the ecological consequences of unleashing hordes of monsters or dark enchantments or plagues or demons. After a quarter of a million years of this, human life is precarious. Scientific understanding is at least as advanced as ours (there are pragmatic restrictions on technology, somewhat balanced by availability of non-sorcerer-level magic), but populations are low, and next year's harvest is not a sure thing. ('Weeding' is the responsibility of elite combat teams.)

The plot follows a team of five student sorcerers. As a story, it shouldn't work - hundreds of pages of lovingly-detailed descriptions of building and excavating and synthesizing - but it does. The novel is centered on the student sorcerers, but what makes it work is our peripheral view of the world in which the novel is embedded. The reader has to work for it. Said periphery is very dense, but the world-building stays on the periphery because the narrator takes it for granted, or doesn't notice it. (This is a welcome change from the traditional twenty-page expositions.)

There are several levels of world-building. There is the picture-by-implication of a world that's had too much time for too many irresponsible magicians. There is the Commonweel - a society that is trying to survive without sorcerous overlords - and does not have good odds of succeeding. There is a bigger picture - barely visible here, more visible in the third book, "Safely You Deliver". The bigger picture *should* be barely visible: From the narrator's viewpoint even the second level, with the Commonweel under attack from monsters in one direction and from enemy sorcerers in another direction, is a background to the immediate problems of getting out of sorcerous training alive.

...more

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Aug 26, 2017 Scott Belisle rated it really liked it

I can see where some of the complaints about plot (or lack of plot) came from. This is definitely not a book for everyone. It is obscurely written, lacking almost entirely in world-building outside of that which grows naturally from the the dialogue and scenes, and for some people might be boring to boot. I think there's a review that describes it as something like a series of civil engineering projects, with magic!

And, well, they're not wrong. But there's also philosophy here, about ...more

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Nov 06, 2015 Jeff Youngstrom rated it it was amazing

In large part, this is a 600-page training montage as a team of apprentice sorcerer engineers begin to learn the skills of their trade. And it is So. Much. Fun.

It's also a deep philosophical examination of the utopian society Saunders has built where coercion and other forms of inter-personal violence are absolutely forbidden.

Pure catnip.

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Jun 08, 2015 cultureulterior - rated it it was amazing

Shelves: the-best, learning-magic, fascinating-engineering

Another fantastic book by Graydon Saunders, about learning magic and high concept civil engineering.

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Sep 27, 2017 Betawolf rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, fiction

I eventually settled on four stars for the adventurous and partially-intentionally challenging nature of the book as a whole. Unlike _The March North_, though, where I was tending towards five stars, this was nearly a three.

The plot is basically nonexistent. Or it's a really extreme bildungsroman, I can't quite make my mind up. The majority of events are the group of sorcerer-apprentices moving around the landscape, or moving the landscape around. Sometimes they manipulate probabilit I eventually settled on four stars for the adventurous and partially-intentionally challenging nature of the book as a whole. Unlike _The March North_, though, where I was tending towards five stars, this was nearly a three.

The plot is basically nonexistent. Or it's a really extreme bildungsroman, I can't quite make my mind up. The majority of events are the group of sorcerer-apprentices moving around the landscape, or moving the landscape around. Sometimes they manipulate probability in an area. Sometimes they kill weeds. It's a bunch of problem-solving stuff. Which would be a fantastic, if niche, as something to watch. But the system they use to solve problems isn't a system. It's not even principles of a system. The entire conceit of the learning process is that the apprentices are _making up the rules_ at the same time as they are learning the rules. This is certainly... ethereal, and very defiantly magical, but doesn't really _work_ as backdrop when you're faced with 'how do we solve this problem' setups. You can't follow their process -- the bit of those sorts of setups that make them _fun_ -- because they have no predictable process. At one point the main character just starts telling things to do things in a command-language never mentioned before. That's not even the least of it.

Anyway, the development of the characters is somewhat of a stand-in for, well, plot. The characters are all a little sickly-sweet and self-effacing and self-sacrificing, which combines with their continually-reinforced general awesomeness to become a little tiresome. I think the idea is that you enjoy watching them win, much like the competence parts of _The March North_, but again the lack of any sort of handle on their limitations makes this hard. The things they do are still interesting, but it's like watching Dumbledore do stage magic.

All of that is to be wrapped in a caveat of 'so far as I understand the text'. Because, okay, Saunders has managed to get the actual structure of individual sentences down into some kind of consistent and mortally-comprehensible scheme. That is certainly a point of improvement over _The March North_ -- each sentence on its own is quite readable. Stringing them together, however, still produces horrible headaches at times. The entire book, or near enough, seems to be a sort of stream of consciousness. That doesn't sound so bad, except when you realise that much of the book contains long, involved descriptions of technical operations and changes to structures that the character -- let alone the reader -- necessarily understands very little about. These are also presented as a stream of consciousness, mostly without any explanation of the intent or significance. These are meshed in with ongoing, rambling conversations between the characters, wherein you have to really mine out the subtext to form the connection between apparently nonsequitorial utterances being made by speakers that mostly just read each others' minds.

All of which makes for a challenging read. To make sure you're not falling asleep, Saunders throws in the usual smattering of obscure (as well as fantastical) terminology, and will toss you into the section where the apprentices build a canal by assuming that you already have a solid background in hydrology and geological surveying, and are perfectly comfortable holding in your head the vaguely-described geography of an area covering multiple lakes, ridges, creeks and streams whilst following a stream of consciousness about magically carving up a canal system that includes magic teleportation gates (which, I don't know why those can't stand in for the entire canal system).

Finally, you can never quite trust that what you're reading is just hard. There were a few obvious errors ('for awhile') which grated, but not as much as the occasional befuddling passages which turned out to be befuddling because under no reading, including archaic definitions, did they actually contain sense, and there were actually some dropped or mis-corrected words. It's tough when you have to dredge a passage or exchange for the intent, it's tougher when you find that it was just an error.

This was a struggle. I wanted to like the book. I think I did, on balance, for entirely niche reasons. I hope nobody, including Saunders, writes another book like this.
...more

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May 30, 2018 Nick Fagerlund rated it really liked it

(Reviewed as a unit with Safely You Deliver.)

Sequels to The March North, with a mostly different cast. (A secondary character from the first book is one of the five or six protagonists here.) Extremely odd, and pretty good.

There might be more of these on the way, but they aren't heavy on series-scope plotting, so it's not your classic "why'd you tell me to read this unfinished series (you fucker)" experience. Each book has a more or less complete plot of its own... sort of.
...more

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Jun 02, 2019 Jesse C rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019

My favorite of his books, so far. Yes, there is an almost hundred page digression into the engineering aspects of canal building in the middle of the books. It is still fantastic.

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Jan 14, 2016 Todd rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Fans of Glen Cook, Gene Wolfe, Lev Weinstein

This is not a fast read of a book. The writing is extremely convoluted at times, written in a very informal, stream-of-consciousness/colloquial manner. This is not a plot-driven book. There are maybe three(?) "action" scenes (action-like, really). This book is primarily about world-building (excellent magic system, very interesting culture and government, even the terrain is interesting), about character, about what it means to be a person (vs. human) and a useful part of society, and what socie ...more

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Oct 23, 2016 Walter Underwood rated it it was ok

I don't understand why this book was written. It doesn't do anything and it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe he needs it for the next book, but if so, it should have been a novella.

Perhaps is should have been called "A Succession of Chapters". There is no real plot. No real character development. One big victory is things ending up the same as they were. It is kind of interesting but not really rewarding. You learn a lot more about the history of the place.

There is a big reveal ...more

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Aug 01, 2016 Dan rated it really liked it

Shelves: indie

The author's unique terse-bordering-on-cryptic narrative meets a "protagonist learns to use magic, let's do worldbuilding" story. In the middle there's a great deal of magic civil engineering and a smaller amount of magic legal theory. The "protagonist learns to use magic" theme has been done to death; the author has some ways to make it original and only partially succeeds.

This held my attention pretty well, for the most part, except for some bits where it got more than usually cryp ...more

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Mar 13, 2016 Malcolm Rowe rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy

This book is fantastic.

The plot here is as light as the text is dense: a workmanlike portrayal of students learning to become sorcerers. The book cares more about showing us the characters themselves and the world-building—in some cases, incredibly detailed world-building by the characters themselves—than it does about giving us an overarching plot token to drive the action forwards, but this doesn't take away from the joy of reading it: it's fantastic fantasy.

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Oct 04, 2018 C Badmin rated it really liked it

Slice of life post-post-post-post-apocalyptic communist pastoral wizards.

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Peter Scully rated it really liked it
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Perspeculative rated it it was amazing
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Billy Cowan rated it it was ok
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Mar 25, 2019 Vasil Kolev marked it as never-finished

I can't finish this, as much as I try. The language thing was ok for one book, but in this one it's just annoying and muddling, and the book gets more and more boring with every page. Basically the title describes the time spent reading it.

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