A Succession of Bad Days – Graydon Saunders

“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.