"CYADOR'S HEIRS: Saga of Recluce, Vol. 17 of 17," by L.E. Modesitt Jr., Tor Books, $27.99, 512 pages (f)
All stories, in their finality and no matter the medium, must prove their mettle against the question "Why do I exist?" The response comes as a compelling idea, engrossing characters, driving narrative structure or meaningful emotional engineering, or any combination thereof. A lack of any such response constitutes a failure to answer this fundamental question of existence, which is the situation in which Utahn L.E. Modesitt Jr.’s "Cyador’s Heirs" finds itself.
For all its talk of sabers and battle axes, the novel desperately needed an editor armed with just such a tool.
"Cyador’s Heirs" is the latest in Modesitt’s Saga of Recluce series, but fortunately the other 16 books in the saga only provide a detailed backstory and "Heirs" can be read as a standalone with the various set pieces of the Recluce setting falling into place.
However, this latest offering offers nothing new by way of setting or premise and instead rehashes previous concepts, many of which come from Modesitt’s own back catalog. Its story is one at home only in the driest of history texts, and its characters are as developed as cinderblocks with names.
For the first half of the novel, the only conflict can be summed up as “sometimes my brother is a little meaner than he maybe could be.” Even that conflict soon disappears as the protagonist goes into training for several hundred pages. This excessive page count spent on digging ditches and sparring is somewhat calming and vaguely satisfying in the same way as watching someone else grind, level by level, through an online video game.
There's no real conflict whatsoever for more than two-thirds of the novel, and even then the entire narrative premise is "There's a war." When that source of conflict does finally appear in the form of an enemy army, it unceasingly marches forward with all the intellectual prowess and emotional complexity of a glacier.
All this coalesced into 500 pages that provoke no emotional involvement from the reader except impatience and frustration. Maybe there are devoted Modesitt fans who will find satisfaction in "Cyador’s Heirs," but this newest novel retreads the “Protagonist discovers his skills through training” path that saturates the Saga of Recluce series, and those new to Modesitt’s rich fantasy universe deserve and can easily find a better introduction to the author’s catalog.
"Cyador's Heirs" includes warfare and thinly veiled sexual references.
Modesitt will be releasing a sequel later this year, but as this volume has more than 300 pages that should have been edited away, the two books could have easily been one and been the better for it. Chronicling a war with no character involvement is basically playing the board game Risk, but Risk is shorter, and plastic makes for better characters.