Safely You Deliver

Commonweal #3

by Graydon Saunders

Egalitarian heroic fantasy. Family, social awkwardness, and a unicorn.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Ebooks

565 pages, ebook

First published April 4, 2016

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeah, that was definitely a Commonweal book is my first and last reaction. We're back to wizard school again, this time focusing mainly on Zora, the least powerful and least militant of the crew from the previous book. Which merely makes her an unbelievably powerful reality bending mage.

The initial problem is that a unicorn shows up and befriends Zora. Unicorns around here are one of several variety of obligate manavores, bred ages ago as part of a bad scheme to make battle-magic compatible cavalry, and they are not friendly and very deadly. This one, exiled, wounded, starving, decides that Zora is alright. Now it's up to her to figure out how to keep it from getting killed, or killing a bunch of people in return. This involves learning the language Unicorn 4, which is a cruel and vicious tongue, and eventually figuring out how to alter the unicorn (named Pelorius, with a bunch of accents I don't care to reproduce), a more human-like alternate for and a friendlier physiology.

There's a bunch of legal and ethical debate about how much a wizard can use magic to alter a creature, how much Pelorius can consent (he can talk, even if he's entirely socially dependent on Zora), and later, whether the two of them can have a romantic relationship, but it's all very clinical. And I have to be honest, I'm not sure how much I believe all of the high and mighty ethics of the Commonweal--more on that later.

There's also some of the usual technical problem solving as well. A failing dam is solved by the simple expedience of reaching back millions of years into the past to fix the entire goddamn landscape. Similarly, when Reems attacks again with a biological weapon, our merry band undoes the disease and death with time-like wibbly wobblies and reaching out and causes the attackers to perish by fire and direct death. Fucking with the Commonweal seems like a bad idea.

The personal drama of the book is whether Zora et al will achieve Independent status, moving much of their mind and physiology out of the physical and into the magical. The more interesting issue is that Parliament points out that even though they're students, the amount of work that the team is doing is enough to completely wreck the economy if accounted for in conventional terms, and that basically whole new branches of economics will have to be set up to manage how they interact with everyone else.

Okay, so back to ethics. The whole point of the Commonweal is that even though there are these nigh-godlike wizards walking around, they do not rule. Though everyone is bound by the Shape of Peace to be honest and not use violence or compulsions to get their way, no one is a slave, and no one goes hungry or unsheltered until everybody starves. There does seem to be a lot of meetings and paperwork, but life is pretty good given the horrific lethality of the landscape. Yet the obliging duty to all is taken very straightforwardly, with only a little criticism. This is no The Dispossessed, with it's trenchant criticism of utopia.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is hints that the whole Commonweal is part of a debate between Halt (spider-god, grandmotherly) and unknown entities comparable to power in Halt about how wizards and mundanes should co-exist.

I'm going to keep reading, but these two books are no The March North.

[Sineala · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is sort of embarrassing, but I rushed to buy this book basically as soon as it came out and then failed to read it for two years on the grounds that, if I read it, it would then be over. I don't really know how to explain what this series is, exactly, because I'm pretty sure most of the words I could come up with would fail to make people want to read it.

This is a direct sequel to A Succession of Bad Days and neither of them are going to make any sense if you don't read the first one first, so go read this series in order. One book of military fantasy and two books of sorcery school, set in an egalitarian fantasy world in which learning to be a sorcerer is sort of like learning to be a civil engineer, but with more ineffability and also unicorns. (This book has a unicorn. I consider that a major plus.) The pace is slow and the diction is the sort of thing you don't usually see in fantasy novels, and I can imagine a lot of people bouncing off this series hard, but I just find it really... relaxing. The author has clearly done a lot of work on the worldbuilding of the Commonweal, and I don't want to say it's unobtrusive because it's kind of impossible not to notice given how thinky everything is, but it's very solid.

Anyway, this book features the sorcerer trainees of the previous book learning how to become even better sorcerers, and there is a lot of discussion of the ethics and philosophy of magic, and I just think it's the best. I cannot guarantee it will be everyone's favorite book but I am very glad the series exists.

Also, unicorns. Did I mention the unicorns? Unicorns!

[Dani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a satisfying conclusion to "A Succession of Bad Days". That's the almost-only useful thing to say in a review of this book. If you read and enjoyed ASoBD and are wondering whether it's worth reading this one, the answer is 'yes!' - and you already know most of what a review might tell you about the milieu and the about the characters introduced in the previous book. If you haven't read ASoBD, read it before you read this. (And read "The March North", which introduces the milieu, before that.)

I loved it, but the writing will not be to all tastes, and if you did not enjoy the earlier book/s you probably won't enjoy this one. It is still more about world-building than about story. (That said, the writing is clean, dense, and often funny, and contributed to reading enjoyment.) The author still makes you work to understand what is happening in the background.

ASoBD introduced a class of student sorcerers in a risky and accelerated course that will see them powerful or dead and takes us through their first year of study. In the background is the Commonweel - a society trying to survive in a world with a quarter-million-year accumulation of bad magic-use decisions. SYD takes us through their last year of study. There are more clues about a larger background: The invasion that was defeated in the first book is part of a pattern of hostile interest directed at the Commonweel.

The Commonweel has existed for a little over five centuries. It is unlikely to have been the first society in a quarter of a million years to try to escape the cycle of bad sorcerous overlords, but if there were others, they're no longer around.

[Betawolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really a conclusion to the Commonweal series, nor, in truth, meaningfully distinct from the second book. I had hoped that Saunders would get over the fixation that produced that prior work, but they seem to be lingering here. Getting to see the collective from the perspective of different characters was something, but not much. The attack that they repel was something else, but again, it is just a single event in the middle of a novel of sequential events. Most unique was the concept of the students coalescing into their Independent identities, but this was a small addition to what came before.

Saunders does seem to have been improving their actual writing, and this book is far less pain to read than the previous two were. What is more, the unicorn-language starts to demonstrate that Saunders is actually starting to control their style, and write deliberately. The problem is that, despite being 400 pages long, this book felt like a novella of side-stories bridging the gap in a series. What is needed, really, is for the second novel to be rewritten by this more learned author, expanded to include the events of this one, and then a final novel with real events and an actual conclusion to be reached. There are hints here, certainly, of what it really means for Halt to have such age predating their involvement in the Commonweal, but this thread must be developed properly if we are to find the result compelling.

[rixx · Rating 3 out of 5]

Similar to the previous book, we get to see the posse from a different point of view. There is a unicorn, and Saunders has a good take on unicorns. It explains the world some more, both the state and the people. I liked it, but I wouldn't have liked to read it as a standalone.

[Bryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This directly follows A Succession of Bad Days and deals with the same characters, but while that book was mostly from Edgar's POV, this one is mostly from Zora's. It is a treat to see what the relationship between Dove & Edgar looks like from the outside (terrifying) and how all of that has developed over time, not to mention getting more information about Blossom & Grue, seeing Halt from a non-entelech POV, etc etc etc. I also really appreciated seeing Zora come into her own -- she's the youngest in the team and unlike the rest of the group in several ways, so watching her really think out her own path towards being an Independent was very satisfying. This is one of those books I will keep rereading endlessly, I suspect, it is just so full of interesting things to think about, although I will need to take long enough breaks that I don't wear it out.

[David Tate · Rating 5 out of 5]

A direct sequel to A Succession of Bad Days, following the same characters from a variety of viewpoints. This is a more difficult read than its predecessors, with more politics, more ethics, and more arcane viewpoints and issues. That said, it's still a fabulous read, exciting and thought-provoking and definitely leaving the reader wanting more.

Also, Zora finally gets to have her time in the limelight, having been somewhat eclipsed by her remarkable classmates in the previous book. That's not a bad thing.

[Thomas Womack · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second half of _A Series of Unfortunate Events_; more numinous scenes, more consideration of what it means to have five friendly wizards in a polity, more contemplation of the power to change history, more truly spectacularly I constrained architect.

[Jeff Youngstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

So very much not the place to start with Saunders.

Go read A Succession of Bad Days first at least. This one is challenging even having read the prior volume(s). Without that context it would be completely incomprehensible.

Which is half the fun.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was too plotless. There were some vague promises of a plot happening in future books but at this point I'm not sure if I believe them.

[Resonant · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you did not read and enjoy "A Succession of Bad Days", do not start with this. Also, the author states that the library is NOT supposed to represent the Bakka Phoenix bookstore, the University of Toronto Robarts Library, or the Canadian Library of Parliament. I do suspect that he was at least inspired by two of them, at least subconsciously.