- Parahexavoctal
- Oct 10, 2004
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I AM NOT BEING PAID TO CORRECT OTHER PEOPLE'S POSTS! DONKEY!!
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I still have the first page of the old thread, so (with permission from Hieronymous) I'm reposting its contents here. (There was one mention of a detail that might have come from the Group, but then a correction that this was in the published text.)
Strategic Tea posted:
Yay, a Commonweal thread!
I think one of the best succinct summaries of the books (by someone in the SFF thread I think) is - feeling patriotic for a country that doesn't exist.
Peace Behind Us 
eke out posted:
on my reread i just got through the part in book 2 where Dove explains why they joined the Line and imo that section hit just as hard the second time through
you go most of the book assuming that most of Dove's issues must be related to losing their troops/partner on the March North but turns out that was practically a good time by comparison
Happiness Commando posted:
to contribute, I think the biggest problem with the books is Graydon's prose style, which is terse to the point of impenetrable at best.
All the same, I love 'em.
eke out posted:
I noticed the big shift even more this time around of going from the Captain-centered 1 to Edgar's head in book 2. 2's conversational and stream of consciousness at times and way less weird writing as a whole, the things that're confusing are the things Edgar's confused about.
In retrospect it's funny how Edgar is basically the archetypical audience insert -- they're not from here, they're learning a new culture and a new job and how people like them exist in this world -- but the audience doesn't get them until book 2. While in Book 1 we're almost entirely centered around one of the least normal people in the entire setting (in several distinct ways lol) who knows a million things that they don't really care to explain to the reader.
edit: for commonweal-accurate pronouns
Happiness Commando posted:
Yeah, I've come around to that opinion as well. I used to not like how all the characters spoke in exactly the same voice of stumbling-over-concepts-parenthetically-terse-vagueness, but after a couple retreads of the second book, I realized slowly that it was all because everything was being filtered through Edgar. And then the polycule one mind thing handwaves the rest of it away for the rest of them.
Kalman posted:
FWIW, from the SF&F thread a post claimed that Laurel defeated Halt. But that’s not correct.
Careful reading of book 4 makes clear that whole much of the Commonweal - including Edgar - believes that to be true, it isn’t. Blossom says that Laurel defeated the Empress; 30 years later, Halt showed up. Halt isn’t the Empress - they’re two distinct manifestations of one larger metaphysical being. Either no one at the Founding of the Commonweal had enough sorcerous talent to tell the difference or else they were willing to ignore it because they needed sorcerers that badly.
Danhenge posted:
I think it's largely that the truth isn't really more comfortable than the misunderstanding for most inhabitants of the Commonweal, so there's nothing gained by correcting the record.
Happiness Commando posted:
Larry Parrish in the general SFF thread posted:
I'm a little shaky on this, but, the way I thought of it is kind of simple. Internal power users are doing what I would call real-rear end magic. They start out doing esoteric, impossible bullshit.
Our friends in the round house start out doing stuff that, while the energy source is impossible, is entirely within and explained by physics (well, maybe not the poo poo with the temporal shifts and stuff. You know what I mean). They're using magic to change gravity, not using magic to make stuff float. It's a subtle difference. Anyway, supposedly these differences between internal/external use fall away. Once someone is fully sorcerous, there is no longer any difference to the caster. But even the precise poo poo they're doing early on when making the lights and stuff is not magically precise. They're providing energy for those fancy artificial emeralds to form via chemical process, not transmuting matter themselves or making it out of nothing.
Idk for this one either, really. You might be right, and that it just got away from Saunders. But Halt is endlessly ancient and powerful, but she's also just one shard of her former self, squeezed into The Peace, wasting a lot of power just to make herself able to interact with regular people. She needs to be able to strip electrical wires and all she has is a hammer with the mass of a moon. All of the old Short List sorcerors are this way, supposedly, or were never very strong in the first place and are just unendingly durable.
Blossom has sort of the same problem, on a smaller scale. She's really strong and talented, but her 'ascension' was flawed and she has trouble until the Round House crew is able to intermesh with her and help her out.
Now you could read that as handwaving previous stuff, and it might even be right, but that's not how I took it.
Sure, there's a lot of handwaving (Zora decided that making life should be easy so it is, Minecraft-style chemistry is just easy because Graydon says so, etc), but I don't think that looking at it as a standardized difference in conceptual outlooks is useful for a critical evaluation of this self-published niche-rear end fantasy series.
Benagain posted:
[Kalman's post about Laurel defeating Halt was me I think, and I need to reread on that in book 4 but in 2 wake mentions the time smearing trick would freak out high level sorcerers since that's what Laurel used on them and I though they at least explicitly called out halt in that statement.
Happiness Commando posted:
You're remembering two passages in one. When Edgar does the time smear, Wake says 'that won't scare anyone but The Twelve'. Later, Halt says 'What Edgar did with time to the metabolism of weeds, Laurel did something very much like that to the minds of those overcome. '
eke out posted:
Yeah, this. Halt seems happy to encourage misconceptions about her background.
Happiness Commando posted:
And in 3 after going to the ziggurat, Edgar realizes that Wake is doing something like Pascal's Wager with the peace, where he abides by it out of prudence, vs Halt, who full on believes in the peace. Wake affirms that telepathically.
And then also in 3, Zora (?) gets Halt to entertain the interpretation that the Commonweal is actually Halt's tool in a big, slow fight between old powerful wizards
Halt definitely didn't submit to Laurel.
Kalman posted:
Honestly, as someone who genuinely likes these books, I would agree that the idea is better than the actuality and that I put up with the writing to get to the ideas.
Benagain posted:
Wake's another one where he was a literal evil god and wound up as a refugee for perspective on how lovely it is outside the commonweal.
Anyone else have guesses for the rough location on our map of the commonweal? I think south america, more towards the mountains that feed the Amazon.
Happiness Commando posted:
their calendar system is pre-revolutionary French, or something like that, and Wake is reported to have crossed "the equatorial sea" to get to the Commonweal. I think he drinks hot chocolate at one point, and his food contains pepper oils implying Mesoamerica
Polikarpov posted:
Read this whole series and love how obtuse it is. I didn't realize that The Captain wasn't human until like midway through book 2. I enjoy careful reading so it's nice to be rewarded with comprehension instead of just told.
Listening to Blossom  about double hot red shot must be terrifying.
Kestral posted:
Happiness Commando posted:
The polycule is forced to grow as quickly as they can, so they can not explode and then spend the next hundreds of years come into the fullness of their fine-grained controls.
Which is weird, because they seem to have all the fine-grained control you could want, considering they're manipulating individual atoms and turning wooden mugs back into the original living trees. If that's not fine-grained control, I'd love to know what is.
Actually, that sums up a lot of my gripes with books 2 and 3: I'd like to have seen something that was difficult for them. I swear at least a third of the chapters have something to the effect of, "it really was easy," or "it should have been difficult, but it wasn't!" They're supposed to be growing into these terrifyingly powerful sorcerers, okay, I'm into that premise, but show us where their path of growth is supposed to be too, and what distinguishes their external style from everyone else's internal style other than raw Goku-over-9000 stuff.
ulmont posted:
Happiness Commando posted:
their calendar system is pre-revolutionary French, or something like that, and Wake is reported to have crossed "the equatorial sea" to get to the Commonweal. I think he drinks hot chocolate at one point, and his food contains pepper oils implying Mesoamerica
cultureulterior posted:
These are amazingly great books, but in the third+ books I miss the amazing inventiveness of new wierd stuff, like Rust's lovecraftean summonings.
I'm also a bit disappointed that there's so much information about what's happening with the Neighbors being kept from the readers in the later books.
benagain posted:
the calendar's revolutionary french but I'd swear there's a comment in the second or third book that puts them south of the equator and coffee could be grown within the territory of the larger commonweal.
fritz posted:
Yeah there's a few mentions of things that only grow in the much-warmer first commonweal further north, coffee's one of them, mango's another.
eke out posted:
i just assume the revolutionary calendar is an artifact of the "translation" notion common in fantasy, meant to convey an idea not tell us it is literally descended from revolutionary france as this world is literally hundreds of thousands of years after the creation of the magic system that destroyed it quite thoroughly
Happiness Commando[/quote posted:
Oh right. Blossom grew up in the City of Peace, where citrus fruits grow.
Ulmont posted:
You can see from the text that there are at least three sources of language: Middle English (wapentake), Greek (Pelorios), and I think there’s a French one I’m forgetting, representing a number of origin cultures (and species) that have melded.
Fritz posted:
Creeks are Greek, Typicals are French, Regulars are Middle English, Graul are Norse.
grassy gnoll posted:
I enjoyed the first book, while the second was like pulling teeth. Before I attempt the third, does Edgar ever learn to parse their thoughts out in complete sentences? And does the fragmentary narration continue into book four?
Happiness Commando posted:
You get less of Edgar in book 3, and I don't remember the fragmented narration at all in 4
eke out posted:
edgar levels decrease precipitously with each book following 2
Kestral posted:
Book 3 is easier and clearer than book 2, especially since Edgar is not the main POV character, but there are definitely places where the poor comma gets a workout.
The fragmentary narration ends after book 3: Under One Banner is written in a completely different style, like an even more intelligible version of The March North with a lot of third-person perspective that makes it easier to figure out what the hell is going on. Not sure what book 5 is like, haven't gotten there yet, but UOB is great.
Did we ever find out what exactly the Hard Road is in books 1-4? Wondering if that's something I haven't gotten to yet (later parts of book 4, or book 5), or if I've missed something, or if it's still a mystery.
Danhenge posted:
Still a mystery. I assume it's something like a highway (the "hard" part) with some sort of magical enhancement for quick movement over long distances like the banners. But it could also have been hard to make, or made by the Independent Hard or whatever.
eke out posted:
i think it's also, confusingly, a metonym for the conquest itself? but i could be misremembering
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Jul 2, 2022 02:27
