Recluce Saga and Wheel of time

[purple gelatinous cube o' Doom]

Ok, I'm really not pitting the two series against each other, but a mere observation I've made. It seems to me that even those who don't read fantasy fiction very much are familiar with the Wheel of Time series, and praise it for it's depth, length and complexity among other things. Yet, the Recluce Saga is equally as lengthy (longer by 3 books at the moment), and is just as complex a world, if not more so. Especially with the addition of the latest books that take place outside of Candar and Recluce. Modesitt's style (which is not just contained in the SoR) has a way of really making you feel for, and want to know the characters, more so than any author I've ever read regularly. Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a fan of the Wheel of Time and could never really get into it myself. But, it just seems as if the Wheel of Time gets all this recognition whereas the Saga of Recluce seems largely forgotten and ignored, except for those avid fantasy readers. You may all now discuss.

[Rare Pink Leech]

I'll be honest, I've never heard of the Recluse Saga. As for why The Wheel of Time gets so much attention and Recluse doesn't, it probably just has to do with "marketing", so to speak. The Wheel of Time is obviously a popular series, and has a huge internet following, so it's spread by word of mouth. Recluse obviously hasn't caught on in more widespread popularity, so people who aren't avid fantasy readers are less likely to have heard about it. It's probably just the same as any musical group, television series, or anything else -- some just so happen to be more popular and well-known than others, and it doesn't have anything to do with how good each one is.

[Indon]

Recluce is awesome (Though I prefer the Recluse novels proper over, say, the Fairhaven-oriented ones), but there's one aspect of the series that always irked me.

The order they were written in is not at all their chronological order.

Since I prefer to read books in chronological order, I was quite frustrated by it.

[Tekraen]

I always liked Recluce over Wheel of Time because the books deal with different people and different aspects of the world. There is no one overarching plot (that I've seen, anyway), just the actions of one set of people within them and setting legends in future books.

Wheel of Time? It seems way too overly wordy, taking a thousand when ten will do. But that's my opinion.

[Darken Rahl]

It pains me every time I see someone complaining that WoT is "wordy."

It's a BOOK. That's the POINT.

[Manticorkscrew]

Perhaps. But there is such a thing as being overly verbose.

[Prophaniti]

I like WoT, read it multiple times (usually re-read whenever the next one comes out), and havent heard of Recluce saga. Consider it added to my list of books to read, right after I'm done with the Horus Heresy.

My only complaint with WoT (and this is entirely a matter of opinion, other people thought the exact opposite about the same thing) is that he gave to much detail on HOW the Power worked. Try reading the first 2-3 books and pretend you know nothing about the Source or anything. Whenever Moiraine or anyone channels you get a sense of mystery and knowledge, a sense of truly arcane and deep secrets. I loved that.

Then, further into the series he gave more detail and more explanation on the mechanics of channeling... and sudenly it became a science, with concrete rules and a counter to every move, like a game of chess.

I like my magic in novels to be, well, magical. A few rules are fine, and necessary for it to make sense, but it becomes TOO defined IMO.

[warty goblin]

I have only read one book of the Recluse saga, and liked it, but then I became somewhat... distracted by Discworld so haven't gotten back to it yet. I did enjoy the way that characters were developed and the magic system and setting were different enough to be really interesting. I havn't tried Wheel of Time, since I somehow feel that if a single narrative cannot be told in under 12 books, something needs editing...

As to why Recluse is not as popular, I point to cover illustrations. The WoT books always have very "fantasy" covers, large men with swords hammering on stuff seems to show up alot. The paperback of The Magic of Recluse, the book that I read, showed a coach travelling through a rainstorm. Far less engaging.

[Darken Rahl]

The WoT covers are so close to being good, but they're annoyingly static for the most part, ( This (http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0812550285.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg) being the worst) and rarely match any specific action in the novel. Sweet has skill, but he needs to quit painting boring covers.

[Indon]

My only complaint with WoT (and this is entirely a matter of opinion, other people thought the exact opposite about the same thing) is that he gave to much detail on HOW the Power worked. Try reading the first 2-3 books and pretend you know nothing about the Source or anything. Whenever Moiraine or anyone channels you get a sense of mystery and knowledge, a sense of truly arcane and deep secrets. I loved that.

I'd actually guessed that the Source was some form of super-advanced nano-technology early on in the series. So I never really had that 'sense of mystery'.

I think it explains how the whole system works quite well, including the existence of...


Skynet, AKA Shaitan, AKA the "True Power"

[Darken Rahl]

Keep your smelly sci-fi out of my fantasy.

[Hawriel]

If the books got out more and be more sociable Im sure more peaple would read them.

[Mistborn]

The Recluse books actually do quite well. Lee isn't Tor's best seller, but he's actually rather high up there. It isn't about promotion or publicity, I think--Lee gets plenty of both.

Robert Jordan isn't a good one to use in comparison. He was the number one seller in epic fantasy, with a huge crossover audience that started building years before the first Recluse book even came out.

You can't plan on which authors in publishing will become the super mega bestsellers. You can, however, sell well and consistently by writing good books over a long period of time, and Lee has done that. He's very successful by anyone's calculations, and is a bestseller himself--just not on the scale of Jordan or Goodkind.

(Though, on a side note, I do remember him telling me once that he never anticipated having ‘Jordan’ style sales. “I don’t write the kinds of books that sell those numbers” he said, or something like it. “But I don’t want to. I write what I want.” I suspect what he meant has to do with the continuing characters factor. Yes, there are a lot of Recluse books, but as has been pointed out, they jump time periods and characters very consistently. I think that stops one segment of fantasy readers--who want a large epic with the same characters covering lots of books--from getting into Recluse as much as they have Wheel of Time.)

[Beleriphon]

(Though, on a side note, I do remember him telling me once that he never anticipated having ‘Jordan’ style sales. “I don’t write the kinds of books that sell those numbers” he said, or something like it. “But I don’t want to. I write what I want.” I suspect what he meant has to do with the continuing characters factor. Yes, there are a lot of Recluse books, but as has been pointed out, they jump time periods and characters very consistently. I think that stops one segment of fantasy readers--who want a large epic with the same characters covering lots of books--from getting into Recluse as much as they have Wheel of Time.)

Very, very true. Although I kind of like the links between Recluse and Modesitt's sci-fi series. Those are particularly interesting.

At any rate reading the books in chronological order makes little sense so often they reference, or outright explain, concepts from previous books that are left unexplained, but the story happens to occurs centuries later in the time line. So what you end up with a lot of the information coming at you in weird ways that doesn't seem to make sense until you realize that reading the books in publication order makes more sense.

[purple gelatinous cube o' Doom]

It seems many of you don't (at least that have commented on it), don't particularly care for the non-chronological timeline of the story. This is personally one of the aspects I really like about the series. I like the fact that we don't have all the information about magic and such at the beginning, and that over time, through the exploits of those previous, we learn much, if not everything there is to know about it. Next, I liked the switch from the main characters being order magic based to that of chaos magic. To me it gave things a unique perspective. First, we see chaos magic as the evils of the world, then we see that for order. Yet, one would not exist without the other, which is an idea I really like. I also like the fact that he finally decided to start on stories outside of Candar and Recluce, as I really felt, and still do to an extent, that too little emphasis was placed on the happenings of the rest of the world. I do know that after he finished book 15 in the series, another one in Recluce or Corean Chronicles is not in the forseeable future.

@ warty goblin
If you don't think the covers of the Recluse Saga books are fantasy enough, then you haven't seen a few of the later ones.

[Rare Pink Leech]

As to why Recluse is not as popular, I point to cover illustrations. The WoT books always have very "fantasy" covers, large men with swords hammering on stuff seems to show up alot. The paperback of The Magic of Recluse, the book that I read, showed a coach travelling through a rainstorm. Far less engaging.

Really? I've always hated the Wheel of Time covers. Rarely do they portray an actual scene, and so often the characters are in extremely awkward positions. My two favourites to hate are the covers for The Eye of the World (which mysteriously adds a character to those who are leaving Emond's Field) and Lord of Chaos (which looks like it should be on the cover of a romance novel).