Sufficiently Advanced Magic

I was looking for a follow up to DCC (better known as Dungeon Crawler Carl) I overheard Cybil recommend this novel as having a world with a well-imagined magic system so I gave it a shot on audible so I could listen to it and fill time with low stakes; that’s my excuse anyways. And it did live up to having a world with a well imagined magic system.

Our protagonist in Coren Cadence an 18-yo? of noble birth and the narrative picks up with him in a tower/dungeon test which is meant to determine his magic attunement (aka specialty). But somehow his adventure takes a weird left turn and he winds up encountering “Katashi” the “Visage of Valor” who is in a battle with a very powerful sorceror named Keras. Anyway he is thereby involved in some sort of political intrigue. He winds up acquiring a magic book and a magic sword after escaping the dungeon and acquiring his attunement sigil which, he is told, is “Enchantment”.

The world has towers which are built by the ruling deities and people gain power,religio-political status and treasure by climbing the towers. Apparently all technology in the world is magical, for example at one point a new magical car is described. The world is semi-feudal in that only nobles and/or the very wealthy can train to be a sorcerer. It would be interesting if there were at least one non-magical “serf” who could provide some perspective.

After a month of downtime he goes off to a magic school which is somewhere between a military academy and Hogwart’s. Coren’s specialty is creating magic items that he can keep for himself or sell. And Coren’s journey to understand how to use mana and create items with the help of Professor Orden is one of the fun subplots of the book.

Anyway all this world building is fine and dandy even if it is sorta clunky and directly stolen from D&D. The real problems are first that the characters are developed but not really believable the book is told first person by Coren, we know that his brother Tristan has been missing for five years and that Coren is more or less asexual and somewhat autistic (which is coded as “he doesn’t like to be touched”) He is also a disappointment to his father but we don’t understand why he is a disappointment. He and his sister are the most well developed characters but they still seem more like puppets than humans.

The next big problem is that he puts the characters into dungeons and the dungeons are not very creative, at least compared to DCC (where each level has a theme and factions and substories involving the room inhabitants). The rooms all seem to have keys, trap doors or monsters stolen from D&D which is great if you are a twelve year old in 1978 rolling weird dice, but the action around solving these problems is tedious to read/hear about.

The third big problem is that the overall political story arc is confusing and never really resolved in the book. Luckily there are five more volumes according to amazon that I will not be reading in order to understand the intrigue.