What do You think about Colors Of Chaos (2000)?
I like Colors of Chaos only marginally less than The White Order (although I do like it less.) It's much broader in scope, as the coming-of-age story turns into a more traditional clawing-up-the-heirarchy story. Modesitt does politics and intrigue tolerably well, although his villains are always a little nihilistic for me, and this is one of his better efforts in that direction.The real interest in this book is that it's a direct companion to The Magic Engineer - same timeframe, same events, told from the perspective of the villains, more or less. While it doesn't exactly flip any of the main moral assumptions - the horrible acts are still horrible, even when their motivations are clearer, and the earlier book made just as much of the ends-or-means quandary the "good guys" are in - it does provide a much broader perspective than the earlier book, which was told from a person with basically a household-level view. Cerryl, the main character of this one, is at a senior officer/regional governor level, and his broader perspective adds quite a bit.I'm not entirely satisfied, in the end, with the degree of moral relativism - I think making Cerryl "grey" sort of undercut the whole theory that the two sides are pretty equal - and I am always a little disturbed by the rather casual attitude towards human life a lot of the Recluce lead characters have, but this is a strong finish to an interesting exercise.
—Jeremy Preacher
The continuing story of Cerryl has gotten alot more interesting, and indepth. Following his beginning not nearly as interesting as it got with when he started having more power and choices at his disposal. Plus seeing the other side of the story from Dorrin was pretty cool. Still don't like the White side of chaos because of the way most of them twist things, and not to mention fairhaven is nothing but ordered and structured yet they just ignore that aspect of the city lol. Anyways a good continuation of the series but not enough to make it 5 stars for me
—Gordon
