Naomi Novik's Take on a School for Wizardry

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The #Scholomance trilogy is @naominovik's take on a #SchoolForWizardry:

It.

Is.

*Superb*.

Novik takes a belt-sander to all the crumbling tropes left by lesser writers to reveal fresh wood beneath, fashioning something breathtakingly new:https://t.co/3jwSYOgJKG 1/ pic.twitter.com/UBx6Cs3lpY

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on https://t.co/iSBh8sqXw0, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:https://t.co/MLBhvWu7xc 2/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Here's the premise: the wizards of the world live in constant peril from malificaria - the magic monsters that prey on those born with magic, especially the children. In a state of nature, only one in ten wizard kids reaches adulthood. 3/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

So the wizarding world built the Scholomance, a fully automated magical secondary school that exists in the void - a dimension beyond our world. 4/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

The Scholomance is *also* an extremely dangerous place - three quarters of the wizard children who attend will die before graduation - but it is much safer than life on the outside. 5/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

The Scholomance's builders all hail from "enclaves" - magical palaces that have also been built in the void - and the enclave kids are the elites of the school, just as their parents are the elites of the world. 6/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Outside the scholomance, every "indie" wizard dreams of a place in an enclave, where they and their children might find a modicum of safety. 7/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Inside the school, the indie kids suck up to the enclavers for four solid years, in the dim hope that they and their family might earn a place as second-class citizens to the enclaves. 8/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Indeed, the only reason the enclaves allow indie kids to attend the Scholomance is so that they will be servants for their own children, and cannon-fodder to stand between them and the monstrous hordes. 9/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

The Scholomance is a cross between *Lord of the Flies* and *Harry Potter*: an adult-free, highly lethal environment with no adults, where interactions between kids are strictly transactional. 10/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

There is no love, nor honor - only the brutal logic of how much each person can bargain for from the others around them.

By the time I'd read the first couple chapters, I was thinking of it as *Hobbeswarts*, a place where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." 11/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Novik's school for wizards is a place where the supernatural is very definitely "red of tooth and claw."

Enter the protagonist, Galadriel "El" Higgins, whose mother is a legendary indie healer who raised her in a yurt in a Welsh forest commune. 12/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

El's mother graduated from the Scholomance already pregnant (El's father died in the final graduation battle for their year, sacrificing himself to save his pregnant teen girlfriend and their child). 13/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

El isn't just an indie, she's a "loser kid": one of those indies who is looked upon with contempt by the enclavers and unlikely to find a crew who will protect her through her years of schooling. 14/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Let alone the lethal "graduation," where seniors battle their way through a dense cloud of malificaria, who devour fully half of the kids who survive that far.

But El isn't an outcast because she's a weakling with nothing to offer to her social betters. 15/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Far from it: El is, if anything, *too* powerful - so powerful that when she casts even minor workings, they cause major damage. 16/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

While other young wizards are given low-powered defensive spells by the Scholomance, El is handed apocalyptic superweapons that can raze whole nations. 17/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

El does her best to hide all this, but something shines through. She gives off the kind of "evil sorceress" vibes that make her a social pariah. 18/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

That sinister aura, combined with her prickly character, quick to anger and slow to forgive, leaves her isolated through her first two years of school.

And then, as the story starts, El has a run-in with Orion Lake, the golden boy of the ultra-powerful New York City enclave. 19/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Orion is one of the school's best fighters, and he alone among the student body seeks out malificaria to kill, leaping to the defense of weaker kids and demanding nothing in return. 20/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

After Orion defends her, repeatedly, from monsters she was prepared to deal with herself, she treats him to the kind of tongue-lashing that only an evil-sorceress-in-waiting who has spent years on the periphery, cordially loathing the popular kids, can dole out. 21/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

This is the meet-cute that begins El and Orion's journey to graduation and beyond, as they perform a kind of *social* magic trick that has no supernatural component, inadvertently and haltingly bringing *solidarity* to the Scholomance. 22/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

It's a Rousseauvian revolution that could transform the lives of the entire student body - and perhaps the whole wizarding world. 23/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

I first read Novik's fiction last year, devouring her nine-volume #Temeraire series, a retelling of the #NapoleonicWars in a world where dragons are real. 24/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Temeraire books has it all: swashbuckling hand-to-hand combat; grand, sweeping battles; a huge cast of beautifully realized characters; a brilliantly wrought geopolitics, and a through-line that is fantastically *tight*, plotted to a fare-thee-well:https://t.co/3dlRf21lmd 25/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

I neglected the Temeraire books because I am generally not a fan of historical fiction, nor high fantasy, *nor* military stories, but Novik found depths in all three of these forms that I had never imagined, innovating fresh angles that transformed me into a true believer. 26/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Scholomance performs the same trick. Novik's handling of the geopolitics and class warfare of the wizarding world - revealed through the subsequent volumes as she widens the tale's aperture - make JK Rowling's attempts look like they were scrawled in crayon. By a toddler. 27/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

This is true all the way down to the micro-level: Novik's thrilling innovations in high-stakes combat-school battle-tactics make Ender Wiggins look like a piker (and also makes me wonder if there's some intentional wordplay in the rhyming surnames). 28/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

And when it comes to complicating the "chosen one" trope, Novik leaves Rowling and Card so far behind in her dust, they basically disappear. 29/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

As for the cosmic horror of the void and the monsters that it spawns, Novik out-Lovecrafts Lovecraft, in a manner to rival such great post-Lovecraftian subverters as #NKJemisin:https://t.co/ekjwIWn67F 30/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

Novik is part of a longstanding and brilliant tendency in genre that refuses to cede all the best, most engrossing tropes to racist pigs like Lovecraft, warmongers like Card, and bigots like Rowling. 31/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

She wrestles these ideas out of their hands and *works* them, revealing the poverty of those reactionary writers' shriveled imaginations.

I read Scholomance as audiobooks, listening to @AnishaDadia's superb narration as I did my physiotherapy laps in the pool each day: 32/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023

https://t.co/9hRAvAkpDl

I was delighted to discover #DRM-free editions on @librofm that would play on my cheapo underwater MP3 player:https://t.co/gXZBudbPhf

When I finished the final book yesterday, I literally gasped aloud. 33/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 29, 2023