A Wizard in Absentia

My first Stasheff book. Probably not the best place to start, but eh!

Magnus Gallowglass is the son if Rod Gallowglass from the Warlock series. In this adventure, Magnus is visiting Maxima, and asteroid owned by family that he is very much estranged from. He finds it a cloying place, too many insincere nobles everywhere, and then there's an inheritance issue that he has to resolve.

In the second half of the book we see Magnus following in his father's footsteps (or so it seems, since I haven't read any books with Rod at the time of this writing). He joins a team incognito that is bent on helping oppressed people establish democracies on planets. This novel's planet is Taxhaven, where rich people a few hundred years ago established a feudal serf-based system that devolved into slavery. Magnus & co. work to right the wrongs instituted by these peoples' descendants.

I felt like a lot of things happened too quickly, but it's a very fun and readable story. The characters don't have much depth and there's little time taken in building their personalities, aside from Magnus. Magnus's problems with women was kind of annoying to read, but I suppose if you've got a lone space traveler for a main character, he will have to be single by the end of the book so that he can go on more adventures! I didn't like how the story was resolved, but you can't win them all.

I swear I've read this series before, but it was probably a dozen or more years ago. I remember liking them, but that's about all I remember. And that Magnus has magic-like abilities, which is probably why I read them despite them being sci-fi, since overall I don't care for sci-fi. ( )

Rod Gallowglass's son, Magnus, needs to get away. He needs to find his own identity and determine who he is and what he stands for. Most importantly, perhaps, he needs to get away from Gramarye in an effort to find love. So Rod gives him Fess and sends him out among the stars. Magnus, though, feels the need to start at the beginning, so he heads to the ancestral home, the asteroid Maximus. There, he is beset with political intrigue and the bonds that family tends to enmesh each other with - and he finds no love there. In his reverie after escaping the madness of the d'Armand clan, he gets approached by SCENT, the organization that sent his father Gramarye in the first place, who wants to recruit him. But they don't know who he is, only that he's honorable, smart and a good fighter. To Magnus, this is enough - a way to stand on his own and live outside his father's shadow. Eventually, though, all good things come to an end and this scenario was no exception.

I really rather enjoyed this book. I had been away from this series for quite awhile (aside from the not-so-good "Here Be Monsters") and this volume seemed to have everything I remembered getting from the Warlock series: good action, some political statements, and a little sexual tension. I really wish more had been done with Allouene and Siflot - although much of the story got spent on Maximus, which didn't seem as fully fleshed out as it might have been made to be. ( )