The Door Into Fire (1979)

It's pulp fantasy, and the protagonist verges on being a Gary Stu... but you also get to see Duane take her first shot at creating a cosmology in which wrestling with entropy is central. ( )

The Tale of the Five, is an early fantasy series by Diane Duane which isn’t complete yet. It is the first series I read that had homosexual and bisexual characters who were just characters instead of stock humor characters, hateful villains or Afterschool Special-style protagonists where we learn important lessons about accepting others. Herewiss, Freelorn and Segnbora are three of my favorite characters in the series, followed closely behind by Sunspark (a fire elemental) and Hasai, a Dragon.) Duane creates an interesting world here, and the juxtaposition of “medieval” setting with a surprisingly non-standard-medieval society was something I really enjoyed. The final book in the series, The Door Into Starlight has been in the works for a long, long time.

It also occurs to me that it also fits into my more stranger reading preferences: I have a fondness for “post apocalyptic fiction” of a certain type. Specifically, I enjoy “rebuilding” themes and magical post apocalypses. (I blame the post apocalyptic fiction that came out during the cold war, okay?)

The protagonist of The Door into Fire is Herewiss, the prince of Brightwood, a region in Darthen, one of two countries (Darthen and Arlen) with a long history of alliance and interdependence. He is the first man in a thousand years to possess a form of high-level magic called the “Blue Flame.” The in-story mythology is that humans were given the Blue Flame in order to help the Goddess protect the world from entropy, personified as a being called The Shadow.

Read the rest of this review at A Wicked Convergence of Circumstances. ( )

There are so many things going on in this book, it's hard to simplify it into a quick summary. On the way to get his friend and lover Freelorn out of trouble, Herewiss meets Sunspark, a fire elemental. Instead of going home after rescuing his friends, Herewiss leads them all to a place where he might be able to learn to use Flame, another kind of magic.

There is a great conversation between Herewiss and Sunspark when they first meet. Sunspark is so far from human that concepts like sex and death and friendship don't make sense to it and they spend a page or so talking in circles around each other, which really gets across the otherness of Sunspark. Unfortunately, the longer it spends in Herewiss's company, the more human it's thoughts and emotions get, so it's a less interesting character later on.

I liked the book, but it is obviously the first in a series because it's just setting things up for future events without much closure at the end. ( )

I read this a thousand years ago when it first came out and I LOVED it. I reread it ten or fifteen years later and it didn't hold up so well. If I were to read it now, I suspect I would have another reaction again, somewhere in the middle, perhaps. It really was one of my very favourites then, and sure, maybe it isn't high art, but the energy was great and I sure had a crush on one of the characters. ( )

I like most of Diane Duane's Wizardry series (minus A Wizard Abroad and the books about the cats), so this has been on my To Read list for a very long time. I finally decided to ILL it. And I do like it. It only seems slightly dated, for having been written in the 70's. Gotta love those drugged up 70's.It's interesting to see the world of her wizardry books from a different perspective. Not a child, not a cat, not our world. This reads more like fantasy than the other books, which I tend to read as science fiction. I'm ready to read the next one. But if book 4 is still not published and is still in indefinite status, it's really going to bug me when I finish reading the first three. ( )