|
|
Loading... To Visit the Queen, or On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service (2000)▾LibraryThing recommendations ▾Will you like it?
Loading...
 Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. ▾Work-to-work relationships
|
|
| Series (with order) |
|
| Canonical title |
|
| Original title |
|
| Alternative titles |
|
| Original publication date |
|
| People/Characters |
|
| Important places |
|
| Important events |
|
| Related movies |
|
| Awards and honors |
|
| Epigraph |
Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been?
I've been to London to visit the Queen.
Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.
- children's rhyme  In Life's name, and for Life's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is Its gift in Life's service alone. I will guard growth and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what grows and lives well in its own way: nor will I change any creature unless its growth and life, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened. To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will ever put aside fear for courage, and death for life, when it is fitting to do so - looking always toward the Heart of Time, where all our sundered times are one, and all our myriad worlds lie whole, in That from Which they proceeded...
- THE WIZARD'S OATH, SPECIES-NONSPECIFIC RECENSION | |
|
| Dedication |
For Mike Hodel | |
|
| First words |
Patel went slowly up the gray concrete stairs to the elevated Docklands Light Railway Station at Island Gardens; he took them one at a time, rather than two or three at once as he usually did. (prologue) At just before 5 P.M. on a weekday, the upper-track level of Grand Central Terminal looks much as it does at any other time of day: a striped gray landscape of long concrete islands stretching away from you into a dry, iron-smelling night, under the relentless fluorescent glow of the long lines of overhead lighting. | |
|
| Quotations |
But when he and his wife and new family moved up to the country, later in his life, Patel was never easy about being in any wooded place in the wintertime, at dusk. The naked limbs of the trees, all held out stiff against the falling night and moving, moving slightly, would speak to some buried memory that would leave him silent and shaking for hours. Nor was he ever able to explain, to Sasha, or to his parents, or anyone else, exactly what had happened to his copy of Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia. Mostly his family and friends thought he had been robbed and assaulted, perhaps indecently; they left the matter alone. They were right, though as regarded the nature of the indecency, they could not have been more wrong. Bong, said the clock: and clearly audible through it, through the voices and the diesel thunder and the sound of the slightly desperate-sounding train announcer, a small, clear voice spoke. "These endless dumb drills," it said, "lick butt." "It still licks butt."
WHAM!
Rhiow closed her eyes and wondered where she and Urruah would ever find enough patience for this job. Inside her, some annoyed part of her mind was mocking the Meditation: I will meet the terminally clueless today, it said piously: idiots, and those with hairballs for brains, and those whose ears need a good shredding before you can even get their attention. I do not have to be like them, even though I would dearly love to hit them hard enough to make the empty places in their heads echo... "It's weird," he said. "I can't see what would happen. Or, I mean, I can see two ways it would go."
"What? You mean, if you went back in time and killed your own grandfather?" Urruah had said. "Well, one way, if you're still there afterwards, it means you're a by-blow. A bastard, as the ehhif would say. But then how else would you describe someone who would go back in time and kill their own grandfather? I ask you. And if you go the other way, and you succeed, then you're not there at all. And serves you right for being a bastard." | |
|
| Last words |
|
| Disambiguation notice |
|
| Publisher's editors |
|
| Blurbers |
|
| Publisher series |
|
▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (3)
▾LibraryThing members' description ▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0446673188, Paperback)
"A purr at the right time can do wonders," says Rhiow, the furry, black heroine of To Visit the Queen,. Diane Duane's mettlesome cats can work wonders with more than their purring: they're wizards, capable of casting spells, walking on air, traveling through space and time, and speaking to humans--if they choose to. In this sequel to the bestselling The Book of Night with Moon, Rhiow and her team are called in to troubleshoot a malfunctioning magical portal in the London underground. Gradually, they unravel a conspiracy that threatens to twist their reality into a nightmarish alternate history--one in which Victorian England gets a boost from future science and uses nuclear technology to terrorize the world. This perfidious design rests upon the assassination of Queen Victoria, and it's up to Rhiow, Arhu, Urruah, and the London cats to save the queen. Duane has earned an enormous following with her stories of the unending battle between the evil Lone Power and the forces of life, here championed by Rhiow and the other wizard cats. Although her stories are usually lively reads, in To Visit the Queen, Duane takes a long time to build up to the action and burdens the narrative with large lumps of magic terminology that's more than reminiscent of computer programs or mathematical theorems. But there's a lot of fun to be had from the wheels-within-wheels universes going awry, in spotting tidbits of history, and in following the chain of events as the traitor in the pride reveals its claws. --Blaise Selby (retrieved from Amazon Sat, 12 Jan 2013 09:07:05 -0500) (see all 2 descriptions) ▾Library descriptions A trio of cats battle an evil force, threatening the stability of the world by altering history. The force is abducting people and making them time-travel to various realities to change events. In one reality, technology brought by an abducted traveller from the 20th century led to a nuclear war in the 1800s.… (more) |
 Google Books — Loading...
|
)
1