Master of the Five Magics

This book had an interesting approach in dividing up the realms of magic. It was not a bad read, but the latter half was riddled with misspelled words and a few sentences that were half-edited or had missing words. Despite that, it wasn't a bad story.

Alodar is on a quest to restore his family's honor. To do this he decides to pursue nothing less than the hand of the beautiful, single queen. He plies his arts with skill despite not being a master of them, and each success leads him on to study another magical path. The culmination is an epic battle of the remaining queen's forces and a prince of demons.

I do have to say that at the end, I absolutely HATE the queen. What a bitch. ( )

Journeyman training, many levels.

Magic here is approached somewhat more analytically, and divided into various different flavours - e.g. sorcery and wizardry are different, is is the variety that the protagonist of the piece uses.

Any one of sufficient intellect can learn them, with enough work.

However, not all studying as there is a fortress under siege, an escape to be made, and the usual sort of fantasy quest to be embarked upon, which trying to accomplish the titutlar feat.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2008/03/master-of-five-magics-lyndon-hardy.html ( )

A story set in a small kingdom in a fantasy world where there are five distinct magical traditions. These traditions are well defined and the principles they rely on, their methods of operation, and the kind of results they deliver are all interestingly different. Since part of the joy of reading this book is to discover each of them in turn, I won't enumerate them here.

I liked the way the traditions were systematic. Unlike in most fantasy books where one achieves results simply by wanting to very badly, or by having the appropriate parentage, in Lyndon Hardy's work one must apply the principles correctly and intelligently and they will work the same way for anyone who has mastered them. The result is a story that lauds the hero's mental abilities rather than the physical.

Speaking of which, the story itself is fairly simple, a traditional hero's quest. I won't say more of it because I detest spoilers. The first few chapters are a little awkward, as some of the characters spout two paragraphs of exposition where I would have expected a curt reply, but this smoothes out later. If you can get to page 40 then the rest will be fine.

A persistent annoyance was the poor spelling, particularly of the lose/loose variety. Perhaps a later publication than my 1980 edition will have fixed this.

This is a fantasy that fans of hard science fiction will like. ( )