Ah, Segnbora, one of my first fictional crushes. She's a master swordswoman, a professionally trained bard, a skilled sorceress. She speaks with dragons. She has an affair with one of the male leads. She is Full of Angst.She is, in short, the definition of the Mary Sue, and I could not care less ...
This is a review of the New Millennium Edition of this book specifically in regards to how it was changed from the original edition. I don't think the NMEs are listed separately on goodreads so hopefully I'm putting this in the right place.A Wizard Alone was originally published in 2002 when know...
Nita's having some problems.First, she's started high school, and while she's still considered brainy, her subjects aren't coming as easily to her as they used to. She's starting to feel kinda inadequate next to Kit, who, though a year younger, is still breezing through everything.Going along wit...
After the events of the last few errantry assignments, Nita, Kit, and Dairine are pretty exhausted. Dairine decides to apply for a wizard's vacation without permission and gets grounded to the solar system; she can't go outside our little circle of planets. Bummer! but Nita and Kit (and the dog P...
Oh man, it's a good thing a certain someone who talked me into reading Harry Potter this year didn't show these to me until long after I'd done with Hogwarts, because Potter & co. would have suffered even more by comparison with these than they already did with the Greats.As I found myself explai...
I don't much appreciate being introduced to blood-soaked scenes so early in a book. The excuse that Nita didn't find the time to pack a 'less-lethal' and less grotesque spell than one which bursts cell membranes is not reasonable. Why DIDN'T she? Whatever she expected to encounter, she shouldn...
If Dairine's computer's incessant chanting of 'Uh-oh' are any indication, there's about to be trouble.When Tom and Carl ask to come over, Nita, Kit, Dairine and their guests hope it's just a normal house call. Maybe a little debrief of why there were suddenly no higher-ranking wizards around last...
I just read the whole Rhihansu series and thoroughly enjoyed it! I am a Trekker from way back. I began my"love affair" with Star Trek back in the seventies, and I have been a fan ever since. The Rhihansu series by Diane Duane is an in depth look at Rhihansu(Romulan)society, with lots of action, ...
I realise that this makes me very late to the table, but I hadn't read this book until just a few days ago. I enjoyed the Young Wizards books when I was a teenager, but somehow never ran into this one - though I had heard of it.A friend heard about this grievous error and gave us a second-hand c...
In a lot of ways, this is where the series hits its stride. There's no longer the choppy, episodic feeling of the earlier books; everything flows smoothly, despite (perhaps because?) the fact that it's the first book to have three equal co-protagonists, three parallel stories. And there's still t...
Welcome to Sanctuary, a city of outlaws and adventurers in a world of war and wizardry, peopled with colorful characters created by today's top fantasy adventure talents, including: Robert W. BaileyC. J. CherryhDiane DuaneJanet MorrisAndrew OffuttDiana L. PaxsonLynn AbbeyRobert Lynn Asprin In thi...
another great Thieves World. the Stepsons are slowly making thier way back to Sanctuary. The Hand That feeds You, and Rebels Aren't Born in Palaces were great stories. You see a whole different side of Hanse here, it was amazing. I still wish Walegrin was a bigger charactor. I only give 3 stars ...
While I regretted last time around that I had not encountered Diane Duane's Young Wizards books when I was a young'un, this time around I'm pretty glad I didn't, because if I'd come across Deep Wizardry when I was the age of its two young protagonists, I would have required extensive therapy afte...
In an alternate-world Los Angeles, prosecutor/psychic Lee Enfield and her partner, Gelert, investigate the murder of an elf. They soon reveal a deadly network of ties among organized crime, multinational corporations, and planetary governments of the Seven Worlds--all working together on the "eth...
This is the third of a series that I really wanted to like, enough to buy the whole set in one go – and I’m so disappointed that it didn’t work out that way. On the good side, the visit to an alien airport was fun, and briefly lifted the book, and the race of little machine creatures was cute, if...
Space Cops, Science Fiction
Introduction (Asprin). Hakim’s back. The intro is (as always) light but helps you get back into the setting [6/10].Lady of Fire (Paxson). A nice return to form after the awfulness that was book #8. It’s particularly good in this story to see Lalo and Illyra working together, as they’re two of the...
THE HISTORIC SAGA BEGINS Born in the twilight years of Vulcan's violent and passionate past, those who declared themselves Rihannsu chose to reign free in the unknown reaches of space rather than to serve under the new tyranny of logic. Having severed themselves from their homeworld, they surviv...
She was finding it hard to do anything but tremble, and not entirely because of the battle. Out there, hanging huge and dark, a great mailed shadow, her future had come for her. And perhaps, in the shadow’s shadow, death… She took a long breath and thrust the feelings of ill-omen away from her, s...
The school day went by without incident or interest for Uchenna, partly because she was mostly avoiding her schoolmates when she didn’t have to be in a class with them: she felt strongly that it would be smart for her to keep her head down at the moment. Afterwards she walked home in company with...
“I’m going down there,” Picard said, and headed for the ’lift. Riker opened his mouth and then shut it again, for the security team would beat the captain there by long enough to get their job done. Still, his mouth quirked in a slight smile at the sight of the man leaving...
After a few days of rain and wind earlier in the week, conditions had abruptly settled the day before into a lovely still crispness exactly right for the end of October. The trees were on the turn and glowing in the last rays of late-afternoon sun; and things had fortunately had time to dry out, ...
Have I lost weight? she thought, pulling the T-shirt a little away from her as she looked down. This doesn’t fit like it did two weeks ago… The view in the mirror was more or less the usual one: light brunette hair cut just above her shoulders, a face neither unusually plain nor unusually beautif...
Kit said. “Is it the krakens?”Ed’Rashtekaresket looked at Kit and began a slow, abstracted circling around him. “You know about that?” said the Master-Shark. “You’re wise for a human.”“I know that the krakens are breeding this year,” Kit said, “breaking their usual eleven-year cycle. And they’re ...
Messengers had already gone out southward into the valleys reaching out to either side of the Reuss. The other councilors took the news home. On the day Mariarta, her father and Theo were to leave, a man in dusty clothes and a long brown cloak awaited them in the courtyard of the inn. The Knight ...
If weird things start happening, she thought, no one’ll see them there. I can’t believe it, this is so great, I’m going to get that pen back! And then… Even though she had no idea what “then” looked like, Nita couldn’t bring herself to care. Behind the high school around t...
They’d been working for three days to attempt to resolve a territorial dispute between two groves of trees… which is a whole lot tougher than it sounds. It’s not easy to argue with a tree, let alone a crowd of them. No amount of hugging will get a tree to stop strangling another one with its root...
Nothing was wrong with him: it was morning, he felt energetic enough— a good breakfast inside him, everything okay at home, the weather steady enough, cool and gray but not raining. However, the package he was carrying was heavy enough to pull a prizefighter's arms out of their sockets. He had ma...
of someone who’s lived in Ireland for nearly a quarter-century. That familiarity, though, with the way things really are here (insofar as anyone, “blow-in” or native, can ever tell what’s really going on in this island…) can make the inhabitant a little impatient with the perceptions of outsiders...
Lola said, standing up straight in the rushing wind and stretching her arms to the sky, “Queen and Goddess, send your servant a sign!” Nothing happened. It was exactly the same kind of nothing that had been happening for the last three days. Lola sa...
“Sorry,” its owner said. “Sorry! I was late. I had to help my tapi, my father. Are you all right?” The first thing that struck Nita was how very tall Quelt was. Nita was getting tall for her age, everyone said, though she still felt short to herself. Looking up at Quelt, h...
It was late in the sol, and the light here would start failing in a while. But a glow of residual wizardry lay over the whole crater, sheening the surface with a thin skin of greenish light, as if with water. In the midst of it all, Nita could still glimpse something that wasn’t really there an...
The pad was showing a news feed recorded the previous day and handed off to it by the local Alfen network. “What is that?” Lee said.“The Worlds Today.”“I mean in the bowl.”“Best dog food I’ve ever had,” Gelert said. “Either venison or buffalo. How’re you feeling this morning?”“Better.”“Me too…”Le...
Later on, she’d felt that the fear was ridiculous. Circuses were supposed to be so much fun for small children—all the sparkle, glitter, and noise, the blare of brass music, the daring acrobats and tumblers, the goofy clowns. Yet it hadn’t worked that way for Nita the firs...
There had been no transition from sleeping to waking: just that unsettling consciousness, and a feeling that the world was wrong, that everything was wrong. She had no idea how long it had taken her to get to sleep last night after Dairine, silent and drained, had finally slipped away. &nbs...
(Gnomics, 412) There is a stretch of the North Darthene coastline where the cliffs turn abruptly from brown granite to black basalt, the remains of some ancient lava flow. The beaches along this part of the Darthene Gulf are dark as night, starred with semiprecious stones car...
The weather forecast for the Phoenix area this morning had been for clear, hot, sunny weather. But half an hour out from Sky Harbor, clouds had suddenly appeared and the plane had begun to shake. If there was one thing Delia couldn’t cope with, it was turbulence. At least in the physical sense, s...
Eyes still closed, she stuck a hand out from under the covers and felt around until she found the button. The insistent buzzing stopped, leaving her with the faint sound of somebody from the local all-news station talking in a cheerful tinny voice about lane closures on the Major Deegan Expresswa...
For a little bit they stood there just getting their bearings. It was warm, but not uncomfortable yet: Central Park glowed green and golden across the street from them. Dairine was fidgeting. “Now where?” “Right here,” Nita said, turning around. The...
Gnomics, 33 Sunset was glowing behind his back when Herewiss woke up. He opened his eyes on a wide barren vista of earth and scattered brush, streaked with crimson light and long shadows. He stretched, and found that he ached all over. It wasn’t all backlash; some of it was the pain of having bee...