Book Review: Wizard World, by Roger Zelazny

Who couldn't love that face?

There is a lot to love about Zelazny's writing that is totally absent from Wizard World.

Now I am a huge fan of Roger Zelazny.  The Great Book of Amber is the best 1258 pages I ever spent, twice.  Lord Demon, Donnerjack, and Creatures of Light and Darkness are among the most imaginative, atypical works of fantasy I've read.  Zelazny's main characters are typically demigods, in one way or another, dealing with their demigod problems, but with some kind of connection to something like the modern world (e.g., the main character of the second half of Amber has a CS degree from Berkeley, and is also a sorcerer).  Something about this is strangely compelling to me.  As another e.g., Amber starts with the main character waking up in a hospital with amnesia, and is very much in a noir style; the true nature of things is revealed only slowly.  Great stuff.

For these reasons and more, I really, really wanted to like Wizard World.
I was certainly happy enough to find it: it is actually two books in one, Changeling and Madwand, and when I found it in The Dawn Treader (the best used book store ever, that is) and figured out what it was, I promise that I actually had Changeling and Madwand in my very hands.  I was in no small part delighted to save 50%.

(A word on the title: Changeling and Madwand are actually halfway-OK titles, it seems to me.  They're succinct, they stand out, and they actually have something to do with the plot.  Wizard World, on the other hand: "Well, there's a world, OK.  And it's got, (stay with me here) wizards in it!  Or one, at least.  Now, I know that wizards aren't real in our world, but you see, this story takes place in another world: the Wizard World!".  Given that the book is in the fantasy section, there'd better be at least one goddamn wizard in it, whether it's called Wizard World or Kull the Cock Conqueror: Mystery of the Sunken Tits.)

Unfortunately, Wizard World falls prey to hella fantasy tropes.  The main character (the eponymous Wizard) has a distinctive white streak in his black hair, while his dead wizard father had a distinctive black streak in his white hair.  Can you feel the magic yet?

The background of the story is that there are two parallel worlds, one magic-dominated and one science-dominated.  This by itself is not a bad premise; it worked quite well when Zelazny did it in Jack of Shadows, and as well as can be expected when Piers Anthony did it in the Apprentice Adept series.  (A word on Piers Anthony: I read a lot of his books when I was, let's say, 13-16.  That's about the right age range.  I decided to stop reading him when I started a Xanth book and couldn't figure out if I'd already read it or not.)  Here, for some reason, it felt forced from the start, and then no one ever went back to the science world after the first 50 pages.  The main character, who was yanked away from his family, girlfriend, and music career, showed no particular desire to return to everything he had known because... you know... Wizard World!

Next on the trope lineup is the wisecracking, greedy, half-amoral (demi-moral?) thief sidekick.  I don't have much to add here except that his name is Mouseglove, which only strengthened the lingering déjà vu.

Another thing I've found compelling about Zelazny's stories is that the magic feels self-consistent.  After a relatively short time I felt like I knew how Amber's Trumps worked, for example, and Lord Demon's chi seemed almost intuitive, despite that I know next to nothing about feng shui.  The wizards in Wizard World seem like they can do pretty much anything, and that's not all that exciting.  That's not how magic works.  Hell, even the Discworld wizards at least make it look hard.

It doesn't help that the main character is the only wizard in the first book, so on more than one occasion he pulls off nonsensical feats that even in the context of the story should be at least difficult.  In the second book some more wizards show up, and he starts to figure stuff out, but he still throws himself into dangerous situations with a stupidly cavalier attitude.  I felt like yelling at the book at times: "You can't do that!  You don't know how your world works!  I don't know how your world works!!"

Now, OK, it's definitely a Zelazny book: series-spanning plot elements get tied up elegantly for the surprise ending, the over-arching mystery and drive for revenge kept me interested, there were some clever hierarchies of information, blah blah blah.  All the elements of his work that I like were there, but they were watered down in an indefinable way.  Even the good parts of this book were just not that good.

In conclusion: read Wizard World for completeness, if you feel so compelled.  If you've never read any Zelazny, as most of my readers probably haven't, start with The Great Book of Amber.  After that, any Zelazny book, chosen at random, will do.  They are all amazing.  Except for this one.