The Book of Night with Moon | |||||
Diane Duane | |||||
Warner Aspect Books, 390 pages | |||||
A review by Todd Richmond
Feline wizards have a special gift for dealing with the cosmic
gates which connect different realities and allow wizards to travel
quickly from place to place. These gates are composed of a series
of energy threads which must be woven correctly for the gates
to function normally. According to Duane, the game "cat's
cradle" evolved from a human catching a glimpse of some feline
wizards at work on a gate. Duane has obviously spent a great deal
of time watching cats at play, and after reading this
book you'll never look at your own cats in the same way again.
In The Book of Night with Moon, three feline wizards and
a young cat on his Ordeal set out to repair a malfunctioning
transit gate. They soon discover, however, that there are even
larger problems to deal with. They must journey to the Downside,
an alternate world inhabited by intelligent dinosaurs, the Children
of the Serpent. There they discover that the cause of their gate
problems is an evil dinosaur wizard, backed by the evil Lone Power.
They must defeat the wizard to prevent the invasion of their own
reality by his minions and restore the gates to normal.
For fans of Diane Duane's Wizardry series, this book adds a great
deal of background regarding wizards who are not human, and the
workings of the transit gates. In addition, we are finally given
the details surrounding the Lone Power. Duane's creation story
parallels many other mythical creation stories: the Powers That
Be made the world under the instructions of the One. Each Power then went
its own way and one of them invented entropy -- it created death.
War ensued and the Power that created death was cast out into
darkness. This Lone Power was furious at the others for their rejection
of its gift to creation and so, as each intelligent species arose,
it offered them a Choice: "Take the path that the Powers
seemed to have put before it -- or turn aside into a path destined
to make the species that tread it, more powerful and blessed...
more like gods." Species that were offered the Choice and
chose badly, condemned themselves to entropy and death forever after.
Like all other species, felines were given the Choice.
While most accepted the gift, a few recognized the potential danger
of the Choice offered by the Lone Power and attacked it and died.
They are reborn, again and again, as wizards.
I would recommend this book if only for this kind of background information.
These are the kinds of details that I enjoy and search for in
stories -- evidence that the author has given a great deal of thought
to how magic works in their world. I must admit, though, that
I found other parts of the book less enjoyable. Duane has
given her felines a language of their own and sprinkles the text
with their words. Though she provides a glossary, I find it tedious
to continually look up what each of the words mean as I run across
them. An appendix explaining each of the powers in the feline
pantheon and how they relate to one another would have been appreciated
as well. That said, the book is a real treat for cat-lovers, giving
new meaning to the inexplicable behavior of cats. In fact, there's
an interesting afterword describing Hauissh, an elaborate game of positioning
and dominance played by cats. It's cute but best appreciated by
ailurophiles. [That means "cat-lovers" for anyone who may not be up on their Greek -- SF Site Ed.]
In summary, The Book of Night with Moon is an excellent
addition to Duane's Wizardry series. The detailed descriptions
of her creation mythology and some of the magical underpinnings
of her books will delight some readers but may bore others. If you
dislike too much detail like this and/or don't care for cats,
you may want to give this book a pass. But if you have cats, you
should enjoy Duane's unique vision of what those cats may be doing
when you're not looking.
Todd is a plant molecular developmental biologist who has finally finished 23 years of formal education. He recently fled Madison, WI for the warmer but damper San Francisco Bay Area and likes bad movies, good science fiction, and role-playing games. He began reading science fiction at the age of eight, starting with Heinlein, Silverberg, and Tom Swift books, and has a great fondness for tongue-in-cheek fantasy àla Terry Pratchett, Craig Shaw Gardner and Robert Asprin. |
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