A WORKING OF STARS

The teenage paperback series Mageworlds, which mixes space opera with magic, offers its seventh flying carpet and second hardback entry, following The Stars Asunder (1999), which coalesced all the themes introduced earlier into a space-faring romance as strongly distanced from mainstream realism as Moby-Dick. Or, as Doyle says, full of “lots of really neat stuff.” A magickal rivalry exists between the Republic and Mageworld, two galaxies of humanity that split long, long ago and remain parted by the Sundering, a huge interstellar gap. Volume three rounds out the original Mageworlds trilogy and brings up the idea that the Mages aren’t dark sorcerers but have morals and ethics. The Gathering Flame, a prequel to the next trilogy, leaps back 500 years to focus on Mageworld and show that it’s as humane as the Republic’s planet Entibor, though star-lords everywhere compete for trade and sweeten their pockets with space-piracy. The mages of Mageworld have fallen into civil war, their powers based on cords of eiran, or life-force and luck, born of energies arising from battles with wooden staves. Arekhon sus-Khalgath sus-Peledaen gives up his home planet to leap the Gap Between and begin life anew in the other universe, sharing his new home with his beloved Elaeli Inadi. Arekhon has foreseen the Fated pattern of The Great Working, which means to bridge the Gap and rejoin the Republic and Mageworld at some far date. But the Mage-Circle is broken. When Arekhon is visited by the great Magelord Maraganha, a Voidwalker, she tells him she will be his student in days to come, when he is an ever greater Magelord than she. But the Working demands first that his broken Circle be remade. Together they gather missing members, including Narin Iyal, who is dead and wandering in the Void. In the end, Arekhon himself is very nearly dead and thinks he must surrender his power to the Working.

Mindsucking magick. More, please, She Who Writes and Husband James.