Diane Duane's HIGH WIZARDRY

There is so much science fiction in High Wizardry, the third book in Diane Duane's wonderful Young Wizards series, that it barely counts as fantasy. Which is entirely awesome; this is the Diane Duane whose name I saw with pleasure and anticipation on those Star Trek novels of my youth, except even more cosmic. More cosmic in every possible way.

I've praised Duane's scientific/mathematical approach to magic before, but little did I know just how scientific and mathematical it was yet to become. For, as the focus shifts from Nita's and Kit's explorations of the powers and responsibilities of wizardry to Nita's astoundingly precocious and fierce little sister Dairene's, Duane adds an important new tool to the mix: computers. As in when Dairene starts investigating this amazing new world that her sister finally had to come clean about in Deep Wizardry, her version of the Wizard's Manual shows up on the family's new Apple computer, which Dairene of course already knows how to put together and program even as her parents are carefully sorting through what order in which to Read the Fine Manuals.

Lickety split, Dairene has taken the Oath (every wizard must promise to protect life and delay entropy with all his or her power, with her very life if need be) and is programming spells of genius-level complexity. The world all but quakes; the younger a wizard is, the more raw power he or she can command, and Dairene is the youngest, smartest wizard ever. The youngest, smartest wizard, with a fixation on outer space and Star Wars and finding her own Darth Vader to fight. Which means soon she is computing her way to and through outer space, with each jump getting progressively farther and farther from home until she's in another galaxy -- with her danger growing at each jump.

Nita and Kit and their mentor wizards' red and blue macaw, Picchu (wizards' pets get strange over time, and Picchu is something of a sibyl) more or less to the rescue, but by the time they catch up with Dairene, she is on the verge of having things pretty much under control. Having discovered a planet that's one giant computer chip, awakened it to sentience and taught it to create artificial life and all. You know, nothing but a thing. Except oh, there's her Darth Vader, except her Darth Vader is a million times craftier, more subtle and, yes, more powerful. Gulp. Okay, maybe a little help.

So again, it kind of drives me nuts that the Harry Potter books, with their elitism, their ugly "muggles vs magic" divides, their contempt for the world, were the ones to get popular, and these have remained as obscure as they have. In the universe next door, which I so long to visit, these got made into big CGI blockbusters and all the kids strive to emulate Nita, Kit and Dairene by cultivating their intelligence, exercising their imaginations, and thinking their way out of problems. Ah, me.

Diane Duane's DEEP WIZARDRY

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 afterward. Look, I'm not going to get into this much, but man, I could have used a trigger warning because

GIANT SQUID ATTACKS YOU GUYS.

I'm having trouble breathing after just having typed those words.*

Fortunately, I'm a grown up now, and have evolved and developed coping techniques for dealing with scenes like the

GIANT SQUID ATTACKS YOU GUYS

and am thus somewhat capable of admiring that scene for the majestic and badass bit of action writing that it is. Somewhat. I'm still very glad I put this book down to sleep last night well before the advent of the

GIANT SQUID ATTACKS YOU GUYS

or I wouldn't have slept at all and would probably have to be hauled off to a mental ward like one of H.P. Lovecraft's less strongly-constituted wus-heroes.

All that aside, Deep Wizardry is a remarkably wise, thoughtful and lovely book. We start up not long after Nita and Kit saved the world from the "Lone Power" in So You Want to be a Wizard, with Nita's family (and Kit along for good measure) vacationing on the beach and Nita and Kit exploring the delights of ocean swimming along with their budding powers and responsibilities. Soon it's those responsibilities -- as I observed last time around, Duane's version of magic has a heavy ethical/ecological bent and literally preserves the world -- that come crashing to the fore like a tidal wave when the duo meet up with a badly injured humpback whale, who turns out to be a young wizard herself, and who has just lost her mentor at the worst possible time.

Soon Nita and Kit are drawn into an awesome round of ritual and rite of passage upon which the fate of the eastern seaboard depends -- the Lone Power they defeated and sealed off last time around is always finding new and old ways to attack the fragile living cosmos these kids and their kind are sworn to defend and preserve -- and into a frame of reference that is startling in its maturity, as they have to spend much of the novel contemplating death quite seriously and personally.

Adding to the shivery archetypal dread of this story is the magnificent giant white "Master-shark" (as in the biggest Great White Shark that ever lived, so old -- possibly thousands of years old -- and vast that he is actually all white, like a deadly ghost slicing through the water), Ed** (short for Ed'Rashtekaresket), who pretty much steals the novel. Ed is a giant slab of uncanny, inhuman awesome, utterly believable as both shark and sentient, at home in his role as the "ender of distress" and full of bleak, harsh and yet still oddly compassionate wisdom in his dealings with Nita and Kit, who assume the forms of a humpback and a sperm whale, respectively, for their dealings in the deep. And while they might therefore be a little bigger than Ed, his lordly, dreadful power keeps them and us in awe through their every dealing with him.

Really, were I at all a reasonable person, I'd be much more afraid of Ed than of the

GIANT SQUID ATTACKS YOU GUYS

but anyone who knows me or even just reads my blog at all often probably already knows that if there is one thing I am not, it's a reasonable person. As it is, well, Ed versus the

GIANT SQUID ATTACKS YOU GUYS

is one of the most thrilling and seat-wetting passages I've ever encountered in literature. Holy crap, you guys?

And but so, Duane has published seven more of these Young Wizards books to date, and another one is due later this year. Could she ever possibly top this? Or even come close to hitting its (pardon me) high water mark? I dunno. But I'm ready to find out.

After some milk and cookies and soothing music to cure me of my lingering horrors from the

GIANT SQUID ATTACKS YOU GUYS

and the after-effects of some truly tragic content as well.

Deep and powerful stuff.

*My greatest childhood phobia was that a giant squid was under my bed and gonna attack me from the watery ocean depths that were also under my bed and yes I knew at the time this was quite impossible given that said bed was some 6000 feet above sea level not far from the Continental Divide but that's what phobias are, you guys. They're as powerful as they are irrational.

100 Books #123 - Diane Duane's SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD

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 explaining to a work colleague who is trying to get her 13-year-old son to read more, among the many reasons Duane's Young Wizards books look to be better than Potter is that their would-be wizards are teaching themselves (with a lot of help from the natural world, which is all quite magical if you're just paying attention) instead of slaving over, e.g., potions in a student cauldron in a dreary classroom for a grade. I like the way Duane has conveyed the pleasures of learning and discovery rather than making the learning process seem like a dreary chore, a set of hoops the impatient student must jump through in order to get to do the cool stuff.

I also like the way Duane has situated magic in the world of Young Wizards. It's got a slight Jedi/Force feel to it in that the practice of magic is one of the things that keeps the universe working (the idea that humanity/intelligent life is the universe's consciousness trying to understand itself is a subtle theme), but in a very reasoned and scientific, rather than a mystical, way. Magic slows down entropy, if it's practiced by the right kind of people, by which is meant people who care enough to make the effort even if it costs them everything. And thus the universe can be safeguarded.

Magic, in this world, then, is a calling rather than a privilege, a practice to be undertaken alongside of, rather than instead of, the rest of one's life in the world. Which means there's no elitism to it, no us versus them mentality, despite the secrecy.*

That's not to say it's not quite a lot of satisfying fun for our two young heroes in this first novel, Nita and Kit. Both of them are nerdy little outcasts with a bent for book-learning (the scene in which Nita comes across this first novel's titular textbook is one every bookworm will recognize, a bit ruefully) and a need to exercise their talents, but of course that means both of them are ostracized according to their lights: the rather passive Kit is a wallflower, the more aggressive and active Nita gets beaten up a lot. But lest this start to sound like a magical Revenge of the Nerds, Nita is more interested in harnessing her budding powers to protect herself from damage and recover a treasured space pen than in tit for tat. And soon, when her spell to recover said pen brings a fascinatingly strange new presence into her and Kit's lives, she's got much more interesting stuff to think about than getting back at some bullies. Like getting to know the trees, especially the rowan tree she's been climbing in her whole young life, who tells her of how the trees have always been watching over and protecting humanity, since they were just another primate screaming in the branches -- and why humanity is worth protecting.

Too, this book does the best job of any I've seen since Fritz Lieber's Our Lady of Darkness of fulfilling the promise inherent in that oft misused genre name, urban fantasy. Here as in the Lieber, we get a true magic of cities, in a radiant and lively good aspect as well as in a creepy and malevolent evil one. And, rarity of rarities, the good aspect is every bit as interesting and vividly imagined and engaging as the evil -- and that's saying a lot, because the foe Nita and Kit and their white hole pal Fred (!) take on is quite possibly the most genuinely heartbreaking and terrifying dark lord I've encountered at least since Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy -- and this being-or-nonbeing, the Starsnuffer, let me say, licks Voldemort and Sauron hollow, as his world is way more interesting and scary than Mordor could ever hope to be. The fire hydrants alone!

And so again I find myself asking, just as I did in my prior post, why the hell isn't this book more famous? Seriously, kids, check this stuff out. Diane Duane is amazevaries.

*I want to make a comparison. If Harry Potter is Big Bang Theory, with muggles standing in for nerds as the class to be either mocked/attacked or protected, but hardly ever respected in their own right (even as it pretends to be a sop to those nerds reading), then Young Wizards is Community.