Spell of Catastrophe – Mayer Alan Brenner
Welcome to the Dance of Gods!
In a world of magic, where computers and nanotechnology are long gone, where thoughtless gods struggle for power with little regard for those below, one unlucky man must make some tough decisions …
Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable isn’t sure what’s going on in the village of Roosing Oolvaya. Someone–probably a god–has trapped Max’s friend The Great Karlini in a castle that keeps trying to move at the most inconvenient times, and naturally it’s up to Max to figure out how to spring him. But the gods throwing their weight around in Roosing Oolvaya are more than Max bargained for, and soon he’s caught between necromancers, working with a detective named The Creeping Sword, and even dancing with Death itself in a desperate attempt to save the city from catastrophe.
“Three separate lines of action engage disparate characters in a race to converge at last in a huge blast of action … leaving the reader breathless but satisfied.” —Kliatt
It wasn’t until I looked this up on Goodreads, partway through reading it, that I realized it had originally come out in the 1980s and had been reissued as an ebook. That made sense of the fact that there were weird glitches in some of the word spacing, while the overall copy editing (apart from the fairly common confusion of “discrete” with “discreet”) was good, better than the cover would have led me to expect.
The story itself is well done, too. It’s reminiscent of Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, and somewhat of Jack Vance, mainly because of the precise diction of some of the characters, though fortunately they are not the alienated, amoral bastards that Vance writes. Instead, they are “vaguely disreputable” (the sobriquet of one of them), but mostly striving to do the right thing, even if they’re not always completely sure what that is. One of them spends a couple of paragraphs musing about it. Lovable rogues, in other words, or at least laudable rogues. Chaotic good, if you want to talk D&D alignments.
There are three main characters, one of them (for narrative reasons which eventually become clear) a first-person narrator, and the other two observed in omniscient third person. The first is a noir-style detective, and the other two are a doctor (among other things) and a wizard whose life goal is to understand magic enough to undermine the gods. They start out separate and eventually come together; this is a difficult approach to pull off, because it risks the reader being jerked out of one story just as they’re getting invested and dumped into another story that they don’t yet care about. The author, for my money, manages it well.
There are moments of wry humour, moments of high drama, and a good deal (perhaps in places a touch too much) of the magical equivalent of technobabble. Lots of things go boom and crash; there’s quite a body count, though mostly in the background, and the characters register it as regrettable rather than just dismissing it as the way life is. It’s capably done, and I enjoyed it.
I’d read the rest of the series, if they were priced a bit more attractively.
This book review is by Mike Reeves-McMillan and originally appeared on Goodreads.. Mike writes the Gryphon Clerks novels, a series featuring heroic civil servants and engineers doing their best in a difficult world; the Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series, about underpowered magical practitioners stepping up to defend their city when nobody else will; and the Hand of the Trickster sword-and-sorcery series, in which a servant of the trickster god exalts the humble and humbles the exalted. His short stories have appeared in a number of professional and semiprofessional venues, including the Terry Pratchett tribute anthology In Memory.
