“The Flying Sorcerers introduces Shoogar, the greatest
wizard ever known in his village. His spells can strike terror in the hearts of
even his most powerful enemies. But the enemy he faces now is like none he has
ever seen before. The stranger has come from nowhere and is ignorant of even
the most basic principles of magic. But the stranger has an incredibly powerful
magic of his own. There is no room in Shoogar’s world for an intruder whose
powers match his own, let alone one whose powers might exceed his. So before
the blue sun can cross the face of the red sun once more, Shoogar will show
this stranger just who is boss.”
About halfway through this book, I decided to do some
research on it because, I admit, I was confused. I’m never been a hard science
fiction reader, but I’ve been known to dabble in it from time to time. And while
I realized the book was satirical in nature, it took me a bit to catch on to
the joke that the writers were blending hard science fiction with doses of
broad humor. The gist of book is primarily a tale about the efforts of a
stranded astronaut to escape from a primitive world, but what I learned (and
sort of understood as it progressed), was that David Gerrold and Larry Niven were aping
Arthur C. Clarke’s three prediction-related adages of science fiction:
1. When a distinguished but elderly
scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When
he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the
limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the
impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And law three is what the two authors
use in this book. I was also slow on the pickup, but soon realized that most
of the names in the book are in-jokes –they seem based on real science fiction
writers. They also sort of touch on the whole notion of how humans can
introduce negative things into other cultures that have no notion of them. Purple
-Dr. Dave Bowman from 2001: A Space Odyssey? - is sort of the reason Star Trek
has a Prime Directive, as he introduces things like crime, money, alcohol, the
battle between the sexes, along with altering their entire ecology.
While I did find the book humorous, the authors also spent an
inordinate amount of time describing the building of the ship that Purple
needed to reach the location to send a signal to his mothership. It’s this sort
of detail, while important to the story, is why I do not read a lot of hard
science fiction. I find the whole mathematical details boring. The book’s
comedy sort of wanes as it progresses, which is another thing I found
distracting (and the whole atomic explosion that destroyed villages and killed
and injured many villagers is just weirdly out of place), but I’m glad I read
it.
Plus, I sort of liked the cover. I acquired it a year ago when I was in
Portland during the filming of Something Like Summer and I just found this
British edition worthy of a purchase at Powell’s. So sue me for buying a book
because of its cover.
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