“Trapped
in a parallel universe, Dr. Marvin Brewster marshals his renegade nation of
brigands, dragons, trolls, vampire elves, and the runesword Dwarfkabob to
challenge evil wizard Warrick Morgannan. The Doc
is unaware that his time machine has fallen into the hands of Warrick,
who keeps putting people into the machine and making them disappear…only to
reappear in our world, where a British tabloid reporter stumbles on what may be
the biggest story of his life. Frustrated in his efforts to learn the secret of
the time machine, Warrick turns his magic on the Narrator, the disembodied
"voice in the ether" that only he can hear, determined to find a way
to interfere with the Narrator's mysterious ability to control events. Despite
everything, Warrick eventually plays the role of destiny
and changes the path of the ambivalent magician--while it's being written.”
This last book is a bit funnier
and a lot weirder than the previous, it’s also a bit more complex and “Fantastic
Metafiction” than the previous two. This may explain why it took him some time
to complete. The first two books came out about the same time, a year apart,
1992 and 1993 respectively. But this last book was released three years later,
in 1996. This also explains the differences in the cover design of this book. I would
assume had the third book been released in 1994, the same artist would’ve the
cover just like the previous two. I could see more than a few people who need a
certain continuity a bit upset that this last book does not look like the first
two.
Part of this shows up in the
first chapter (though it’s more an Author’s Note), where The Narrator (AKA,
Simon Hawke) is having a conversation with his fictional villain, Warrick
Morganann. The Bad Magician is the only person who can hear The Narrator and
thus for Teddy the Troll, Warrick’s servant, a terrifying experience. Anyways,
The Narrator talks about the difficulty he’s had completing this third book: “Oh,
indeed. This is rather inconvenient. Your faithful narrator wasn’t ready to
start working on this book, yet. I have too many other things to do. My desk is
piled high with papers from my students; I’ve got to complete more revisions on
another novel I have been working on; I’m finishing up work on a graduate degree;
my checkbook is hopelessly, unbalanced, and the last thing I need it right now
was this.”
When Warrick threatens a reckoning on the narrator, we get more “Fantastic Metafiction” moments: “Reckoning, schmeckoning. I haven’t been hiding, I have been busy. Look, I’ve got enough trouble with the readers pestering me about when the next book in the series is coming out without having one of my characters start interfering with my writing process. Now get out of my computer and slither back to the depths of my subconscious where you belong. I’ve got work to do.”
Hawke then must get the reader caught up after a three year gap between books: “How am I supposed to summarize what happened in two novels in a couple of short and cognizant paragraphs? If I go on too long, my editor say it’s an ‘expository dump’ and then I’ll have to cut it. If I don’t cover it well enough people write me letters and complain that the first chapter was confusing, and they found the rest of the novel hard to follow. I just don’t know how guys like (Piers) Anthony and (Robert) Aspirin do it. They write the series that go on forever and the sort of thing just doesn’t seem to bother them.”
The final moment of chapter one/author’s note comes out this way: “Oh, right we
were still trying to get the story started properly. Damn that Warrick, anyway
I haven’t had this much trouble since I wrote those Battlestar Galactica novels
back in the early 80s. Don’t ask, I don’t wanna talk about it. Just forget, I
mentioned it, OK? It wasn’t me. It was at other guy, what’s-his-name. I just
got confused there for a moment.” Not sure what difficulty he
had with those books, but both were released under his birth name of Nicholas Yermakov.
In chapter five we get another “Fantastic Metafiction” moment: “Look, don’t tell me about
courage, all right. You try making a decent living as a writer. I wrote a book
connected to a popular television series about a starship and his crew and it’s
been a month since I delivered it, but I still haven’t been paid. Meanwhile,
the bills keep piling up. Do you think Magic is tough? Try dealing with
publishers.” That is a reference to a Star
Trek: The Next Generation novel he wrote (Blaze of Glory) that was released
in 1995. Chapter five also features
cameos by three characters from his TimeWars series, Lucas Priest, Andre Cross,
and Finn Delaney.
And then the ending…which is
not so much an ending, but a clever alternate take on –I guess- Blazing Saddles
ending. As with the other two books in this series,
Hawke lets himself get all tangled up in too much minutiae, but I found
flipping ahead a few pages was usually enough to get back on track. It makes no literary advances to the genre, but I don’t think
it needed to. In the end, they proved a perfect beach or travel reading.
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