Books: The Ambivalent Magician by Simon Hawke (1996)

“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.