First Ace Printing: October 1978. First trade paperback edition, issued simultaneously with the mass market paperback. Cover by Boris Vallejo, interior illustrations by Estaban Maroto. Once there was magic in the world ... but hordes of selfish, short-sighted magicians have used up the mana that moved the world, and the magic goes away...
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not as good as I remembered,
By
This review is from: The Magic Goes Away (Paperback)
Here's an overview: Four magicians and a Greek soldier combine forces to find new sources of mana. Mana is what allows magicians to perform magic but it is a resource in limited supply and magicians in the past have squandered the supply away. They use the last bit of mana they can find to travel to northern Europe to find the last living god and steal its mana.I read this book a number of years ago when I was younger. I decided to read it again because my memory of it was good. I can't say the book was bad, but it wasn't great. There were some interesting ideas about magic and the scene of travelling on a cloud still gets me excited (it sounds like fun). If you're into fantasy and magic this book is for you. It's a quick read and the version I have has fantasy drawings on almost every other page. It's almost like a fantasy comic book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Magic with explicit (and not merely arbitrary) constraints,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Magic Goes Away (Mass Market Paperback)
This book of fantasy stories is unusual in that it
postulates a specific reason (the gradual exhaustion
of the world's supply of "mana", which is effectively
the energy source for magic) for the decline of magic
in the world. The stories are concerned with the attempts
of magicians to cope with the exhaustion of this vital
(to them) resource. Niven herein does what he does best -
working out often-surprising implications of what might
happen if techology or natural laws were different in
specific ways. This book works as both fantasy and science
fiction.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The magic indeed went away,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Magic Goes Away (Paperback)
There's a short story by Niven called "Not Long Before the End", to which this book is a kind of a sequel and which, I think, won a Hugo. I guess Niven thought his idea was just too good to squander on a single short story. Possibly: but it was a good short story, and this is a flabby book. A collection of short stories might have been preferable.
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