Customer Reviews

The Magic Goes Away

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Niven outdoes himself in this proof that the master of sci-fi is also the king of fantasy. Look for the spinning disk that uses up avalably mana. the inspration for nevinrals disk in the magic the gathering card game. the concept of a nonrenewably mana pool for magic energy found its birth in this classic. a must read for all fantasy fans.

Most of Larry Niven's considerable oeuvre takes the form of the Heroic Quest,but using the vocabulary of hard science fiction. In "The Magic Goes Away", he leaves the space ships and gravity generators on the shelf, and addresses the Quest directly.
In doing so, he reveals a level of poetry of language and sensitivity of characterization that is rare in any genre, and unheard of in science fiction. "The Magic Goes Away" is in a class with "The Circus of Doctor Lao" and "Green Mansions": Small, easily-read fantasy novels that will stay in your mind forever.

It's a classic. Saying this needs some work is like saying that Snow White and the Seven Dwarves wasn't good enough.

The latest Niven book 'The Burning City' looked interesting, and having heard that 'Magic..' was a prequel-of-sorts, I decided to read it first.

This was my first experience with Niven and if it's representative of his body-of-work as a whole, I can see why he regularly collaborates with others...he's not very talented with the written word.

Most of this book was stilted throughout. Topping that off, it's just not horribly interesting. Perhaps we can give Niven a little credit for being one of the forerunners of the modern fantasy boom, but calling this book a classic isn't something I'll ever do.

The fact that other reviewers have remarked on its similarities to a popular children's fantasy game speaks volumes.