Cat Wizards
Oct. 15th, 2017 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday I finished reading 'On Her Majesty's Wizardly Service', also known as 'To Visit The Queen', by Diane Duane. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Visit_the_Queen
It is about cats who are wizards, in the same universe as her Young Wizards books.
It's also a little difficult to summarise, because once you've got the hang of 'regular cats who live in New York, some of them with owners' and 'they do magic' then in the first book you get 'they turn into big cats when they visit an alternate universe full of dinosaur descendent intelligences' and bring that bit along to book two, and *then* it goes all steampunk, with nukes. And alternate timelines. And cats cradle is a game cats play with hyperstrings that make Gates happen? To other places and times and universes, sometimes on accident. And those instant transit gateways are located in regular transit centres, partly because the nature of gates and magic just likes it that way, so the main cats work in Grand Central as gate technicians and they get called to London to work on the gates there. Also there are prophecy ravens. And the Lone Power, Eldest, Fairest and Fallen.
Plus the fate of the cat mummies of egypt is a big plot point.
And they have to stop Queen Victoria from being assassinated.
And retrieve a book. Not a magic book, those are considerably safer.
And there's a whole lot of interpersonal stuff, but with nine life cats, so its simplest to think of them as aliens we live with but cant communicate with yet, so they're familiar and shaped by their interactions with humans and yet here presented as just a non human civilisation that runs intertwined with ours.
So, cat wizards, but... a bit complicated.
I suspect that the difficulty of summarising is why only the two books happened in paperback. I mean I'm sure there's people who'd like reading about cat society, and magic, and worldgates, and dinosaurs, and steampunk Victorian politics, its just difficult to sum up the story in a way that would get the book to its readers.
Also, possibly, difficult to get readers who want all those things at once.
But I do like them, so I'm very much looking forwards to book three, now in convenient ebook form available to buy through the authors website
https://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com/products/the-big-meow-feline-wizardry-3
It is about cats who are wizards, in the same universe as her Young Wizards books.
It's also a little difficult to summarise, because once you've got the hang of 'regular cats who live in New York, some of them with owners' and 'they do magic' then in the first book you get 'they turn into big cats when they visit an alternate universe full of dinosaur descendent intelligences' and bring that bit along to book two, and *then* it goes all steampunk, with nukes. And alternate timelines. And cats cradle is a game cats play with hyperstrings that make Gates happen? To other places and times and universes, sometimes on accident. And those instant transit gateways are located in regular transit centres, partly because the nature of gates and magic just likes it that way, so the main cats work in Grand Central as gate technicians and they get called to London to work on the gates there. Also there are prophecy ravens. And the Lone Power, Eldest, Fairest and Fallen.
Plus the fate of the cat mummies of egypt is a big plot point.
And they have to stop Queen Victoria from being assassinated.
And retrieve a book. Not a magic book, those are considerably safer.
And there's a whole lot of interpersonal stuff, but with nine life cats, so its simplest to think of them as aliens we live with but cant communicate with yet, so they're familiar and shaped by their interactions with humans and yet here presented as just a non human civilisation that runs intertwined with ours.
So, cat wizards, but... a bit complicated.
I suspect that the difficulty of summarising is why only the two books happened in paperback. I mean I'm sure there's people who'd like reading about cat society, and magic, and worldgates, and dinosaurs, and steampunk Victorian politics, its just difficult to sum up the story in a way that would get the book to its readers.
Also, possibly, difficult to get readers who want all those things at once.
But I do like them, so I'm very much looking forwards to book three, now in convenient ebook form available to buy through the authors website
https://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com/products/the-big-meow-feline-wizardry-3
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Date: 2017-10-16 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-16 08:13 am (UTC)