Wizard's Bane

Published Information

Author:	Rick Cook
Series:	The Wiz Biz
Published:	October 1997
Genre:	Fantasy
Pages:	Online

Ratings

Violence:	PG-13 (Fantasy violence, one graphic scene)
Sexual Content:	PG
Language:	PG-13 (B-word, Sh-word, Lord's name)
Reading Age:	High School
Buy Recommend:	Borrow (Niche story)
Overall Rating:	4 out of 10 (Not best writing)

Plot Summary

The book is about a systems programmer, Wiz, from Cupertino who is summoned to a magical world to help good wizards overcome the evil wizards. When he is summoned, the wizard who did the summoning casts an infatuation spell on him so that he will follow a beautiful hedge witch, Moira, around. The wizard is then killed by the evil wizards who have been looking for just such a summoning. Through most of the book, he is fairly useless and causes more problems than he solves.

But he then discovers that magic can be structured like a computer program and builds a compiler, assembler, etc, that allows him to write magic programs that no one has ever seen before. At this point, Moira is captured and he must use his programs to find and save her before she is killed.

Comments

This is actually one of my favorite books of all time. I have read it several times and will probably read it more. But, this book is not the best fantasy I have read by a long shot. In fact, it is fairly simply and in some cases predictable. It also seems like the writer's original profession was not writing. But it is a quick and enjoyable read.

As mentioned above, I love the idea that magic can be controlled by programming. Being a programmer, this is one of those books that just appeals to me. That being said, there are very few people I would recommend this to. I recommend it to every programmer I know, but no one else.

Note, the entire book is available online for free. Click on the book image to go there.