Subject: Carolyn Cushman: Witch and Wombat

From: [email-masked]
Date: 15 Jun 1994 18:00:12 -0400

Carolyn Cushman is (imo) the Locus's best reviewer.  She also tends to
consistently review books in which I'm interested, so her novel, "Witch
and Wombat", seemed like a good bet.  As it turns out, she does a
competent job within an overgrazed subgenre.  Two subgenres, in fact, as 
the-fantasy-game-is-real intersects self-parodying-fantasy-world.

Hali is a witch.  This means that she lives in a hut, casts curses on rude
passers-by, gives useful if cryptic advice to younger sons who remember to
share their bread, and specializes in making people's lives miserable for
their own good.  Now, however, the magic is going away -- or so claims
Bentwood, the troll who is Hali's supervisor.  (Trolls tend to gravitate
to robbery or management.)  Hali's world is sustained by ours, and people
no longer believe in the right things.  

Bentwood's plan to turn people's imagination in the right direction in to
market his world as a game:  Players will be told that they are travelling
and interacting through a computer-moderated virtual-reality simulation,
whereas in fact their adventures will be real.  The only problem is, it'd
be very bad for sales if the real adventures result in real fatalities, so
he blackmails/bribes Hali (and her familiar, who's turned into a wombat,
because studies show that people think wombats are cute) into guiding the
first group through.  Well, not the *only* problem; there's a more serious
one:  Bentwood hasn't cleared this plan with the monsters' union.

It's competent mind-candy -- a good enough read, but not as good as it
might have been if it hadn't been reworking such familiar material.

%A  Cushman, Carolyn
%T  Witch and Wombat
%I  Warner-Questar
%D  May, 1994
%P  316 pp.
%O  $5.50
%G  ISBN 0-446-60086-5

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Dani Zweig
[email-masked]  [email-masked]

  Watership Down:  
  You've read the book.  You've seen the movie.  Now eat the stew!