Subject: Prograde Reviews--John DeChancie:MagicNet

From: [email-masked] (Aaron V. Humphrey)
Date: 30 May 1994 21:42:44 GMT

John DeChancie: MagicNet

A Prograde Review by Aaron V. Humphrey

John DeChancie, from my reading so far, seems to be a highly uneven author.
He seems to be at his best with off-the-wall humour; with this book he is
attempting to demonstrate that he can do equally well with straight fantasy.

The book never really clicks, though.  It starts with an interesting enough
premise--computers being used to aid in magic--which, while not original,
still has lots of unmined ideas.  But DeChancie doesn't really mine them
well.

The problem is that the book blurs the boundary between reality and
fantasy, and not in any consistent fashion that I could see.  MagicNet, the
computer-generated magical reality that arose from a simple Fidonet-style
occult discussion network, has somehow become something perceptible without
any computer linkage...but only to a few that are attuned to it, which, for
no reason really explained, our narrator, Skye King, is.  But sometimes
MagicNet is merely a layer of perception laid over our own reality, and
sometimes actions in MagicNet are not echoed in the real world.

Furthermore, the ending is highly unsatisfactory.  Skye, his friend Grant
(who was killed early in the book but, luckily, backed up on floppy), and
their ally Jill, spend most of the book trying to get to Lloyd Merlin
Jones, who had Grant killed and is trying to get rid of the others as well,
so that they can reboot MagicNet, but at the end things get highly
confusing.

I get the feeling that DeChancie is trying to pull off some subtle things
here, but that they're just a wee bit beyond his ability at the moment. 
This book, in other words, was overly ambitious and falls a bit short of
its goals.

%A DeChancie, John
%T MagicNet
%I Avon
%C New York
%D 1993
%G ISBN 0-688-12759-2
%P 234pp
%O Hardcover

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