Saturday, December 30, 2017

Books read in 2017: No. 50 -- The Planet Wizard

by John Jakes

Started: Dec. 26
Finished: Dec. 30

Notes: What some might not know is that before he became known for his sweeping historic novels, Jakes was a science fiction and fantasy writer, even being known for his Sword & Sorcery creation, Brak the barbarian. I've read a handful of Jakes' fantasy short stories over the years, but until now I've never enjoyed a longer novel of his in the speculative genres.

Mini review: More science fiction than fantasy, or maybe space fantasy, with even a touch of Sword & Planet. A few generations after two planets went to war and nearly destroyed one another, one of the planets is mostly a desert wasteland populated by lizard folk while the other has fallen into something akin to the Dark Ages. On the Dark Ages planet, a con-artist passing himself off as a wizard falls into trouble with the local authorities and is tasked with traveling to the other planet to exorcise its "demons" and to search for powerful magics. I'm barely touching what this novel really goes into, but I will say this was a fun one to read, more fun than the dark, moody cover by Jeff Jones would imply (not that that's Jeff's fault).

1 comment:

Charles Gramlich said...

Been a long time but I vaguely remember this as a pretty good book. I never read his historicals but sure did like a lot of his SF/fantasy