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Wizards
Donald Tyson answered an improbable ad. Now, heÕs a wizard, and sells magic over the counter like toothpaste, providing invulnerability and perfect health at reasonable cost. Business is brisk, as you might imagine. But who will buy a car when a magic carpet is cheap and doesnÕt need fueling? Who needs doctors or hospitals when no one ever gets sick, or hurt? Soon, half the world is unemployed. ThatÕs bad. But soon, too, dictatorships will vanish, and thatÕs good. How do you oppress people who canÕt be hurt, and who can jump on their flying carpet and cross oceans at will?
194 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2010
5 people want to read
About the author
Jay Greenstein
47 books22 followersFirst, and before anything else, I’m a storyteller. My skills at writing are subject to opinion, my punctuation has been called interesting, at best—but I am a storyteller.
I am, of course, many other things. In seven decades of living, there are great numbers of things that have attracted my attention. I am, for example, an electrician. I can also design, build, and install a range of things from stairs and railings to flooring, and tile backsplashes. I can even giftwrap a box from the inside, so to speak, by wallpapering the house.
I'm an engineer, one who has designed computers and computer systems; one of which—during the bad old days of the cold war—flew in the plane designated as the American President’s Airborne Command Post: The Doomsday Jet.
I've spent seven years as the chief-engineer of a company that built bar-code readers.
I spent thirteen of the most enjoyable years of my life as a scoutmaster, and three, nearly as good, as a cubmaster.
I joined the Air Force to learn jet engine mechanics, but ended up working in broadcast and closed circuit television, serving in such unlikely locations as the War Room of the Strategic Air Command, and a television station on the island of Okinawa.
I have been involved in sports car racing, scuba diving, sailing, and anything else that sounded like fun. I can fix most things that break, sew a fairly neat seam, and have raised three pretty nice kids, all of who are smarter and prettier than I am—more talented, too, thanks to the genes my wife kindly provided.
Once, while camping with a group of cubs and their families, one of the dads announced, “You guys better make up crosses to keep the Purple Bishop away.” When I asked for more information, the man shrugged and said, “I don’t really know much about the story. It’s some kind of a local thing that was mentioned on my last camping trip.” Intrigued, I wondered if I could come up with something to go with his comment about the crosses; something to provide a gentle terror-of-the-night to entertain the boys. The result was a virtual forest of crosses outside the boys’ tents. That was the event that switched on something within me that, now, more than twenty-five years later, I can’t seem to switch off.
Stories came and came… so easily it was sometimes frightening. Stories so frightening that one boy swore he watched my eyes begin to glow with a dim red light as I told them (it was the campfire reflecting from my glasses, but I didn’t tell him that).
Then, someone asked for a copy of one of my campfire stories, which brought me to the word processor. When that was finished, I wondered: could I write something other than technical articles and campfire stories? Something with dialog?
“Something with dialog,” when completed, led to: Can I write in the first person? Do an adventure? A romance?
Having finally sold a few novels (four, to date, the latest to Double Dragon) plus a handful of short stories, I am living proof that if you work at something for long enough you will eventually get it right.
I am, of course, many other things. In seven decades of living, there are great numbers of things that have attracted my attention. I am, for example, an electrician. I can also design, build, and install a range of things from stairs and railings to flooring, and tile backsplashes. I can even giftwrap a box from the inside, so to speak, by wallpapering the house.
I'm an engineer, one who has designed computers and computer systems; one of which—during the bad old days of the cold war—flew in the plane designated as the American President’s Airborne Command Post: The Doomsday Jet.
I've spent seven years as the chief-engineer of a company that built bar-code readers.
I spent thirteen of the most enjoyable years of my life as a scoutmaster, and three, nearly as good, as a cubmaster.
I joined the Air Force to learn jet engine mechanics, but ended up working in broadcast and closed circuit television, serving in such unlikely locations as the War Room of the Strategic Air Command, and a television station on the island of Okinawa.
I have been involved in sports car racing, scuba diving, sailing, and anything else that sounded like fun. I can fix most things that break, sew a fairly neat seam, and have raised three pretty nice kids, all of who are smarter and prettier than I am—more talented, too, thanks to the genes my wife kindly provided.
Once, while camping with a group of cubs and their families, one of the dads announced, “You guys better make up crosses to keep the Purple Bishop away.” When I asked for more information, the man shrugged and said, “I don’t really know much about the story. It’s some kind of a local thing that was mentioned on my last camping trip.” Intrigued, I wondered if I could come up with something to go with his comment about the crosses; something to provide a gentle terror-of-the-night to entertain the boys. The result was a virtual forest of crosses outside the boys’ tents. That was the event that switched on something within me that, now, more than twenty-five years later, I can’t seem to switch off.
Stories came and came… so easily it was sometimes frightening. Stories so frightening that one boy swore he watched my eyes begin to glow with a dim red light as I told them (it was the campfire reflecting from my glasses, but I didn’t tell him that).
Then, someone asked for a copy of one of my campfire stories, which brought me to the word processor. When that was finished, I wondered: could I write something other than technical articles and campfire stories? Something with dialog?
“Something with dialog,” when completed, led to: Can I write in the first person? Do an adventure? A romance?
Having finally sold a few novels (four, to date, the latest to Double Dragon) plus a handful of short stories, I am living proof that if you work at something for long enough you will eventually get it right.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 2, 2014
I'm going to start this with saying that Jay and I are internet acquaintances of each other and I think It's safe to say that we don't get on. I've done my level best to be unbiased, but I wouldn't believe it myself if I claimed to be be totally without bias here. Please bear that in mind.
There's an old saw that every Science Fiction author writes a novel where they expound on their idea of utopia, to varying degrees of success. Wizards fits easily into this category, but perhaps the best thing that can be said about it is that it came early in Mr Greenstein's career. With a narrative that's best described as uneven, characters that are hard to differentiate and little thought to the general consequences of the plot, Wizards simply does not do the great idea at its core justice.
The central conceit of Wizards is that wizards begin to appear around the world, offering magical amulets to anyone willing to pay or in dire need. At first these amulets merely promote health and healing, but later on others are made available, allowing the creation of flying carpets and improving crop yields. This causes the world as we know it to unravel, as the old rules fall apart, promoting a new world where the incorruptible wizards run things.
The central problem with the novel is its structure. The novel aims for a multi-threaded narrative, bouncing between multiple characters' perspectives, but this system falls short far more often than it succeeds. The first half of the novel focuses almost entirely on the story of Donald, the perspective wizard, detailing both his early days as a wizard and his training under the creators of the magic. The problem is that it doesn't leave space for the development of the other characters and he then drops out of sight for the second half of the novel without anything to really replace him. As a result we get a number of fairly inept and poorly thought out plot lines, none of which are hugely interesting. This culminates in one of the later chapters, which is entirely devoted to a character who doesn't appear at any other point in the novel, making the chapter seem like a short story dropped in to improve the word count.
Unfortunately, these plot lines would be far more interesting if they actually contained interesting characters. There's a constant blandness to many of the characters that makes them hard to tell apart and hard to care about. There's a repetitiveness to the character arcs that really drains the interest (I'm trying to think of a perspective character that isn't either a wizard or end up one by the end of the novel and I can't) and this predictability just doesn't work very well. All the wizards are so inherently decent that they're never very interesting.
However, it's worth pointing out that the female characters are, if anything, worse. Every single one is basically defined by their romantic relationship with a male character, with little to their character beyond this. Worse, their relationships are presented almost entirely as rewards for virtuous behaviour. Almost every time a male character decides to become a wizard, they get to marry their loved one at the same time. It's both repetitive and more than a little offensive.
The mark of a really good novel of this style is just how well it covers the global changes. Unfortunately, Wizards doesn't really do this. Firstly, with the exception of a chapter set in Israel, the vast majority of this is set in America or some unspecified part of the West. There's no consideration of other cultures or the like. It would have been far more interesting to see how countries like China and North Korea would handle things than some of what's actually in Wizards. Scenes from the perspective of characters other than prospective wizards would have made this significantly more interesting.
Yet part of the problem here is that when it does step outside of its comfort zone, it's almost entirely terrible. There's a wonderful moment when it's revealed that the response of Arabs to wizards has been entirely to buy a health amulet to make themselves unkillable and then try and kills as many Jews as possible (It's worth pointing out that this happens during a Presidential briefing, so it's not like the person saying this is supposedly a bigoted idiot). It's an ugly piece of lazy stereotyping that's also astonishingly inaccurate. Given the context of what actually happens in the novel, it seems more likely that the author wanted to say 'Palestinians' and just didn't, not that I find this much better on the stereotype front. Another more plot relevant point is almost as bad. It's explained early on that Jews refuse to use magic as it's against their religion, but there's no similar prohibition displayed in any other religion. This would, of course, include Christianity, which shares the same ban on magic as Judaism.
The final nail in the novel's coffin is the ending, which means that any explanation of it is full of spoilers.
In total, Wizards is that most disappointing of novels: the terrible waste of a good idea. Even without its genuinely awful ending, it consistently lets itself down with dull, uninteresting characters, a world that is blindingly underdeveloped and a tendency towards trite answers to hard questions.
There's an old saw that every Science Fiction author writes a novel where they expound on their idea of utopia, to varying degrees of success. Wizards fits easily into this category, but perhaps the best thing that can be said about it is that it came early in Mr Greenstein's career. With a narrative that's best described as uneven, characters that are hard to differentiate and little thought to the general consequences of the plot, Wizards simply does not do the great idea at its core justice.
The central conceit of Wizards is that wizards begin to appear around the world, offering magical amulets to anyone willing to pay or in dire need. At first these amulets merely promote health and healing, but later on others are made available, allowing the creation of flying carpets and improving crop yields. This causes the world as we know it to unravel, as the old rules fall apart, promoting a new world where the incorruptible wizards run things.
The central problem with the novel is its structure. The novel aims for a multi-threaded narrative, bouncing between multiple characters' perspectives, but this system falls short far more often than it succeeds. The first half of the novel focuses almost entirely on the story of Donald, the perspective wizard, detailing both his early days as a wizard and his training under the creators of the magic. The problem is that it doesn't leave space for the development of the other characters and he then drops out of sight for the second half of the novel without anything to really replace him. As a result we get a number of fairly inept and poorly thought out plot lines, none of which are hugely interesting. This culminates in one of the later chapters, which is entirely devoted to a character who doesn't appear at any other point in the novel, making the chapter seem like a short story dropped in to improve the word count.
Unfortunately, these plot lines would be far more interesting if they actually contained interesting characters. There's a constant blandness to many of the characters that makes them hard to tell apart and hard to care about. There's a repetitiveness to the character arcs that really drains the interest (I'm trying to think of a perspective character that isn't either a wizard or end up one by the end of the novel and I can't) and this predictability just doesn't work very well. All the wizards are so inherently decent that they're never very interesting.
However, it's worth pointing out that the female characters are, if anything, worse. Every single one is basically defined by their romantic relationship with a male character, with little to their character beyond this. Worse, their relationships are presented almost entirely as rewards for virtuous behaviour. Almost every time a male character decides to become a wizard, they get to marry their loved one at the same time. It's both repetitive and more than a little offensive.
The mark of a really good novel of this style is just how well it covers the global changes. Unfortunately, Wizards doesn't really do this. Firstly, with the exception of a chapter set in Israel, the vast majority of this is set in America or some unspecified part of the West. There's no consideration of other cultures or the like. It would have been far more interesting to see how countries like China and North Korea would handle things than some of what's actually in Wizards. Scenes from the perspective of characters other than prospective wizards would have made this significantly more interesting.
Yet part of the problem here is that when it does step outside of its comfort zone, it's almost entirely terrible. There's a wonderful moment when it's revealed that the response of Arabs to wizards has been entirely to buy a health amulet to make themselves unkillable and then try and kills as many Jews as possible (It's worth pointing out that this happens during a Presidential briefing, so it's not like the person saying this is supposedly a bigoted idiot). It's an ugly piece of lazy stereotyping that's also astonishingly inaccurate. Given the context of what actually happens in the novel, it seems more likely that the author wanted to say 'Palestinians' and just didn't, not that I find this much better on the stereotype front. Another more plot relevant point is almost as bad. It's explained early on that Jews refuse to use magic as it's against their religion, but there's no similar prohibition displayed in any other religion. This would, of course, include Christianity, which shares the same ban on magic as Judaism.
The final nail in the novel's coffin is the ending, which means that any explanation of it is full of spoilers.
In total, Wizards is that most disappointing of novels: the terrible waste of a good idea. Even without its genuinely awful ending, it consistently lets itself down with dull, uninteresting characters, a world that is blindingly underdeveloped and a tendency towards trite answers to hard questions.
December 15, 2011
Good idea...God awuful writing.
This and two other books by Mr. Greenstein were passed down to me on a reader I recently got from a friend. Had I actually paid for any of these books, I would request a refund.
The writing is nothing short of the atrocious attempts of an amateur.
I found the voice of the author to be unwelcoming and strained, the POV, in most cases, seemed displaced, the dialog was contrived and unrealistic. Descriptive text was fuzzy and for much of the book it seemed to drone on and on, without being very informative or entertaining,(as if the author liked to read his own prose), the opening scene is a perfect example of this.
I'm sorry Mr. Greenstein, but I could not finish this book.
This and two other books by Mr. Greenstein were passed down to me on a reader I recently got from a friend. Had I actually paid for any of these books, I would request a refund.
The writing is nothing short of the atrocious attempts of an amateur.
I found the voice of the author to be unwelcoming and strained, the POV, in most cases, seemed displaced, the dialog was contrived and unrealistic. Descriptive text was fuzzy and for much of the book it seemed to drone on and on, without being very informative or entertaining,(as if the author liked to read his own prose), the opening scene is a perfect example of this.
I'm sorry Mr. Greenstein, but I could not finish this book.
April 14, 2022
Has the potential to be great but needs severe editing.
August 13, 2010
If you think this is like Harry Potter, you're totally off!!
The real premise is that you have to imagine you live in a world with wizards, you can get amulets for protection against violence, amulets for health, an amulet you can sew into a carpet and fly ...sounds great, doesn't it? But what happens to all the doctors and nurses when nobody gets sick anymore? The insurance companies? (I'd be out of a job!; and then you wonder, where are these amulets coming from? The wizards get them from somewhere, but from where? And why?
I think it's worth reading, and it's only about 170 pages, but I didn't really like the way the different sections are arranged.
The real premise is that you have to imagine you live in a world with wizards, you can get amulets for protection against violence, amulets for health, an amulet you can sew into a carpet and fly ...sounds great, doesn't it? But what happens to all the doctors and nurses when nobody gets sick anymore? The insurance companies? (I'd be out of a job!; and then you wonder, where are these amulets coming from? The wizards get them from somewhere, but from where? And why?
I think it's worth reading, and it's only about 170 pages, but I didn't really like the way the different sections are arranged.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews