Posted on by TracyC

The Girl Who Owned a City

The Girl Who Owned a City by O. T. Nelson, 1975.

A disease has killed off all of the adults on Earth, leaving only children. In a world without adults, all of the laws, rules, and structure of society are gone, and the children struggle to survive by themselves. When they run out of food in their own homes, they raid the grocery stores and other people’s homes to get more. However, even those sources of food are starting to run out, and they need to find new sources of food. Children are starting to form gangs and raid each other, desperate for food and resources.

In one particular neighborhood, a girl named Lisa Nelson, struggles to look after her little brother, Todd. She also begins to realize how much her friends in the neighborhood are struggling and the dangers around them posed by other kids. Lisa is more practical and organized than many of the other children, and she begins to emerge as the leader of their neighborhood.

Lisa considers where food comes from before it ends up in grocery stores, and she reaches the conclusion that it’s usually transported from farms and stored in warehouses before being shipped to individual stores. Since the adults died, nobody has been taking food from the warehouses to restock stores, so there are warehouses somewhere that are still filled with food and supplies. She recruits help from other kids in the neighborhood to find a warehouse of food and raid it. However, to maintain control and keep the other children organized, she claims ownership over the warehouse and the distribution of food from it. She even threatens to burn the whole thing down if people start raiding it for food without her permission.

If the children manage their resources wisely, they will be secure for a long time while they figure out how to begin producing new food themselves. However, a gang of children from another neighborhood led by a boy named Tom Logan have been raiding the area and attacking children from Lisa’s neighborhood. The children in the neighborhood struggle to defend themselves from Tom’s gang, but Lisa realizes that their neighborhood doesn’t provide adequate defense. The only way the kids from Lisa’s neighborhood will be safe is if they relocate to a place that offers more protection and will easier to defend.

Lisa chooses the high school, Glendbard, as the children’s new home. It’s an ideal location to create a fortress because it’s surrounded by fences and has a limited number of entrances and exits. It’s self-contained, offering many rooms with indoor corridors with facilities in place for the children to use. Lisa persuades the children from the neighborhood to relocate there, set up organized defenses, and move stores of food into their small fortified city.

Under Lisa’s leadership, the new little city of Glenbard is run efficiently, and it offers the children improved safety, but nothing for them is entirely secure. When Lisa is injured in a battle with Tom’s gang and retreats to a farm outside of town with some of her friends, the children consider what the future of the civilization they want to rebuild will be. Tom and his gang are the immediate threat, but sooner or later, there will be others. Tom knows how to raid and conquer, taking things from other people, but he doesn’t have Lisa’s ability to organize, govern effectively, produce new food and supplies, and inspire real loyalty. If everyone is going to survive, they need an effective leader, someone who can organize everyone and make use of their individual talents to grow and protect their society. If Lisa is going to be that leader, she has to not only learn to fight people like Tom but also help them to see her vision of the future.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). The book has also been made into a graphic novel, although some of the details from the original story were changed in the graphic novel.

My Reaction

I remember reading this book in a middle school English class when I was about 13! It has always reminded me of the episode from the original Star Trek series, Miri, about a planet of children living without adults because all of the adults were killed off by a disease that only affects people adolescents and adults. The Star Trek episode is from 1966, older than this book, so if there is a connection between them, it would have been the Star Trek episode that inspired the book.

In the Star Trek episode, when any of the children gets too old, they also start showing signs of the disease, and it eventually kills them, until the crew of the Enterprise figures out a way to cure it. In this book, it isn’t clear whether or not any of the children are going to be at risk as they get older. The implication seems to be that the disease died off with the last of the adults. Presumably, the children who are alive now will live to grow up and will rebuild their society, as long as they can figure out how to manage their resources, develop new food production, and maintain order well enough that they don’t kill each other off.

Dealing with their own fears is as much of a struggle for the children as simply finding food and supplies, and it fuels much of the violence between them. Children who lack resources more than the others and don’t have the imagination, knowledge, or skill to figure out how to get more turn to bullying and violence to get what they need. They are simply desperate for survival and doing what they know how to do, which for some kids, is more about taking from others rather than scavenging for themselves or about using violence and destruction instead of creating and building. Lisa is more successful than most because she’s a thinker and planner, and she has some knowledge about how the world usually works, which she can use to fill in the gaps left by the adults (like realizing the connection between farms, warehouses, and stores and that what’s missing now is people to produce food and transport it to the places where it’s usually stored and accessed by others, so she can trace resources back through the supply chain). Lisa realizes that thinking things through is the key to survival. She has her worries, like the others, but she manages her emotions and directs her focus on making plans and accomplishing things rather than panicking and taking out her feelings and needs on others.

Around the time this story was written, in the 1970s, there were a number of other dystopian books about people needing to rebuild society after a disaster. (See In the Keep of Time Trilogy for an example.) What makes this particular book different from other dystopian books of its time is that other books tended to focus on nuclear war as the reason for the society-ending disaster. The 1970s were part of the Cold War, and nuclear threats were on people’s minds. In this book, though, the cause of the disaster is a disease, and children are the only people left on Earth. All of the infrastructure is intact, and the primary challenge is for the children to figure out how to use it. The focus on children trying to build a society of their own is great for keeping children interested in the story!

One of the things I liked about this book when I was young was how the children adapted the school into a city. Sometimes, I used to imagine how it would be to live in other unconventional places – a library, a museum (like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), or a shopping mall. Some of the features of the school do lend themselves to communal living or a small city. The school’s gates offer them protection from outsiders, the classrooms provide living space, and they have a library, an infirmary, and a cafeteria.

The school in the story is based on a real school. The story is set in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, which is a suburban area near Chicago, where the author lived, and the school, Glenbard, is a real high school there. The children in the story, Lisa and Todd Nelson, are named after the author’s own children.

There is a new graphic novel version of this book. I haven’t read the entire the graphic novel version yet, although I’ve read selections of it. In some ways, what I’ve read so far bothered me because it seemed to me that they made Lisa meaner in the beginning. In the original book, Lisa shares the spoils from her scavenging with other kids, telling them that she would be willing to help them, if they ask her. In the graphic novel, she makes it a point to tell Todd that they got everything they have because they’re smart and work hard, and other people should just learn to do the same. It’s a very conservative/libertarian attitude, but it isn’t completely faithful to Lisa’s original character or the themes of the original story. I have to admit, though, that there are strong connections in the story to libertarian/Ayn Rand philosophy that didn’t occur to me when I was 13 years old because I hadn’t heard of Ayn Rand at that age. As an adult, it jumps out to me more now, and there’s another book reviewer who has noted the connection. The original author was a firm libertarian, which is something else I didn’t know until I was an adult. It just seems to me that the graphic novel version of the book bore down on the callousness of libertarian attitudes, that “I’ve got mine, and screw everyone who doesn’t get their own because I don’t owe you anything that’s mine” kind of attitude, than the original book did.

In the original book, Lisa realizes that she is proud of herself and Todd for learning to survive by their own efforts rather than by resorting to violence and stealing, like other kids have, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t also willing to share whenever she could or thought someone really needed help. The times when she was reluctant to share were when someone had already stolen from her, and she no longer trusted them, not merely because she thought that they weren’t smart enough, not hard-working enough, or too undeserving to merit help. In the original book, Lisa wants to rebuild community and society, and you just can’t be part of a community or society with people who would hurt and betray you if they thought they could get something they wanted for doing that. She does realize that working toward survival is useful for building community and also provides an individual sense of purpose. Like she points out to Jill, who has made it her mission to look after the youngest children, having chores to do and feelings of accomplishment are important to making the younger children feel less afraid because they can see that they have agency (although the book doesn’t use that term), that they are capable of making a difference in their own lives. Lisa works through her own fears and develops her own sense of self-confidence by realizing that she is capable of handling situations, and she wants to help the other kids build that sense of agency and capability. Lisa’s vision for building a new society is for the mutual protection and welfare of everybody, not just self-promotion or personal enrichment. At one point, she thinks to herself how she and her brother can’t focus on just their own survival alone or just getting things for themselves because, for the other kids to be willing to listen to her ideas, they have to be part of the same community with them, sharing their concerns and looking after their mutual welfare. She says to herself, “All the brilliant ideas in the world will be useless if the world collapses around me and I’m the only one left to steal from.”

That’s an issue that I often have in real life with fans of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand focused a lot on how special her main characters were and that society didn’t appreciate how brilliant and how much better they were than other people and didn’t acknowledge how much more deserving they were than anybody else. Frankly, Ayn Rand’s characters strike me as a kind of wishful thinking Mary Sue. As others have pointed out, the only characters considered “good” in any respect in Rand’s books are the ones who agree with her philosophy, and she just completely trashes everyone else. It’s not that Randian heroes are never compassionate, but they only seem compassionate to people who support them or provide personal validation. To everyone else, they’re ruthless, and anybody who disagrees with them is a villain with no positive traits on purpose.

Lisa kind of represents an Ayn Rand type character in the sense that she has more vision of what is possible for the children as they attempt to rebuild society and better organizational skills, but the focus of the original book isn’t about “look how great Lisa is and other people should acknowledge her greatness as the superior person and defer to her.” Lisa has a sense of communal welfare and an understanding that, while she and Todd have managed so far on their own, they really do need other people. She doesn’t want only rugged individualism and competition with everyone else to prove her own worth or place herself above others. Lisa doesn’t seem to see her position as leader of her new society as some kind of reward for being special or better than other people, and she isn’t trying to hoard all she has for herself as the rewards of her hard work or some kind of token that she’s the most deserving of having things. What she gathers has a purpose beyond simply enriching herself and securing her own future welfare.

She is definitely not laissez-faire in her leadership style, either. When she reveals the existence of the warehouse to the other kids and claims ownership of it, she lets everyone know that she can supply them with things they need but she would rather destroy it all if any of them abuses or misuses it. She uses its existence as a tool to gain and keep their loyalty and get them to do what she tells them, which seems a bit authoritarian. However, there are no adults left, and it seems that Lisa has realized that there always has to be an adult in the room to provide guidance and direction. Although she might not realize it, she effectively creates a kind of welfare state that provides housing, mutual protection, food, and other essentials in exchange for labor and cooperation. Providing for everyone is necessary because they’re going to have to keep everyone alive while they’re preparing for their future. The warehouse has a lot of food in it, but it will run out eventually or things will expire, and to provide for their future, they’re going to have to study food production and get crops growing again. It’s going to take time, and for them to make it to that point, they need to regulate their usage of food and supplies. Lisa is acting as the adult to guide that process.

The other kids are expected to participate and contribute in their new society, although not all kids can contribute in precisely the same way or to the same degree because some of them are much younger than the others. This is something that she discusses with Jill, who thinks that younger kids need more protection. In some ways, they’re both right and wrong in their approaches. Lisa proves correct that younger kids are sometimes capable of more than Jill thinks and that they start to feel better about themselves and the frightening loss of their parents when they realize that they can accomplish small tasks. However, Lisa does sometimes expect too much of them, and Jill is correct that little children would be frightened to patrol as night guards and wouldn’t really make intimidating guards against the bigger kids anyway. Lisa has high expectations of others and high ambitions, but her friends help to keep her more realistic about what other kids can do and what their priorities as a new society should be. When Lisa gets carried away with their accomplishments so far and excited about all the things they can do now that they’re free to do anything they want without adults, she talks about learning to fly an airplane, and one of her friends has to remind her that their first priorities should be to secure sources of food and restore water and electricity.

It seems that Lisa provides goods equitably (she doesn’t seem to provide extra to special favorites, elites, or people she deems as more deserving than others in her society) as long as everyone is willing to go along with her plans. Her primary reason for wanting to be in control is to keep the system functional and equitable. She also relies on people like Jill, who have some altruistic motives and are willing to provide nurturing care for the very young and people who are sick or injured, those least able to help themselves without help from someone else. Lisa and Jill don’t have quite the same philosophy, but building a society requires different people with different types of focus. Both of these characters are necessary for building the new society. Jill even takes in Lisa and Todd after their house burns, so Lisa benefits from Jill’s altruism, which gives her the support she needs while she recovers and makes other plans.

In the original book, her leadership and the resources that she has gathered are treated largely as tool that Lisa uses to achieve her ultimate goal of rebuilding a society. Lisa doesn’t seem opposed to the concept of “common good”, and she really wants to be part of a society. She especially wants a society that actually cares about all of its members and provides what all of its members need, and she recognizes that any society that doesn’t care for its members or provide for them sufficiently isn’t going to survive because nobody’s going to want to join something that doesn’t care about them or provide what they really need. Many of these other kids are also her long-term neighborhood friends, so she has some personal feelings for them. They’re not just there as underlings, and they have worth beyond just serving the system or proving themselves as earners.

The original book’s philosophy has some strong libertarian leanings, but it didn’t strike me as being purely libertarian in the way that the graphic novel seems to. From what I’ve read, it seems like the graphic novel doubled down on the more callous and self-centered form of individualism and took away at least some of Lisa’s consideration for other people. For me, it made her a less likeable, sympathetic character and less inspiring as a leader, and these are frequently requirements of mine when I consider literary characters. Just as people don’t tend to join societies with nothing to offer them, I lose interest in books and characters that don’t offer me what I’m looking for. The graphic novel didn’t grab me in the same way the original book did because it took out some of the aspects that appealed to what I was looking for.

Because of the subject matter, this book is best for older children. According to Wikipedia, it’s recommended for ages 12 to 15, and that estimate seems about right to me. There is real violence in the story. The children start using weapons against each other, and Lisa gets a gunshot wound. When her friend is treating her wound, she gives Lisa alcohol to drink because they don’t have any better painkiller.

Posted on by TracyC

The Magicians’ Challenge

The Magicians’ Challenge by Tom McGowen, 1989.

This is the third book in The Magician’s Apprentice trilogy. It picks up soon after the second book, with the magician Armindor, his apprentice Tigg, Jilla, and Reepah the grubber on their way to the city of Ingarron, where Armindor and Tigg were originally from. They’ve already told the people of the city of Inbal of the threat posed by the reen, the ratlike creatures that are scheming to take over the world by finding old forms of lost technology and using them to dominate and destroy humanity.

Before they return to Ingarron, they want to stop in Orrello and take care of some business there, letting that city know about their discoveries about the reen and the ancient technology they’ve uncovered. On the ship to Orrello, they begin to get some insight into one of the pieces of old technology they’ve uncovered – the magnetic compass. When they first found it, they didn’t know what purpose it served. All they could tell about it was that the compass’s arrow always points in one direction, no matter how you move it. When they show it to the captain of the ship, he says that he could see a purpose in having such a thing if it pointed to a place that he knew he wanted to go, and Tigg begins to realize that the compass doesn’t point to a specific place but the general direction north. They still have a concept of north and south as directions, but they don’t think in those terms unless they’re comparing one known location to another known location, which is why they didn’t think of it before. Armindor is overjoyed at the revelation. Their people currently depend on known locations or observing the sun and stars in the sky to find their way, but with a compass (which they consider a “spell” of finding your way), people could navigate even in unfamiliar areas where the sky isn’t easily visible. This is the sort of thought and investigation that “magicians” (scientists) have had to do since the old technologies were lost and forgotten following a great nuclear war. After thousands of years, people are starting to rebuild society and redevelop technological knowledge, but because they don’t yet understand most of the principles behind it, they think of it as “magic” and “spells.”

However, as they are about to arrive in Orrello, they discover that the city has already been attacked by the reen, and many people there are dead. The captain of the ship says it’s not safe to go to the city now, so Armindor asks him to drop off his party further down the shore so they can continue to Ingarron and warn them of the danger. Now that they understand how the compass works, they can use it to find their way. (Although, readers will notice that, because language and writing have changed over the centuries, they don’t understand which of the letters on the compass actually represents “north”, and they think it’s the ‘S’ symbol, so ‘E’ represents “west” and so on. Close enough. They have the basic principle, and as long as they’re consistent, it will still work.)

On the way to Ingarron, they find a young man who escaped from the attack on Orrello. The young man, tiLammis, turns out to be the nephew of an important merchant in Ingarron, and he confirms that it was reen who attacked Orrello. The others are grateful that tiLammis witnessed the attack so he can help describe and confirm their accounts of the reen.

When they reach Ingarron, they are relieved to see that it has not yet been attacked. Tigg is promoted from Apprentice to Novice Sage and becomes a member of the Guild of Sages. They warn the other sages and the Lord Director of Ingarron about the reen, and tiLammis’s account of the attack on Orrello helps to convince them of the danger. Because they know that the reen hide among human populations and spy on them, Armindor says that they will have to make their preparations to protect Ingarron in secret. No one outside of the city leaders and sages should be told about what is happening. Rumors are already starting to spread about the destruction of Orrello, but the city leaders decide to pretend that they think some marauding barbarians are responsible. They discuss the armor and weapons they’ll need and the possibility of making a first strike on the reen by going into the sewers and tunnels beneath the city, where they know the reen are hiding, pretending to be normal rats.

Thanks to Tigg’s deprived upbringing in the streets of Ingarron, he knows someone who could be invaluable – the King of the Ratcatchers, Goorm. The Ratcatchers are a guild of intermarried families who, for generations, have made their profession catching and killing rats, thus eliminating a city pest and providing meat to poor families, who can’t afford anything else. When Tigg approaches Goorm and the other Ratcatchers to explain the problem of the reen and why the city needs their help, he discovers that they already know about it. They didn’t know exactly what the reen were or how many of them there were, but they’ve encountered them before while hunting rats, and they’ve even lost some of their members to them. They’re more than ready to help lead an expedition against them with the help of the city’s soldiers.

There is a complex system of underground roads beneath Ingarron, which the Ratcatchers explain were once above-ground roads because Ingarron was built over the ruins on a much-older city. Sometimes, Ratcatchers even find old artifacts from the Age of Magic (our time) there. The reen have poison darts that kill instantly, but the humans have improvised incendiary weapons made of flammable liquid in bottles. (Basically, they’ve figured out how to make Molotov cocktails, although they don’t call them that. They just call them “fire bottles”, which is descriptive.) The ensuing underground battle between the reens and the humans seems to end in victory for the humans with many reen dead. The humans are quick to celebrate their victory, but the story isn’t over yet. Tigg and Armindor determine that, although hundreds of reen were killed in the human attack, it’s not enough to account for the full reen population. Although the Lord Director and soldiers want to believe that the remaining reen have fled, they haven’t, and the battle has really just begun.

However, as Tigg and Jilla seek shelter from the reen’s retaliatory attack underground, they come face-to-face with the reen and realize that there is more than one faction of reen, including one that might be willing to negotiate instead of fight.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I haven’t talked about religion in this post-apocalyptic future, but they do have a different concept of religion from our time. They are polytheists in the fashion of ancient civilizations, with gods who represent different natural forces, like weather, or different professions, almost like patron saints. However, the names for their gods are completely unfamiliar, not based on any classic mythology. I haven’t explained about this before because they only make passing references to their gods and don’t go too deeply into their lore, so it’s hard to say much about them.

In the last book, they described the origins of one god, Roodemiss, who is the god of sages and “magicians”, and it seems that he might be based on some scientist or astronaut from the past because they describe him as a magician who ascended into the sky in a machine that he built in order to keep watch over the Earth from above during the nuclear holocaust that brought an end to civilization as we know it on Earth. However, they don’t explain any more about him, and he apparently never came back to Earth, which leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Was there supposed to be some kind of space station or maybe a Martian space colony where some humans went? I’m guessing a space colony would make more sense because space stations need to be resupplied from Earth, something that would be impossible for people to continue to do after the nuclear holocaust. On the other hand, because we don’t know who “Roodemiss” is, he might not necessarily be a human being, even though they describe him as being a “magician.” It occurred to me that, just as people in this time don’t really understand the difference between “science” and “magic” or “inventions” and “spells,” they might have gotten the story about “Roodemiss” wrong, and Roodemiss might actually be a satellite that would monitor conditions on Earth from above. Since they really only have legends about Roodemiss and no direct, continuing contact, it’s hard to say. Roodemiss is only represented by an eye because he is supposed to be watching over the world. If Roodemiss was a human in a space ship, space station, or space colony of some kind, we have no information about what happened to him or whatever group he may have been with in the thousands of years that have passed since his time. Sometimes, I wondered if the names of the gods are something that I should recognize, like corruptions of the names of modern people or things that I should know, but I just don’t recognize them and can’t think of what they are or would be, so that might not be the case. If anyone thinks they can recognize what “Roodemiss” or “Badoween” (the weather god) or “Durbis” or “Garmood” are supposed to reference, please comment below.

Part of the reason why I’m talking about religion now is that the Ratcatchers have made their headquarters in what is clearly an abandoned church. Tigg recognizes from the way it looks that it was once a place of worship, but he’s not quite sure what god was worshipped there. He looks at the pictures on the walls and describes seeing winged humans (angels), but he doesn’t know what to call them and doesn’t know what god they are surrounding. It gives him an odd feeling, and he worries about what happens to a god if people forget about him. We don’t know by what process this monotheistic society (we know from the previous book that Tigg’s society is located somewhere in North America) turned polytheistic or whether they will ever uncover their religious and cultural past, but there are remnants of that past still there, waiting to be uncovered, along with lost technology.

In the end, the humans and the reen do negotiate with each other. Although a large faction of the reen have wanted to destroy humans, another faction would really rather just be separate from human society. What they want is to leave human cities and build their own civilization in the uninhabited Wild Lands, where humans normally don’t go. The decision to negotiate isn’t easy for the humans because they don’t trust the reen. They consider possibly attacking the reen as they leave the city because they will be vulnerable, and if they kill them there, they could eliminate an enemy who might return to attack them again later. However, Armindor argues that a sneak attack after a peace agreement would be a dishonorable betrayal. There are also the other communities of reen in other cities to consider. If they hear stories about betrayal and massacre of their kind in Ingarron, it will only fuel their hatred of humans and lead to further war and massacre. Armindor and the other sages have the sense that, even though they don’t really understand what exactly the nuclear weapons that lead to the destruction of the past civilization were, that they were weapons of some kind that were used in a great war, and they don’t want their civilization to go the same way, just when they’re beginning to make some real progress on rebuilding it. The Lord Director is persuaded by their arguments and decides to allow Tigg to carry the message to the reen that they will be allowed to leave the city in peace and go to the Wild Lands.

It seems like a sudden end to the conflict with the reen, but only on the surface. There really are no easy answers. In the last book, the humans made the discovery of a computer with tutorials about ancient knowledge, but although the computer is telling them things they’ve always wanted to know, they first have to understand the language that the computer uses, and that’s going to take time. Even then, they’re going to have to work their way up through simple concepts to more complex ones in order to regain the level of technology that society once had. This agreement with the reen of Ingarron is also only the first step into an unknown future. The reen of Ingarron are only one faction of a much larger reen society that extends to other human cities. The reen have already destroyed and conquered Orrello, and as the book and the trilogy ends, it remains to be seen whether reen in other human cities will favor conquest and destruction or if they will join with the reen from Ingarron in building a new society of their own. They have a shared resentment of humans from generations of being treated like pests that need to be eliminated, but they’ve reached the point where they now have intelligence and abilities that are equal to those of human beings. Whatever happens to them, they now don’t have to live off of the crumbs of human society and can continue to build an independent society of their own. It’s possible that gaining recognition as an intelligent species with a society of their own that must be respected will calm some of their anger and resentment, so their future with the humans may include trading with human society as an independent, sovereign nation, but all of that is left to the imagination. It’s enough to know that all of the societies that now inhabit the Earth, both human and non-human, are beginning to change, and that’s a start.

Posted on by TracyC · 2 Comments

The Magician’s Apprentice

The Magician’s Apprentice by Tom McGowen, 1987.

From the title of this book and others in this series, it sounds like the stories take place in a fantasy world. When you’re reading this book, it seems like fantasy at first, but it’s not. It’s actually science fiction.

Tigg is a poor orphan boy who makes his living in the city of Ingarron as a pickpocket because he has no other means for survival. One night, he notices that a sage has left the door to his house open, and although it’s a risk, he decides to enter and see if he can find anything worth stealing. The sage, a man called Armindor the Magician, catches Tigg. In fact, Armindor had deliberately left the door open for Tigg to enter. When, Armindor questions Tigg about who he is, Tigg says that he’s about 12 years old (he’s unsure of his exact age and defines it in terms of “summers”) and that he has no family that he knows of. He lives with an old drunk who makes him pay to live with him with the money he steals.

Tigg asks Armindor what he plans to do with him. He can’t really punish him for stealing from him because Tigg hadn’t had a chance to take anything of Armindor’s before he was caught. Armindor says that’s true, but he was planning on stealing something, so Armindor tells him that he will do the same to him – plan to take something he has while still leaving him with everything he has. Tigg is confused, and Armindor explains his riddle. He witnessed Tigg picking someone else’s pocket and was intrigued by the boy because he seemed to possess courage, wit, and poise. He left his door open for Tigg because he has been looking for a young person with those qualities to be his apprentice. If Tigg becomes his apprentice, he will have to put his good qualities to use for him, but yet, he would keep these qualities for himself as well.

Tigg likes the praise but has reservations about becoming a magician’s apprentice because an apprenticeship would limit the freedom he currently has. His current existence is precarious, but the long hours of work and study involved in an apprenticeship sound daunting. However, Armindor isn’t about to let Tigg get away. He takes a lock of Tigg’s hair and a pricks his thumb for a drop of his blood and applies them to a little wax doll. He tells Tigg that the doll is a simulacrum and that it now contains his soul, so whatever happens to the doll will also happen to him. If Tigg runs away from his apprenticeship, Armindor can do whatever he likes to the doll as his revenge or punishment. Tigg, believing in the power of the simulacrum and feeling trapped, sees no other way out, so he becomes Armindor’s apprentice.

Although Tigg is fearful and resentful of his captivity as Armindor’s apprentice, it soon becomes apparent that life with the magician is better than what he used to have living with the old drunk. Armindor gives him a better place to sleep and better food. There is work and study, but it’s not as difficult or unpleasant as Tigg first thought. At first, he is daunted at the idea of learning to read and do mathematics, but Armindor is a patient and encouraging teacher, and Tigg soon finds that he actually enjoys learning things he never thought he would be able to do.

Armindor’s magical work seems to mainly involve healing sick people. When people come to him with illnesses, he gives them medicines that he calls “spells.” He keeps a “spell book” with instructions for remedies that he’s copied from other sources. Armindor teaches Tigg about the plants he uses in these spells. Armindor also does some fortune-telling, and he teaches Tigg that, too.

However, Tigg is still uneasy because, although Armindor treats him well, he still has that simulacrum of him, and he can also tell that the money he takes in doesn’t seem to account for his personal wealth. Armindor sometimes goes to meetings with other sages, and Tigg is sure that they’re doing something secret.

It turns out that Armindor is planning a special mission involving Tigg, one that will take them on a journey through uninhabited lands to the city of Orrello. Tigg realizes that if he leaves the city with Armindor, he will be committed to whatever secret plans Armindor has. At first, Tigg wants to take the simulacrum and escape, but when Armindor intentionally leaves the simulacrum unguaded where Tigg can easily take it, Tigg realizes that Armindor is telling him that he’s not really a captive and that Armindor is giving him a choice, trusting him to make the right one. Tigg realizes that he likes being trusted and that he trusts Armindor, too. He decides to stay with Armindor as his apprentice and go with him on his mission.

Tigg and Armindor leave town with a merchant caravan. On the way, the caravan encounters a wounded creature called a grubber. Grubbers are described as furry creatures about the size of a cat and have claws, but they have faces like bears and walk on their hind legs and may be intelligent enough to make fire and have their own language. One of the soldiers with the caravan things that the grubber is wounded too badly to save and wants to put it out of its misery, but Tigg insists on trying to save it. Armindor treats the grubber for Tigg, and it recovers. It is intelligent, and Tigg teaches it some simple human words, so they can talk to it. He tells them that his name is Reepah because grubbers have names for themselves, too. Armindor asks him if he wants to return to his own people when he is well, but by then, the caravan has taken them further from the grubber’s home and people, and he says that he doesn’t know the way back, so he’d like to stay with Armindor and Tigg, which makes Tigg happy.

However, Tigg soon learns that their journey has only just begun. They’re not stopping in Orrello; they’re just going to get a ship there to take them across the sea. Their eventual destination is the Wild Lands, an uninhabited area said to be filled with monsters and poisonous mists. Tigg is frightened, but also feels strangely compelled to see the place and have an adventure. Armindor finally explains to Tigg the purpose of their secret mission.

Years ago, there was another magician in Ingarron called Karvn the Wise, and he possessed some rare “spells” that no one else had. Armindor now has one of these “spells”, which he calls the “Spell of Visual Enlargement.” Tigg describes it as looking like a round piece of ice, and when he looks through it, things look much larger than they really are. Tigg is amazed.

Anyone reading this now would know from its description that what Armindor has is a magnifying lens. Tigg and Armindor don’t know the words “magnifying lens”, which is why they call it a “spell”, but that’s what they have. This is the first hint that this book is actually science fiction, and the “spells” are really pieces of lost technology and knowledge that are being rediscovered. One of Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws of science fiction is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Armindor the Magician thinks of himself as practicing magic with “spells” because he’s doing things and using things he can’t fully explain, but he’s actually a doctor and scientist. He doesn’t fully understand why these things work like they do, but he’s investigating how different forms of science, technology, medicine, and knowledge work, and he’s passing that knowledge along to his student and assistant, Tigg. So, you might be asking at this point, who made the magnifying lens and why doesn’t Armindor understand exactly what it is?

Armindor knows enough to understand that the lens is made of glass, not ice. He knows what glass is, but he says that their people don’t have the ability to make glass that clear and pure themselves. This lens is the only one of its type they have, and it’s more than 3000 years old, from what Armindor calls the “Age of Magic.” Tigg has heard stories and legends about the Age of Magic, when people apparently had the ability to fly through the air, communicate over long distances, and even visit the moon. The events that brought an end to the “Age of Magic” were “The Fire from the Sky and the Winter of Death.”

Spoiler: I’m calling it a spoiler, but it really isn’t that much of a spoiler because, by the time you reach this part in the story, it starts becoming really obvious, even if the characters themselves don’t quite know what they’re describing. This fantasy world is our world, but far in the future. For some reason, thousands of years in the future, so much of our knowledge and technology has been lost, society has reached the point where people don’t know what magnifying lenses are. Also, there are creatures in this world, like grubbers, that don’t exist in other times. Something major must have happened, and it doesn’t take too long to realize what it was. Even when I read this as a kid in the early 1990s, I recognized what the characters are talking about. This book was written toward the end of the Cold War, in the 1980s, and the concept of nuclear winter was common knowledge at the time and something that was pretty widely talked about and feared, even among kids. We know, without the characters actually saying it, that the winter was caused by nuclear weapons rather than an asteroid striking the Earth because Armindor knows from writings that he’s studied that animals mutated after the “Fire from the Sky.” An asteroid or massive eruption can cause climate change due to debris in the air, but they wouldn’t cause mutation like the radiation from a nuclear explosion would. People also mutated, and Tigg and Armindor and other people now have pointed ears. People have been like that for so long, they think of it as normal, and it’s only when Armindor explains to Tigg about the concept of “mutation” that Tigg wonders what people in the past looked like.

Armindor explains that Karvn had a nephew who was a mercenary soldier. One day, this nephew came home, seriously wounded. He died of his wounds, but before he died, the nephew gave Karvn this lens, explaining that it came from a place in the Wild Lands. He said that there were many other types of “spells” and magical devices there left over from the Age of Magic. The nephew and his friends had hoped to make their fortune selling the secret of this place, but there was a battle, in which the nephew was seriously wounded and his friends were killed. He told Karvn where to find this place in the Wild Lands, but Karvn was too old to make the journey himself. He wrote an account of his nephew’s story, and after his death, all of his belongings and writings became property of the Guild of Magicians, to which Armindor also belongs. Armindor has studied Karvn’s writings, and he thinks he knows where to find this place with magic and spells, and he is going there to claim whatever he can find on behalf of the Guild.

There is danger on this journey. These lands, which Armindor says were once one country long ago, are now smaller countries that war with each other. (This is probably the United States and the different lands were once individual states. When they travel across water, I think they’re crossing one of the Great Lakes, although I’m not completely sure. The author lived in Chicago, so I think that might be the jumping off point for the crossing.) There are bandits and mercenaries and the strange creatures that inhabit this land, and it’s difficult to say whether there is more danger from the creatures or the humans.

This book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

I remembered this series from when I was a kid. It made a big impression on me because of the way that technology was treated as magic. The types of futures depicted in science fiction books, movies, and tv series can vary between extremely advanced technology and civilization, like in Star Trek, and this kind of regression to the past, where even simple forms of technology that we almost take for granted today seem wondrous and are the stuff of legends. Nobody knows what the future actually holds, but I thought this series did a nice job of showing how people who had forgotten much of the everyday knowledge of our time might think and feel when encountering it for the first time, knowing that people who lived in the past were once able to make these amazing things themselves and use them every day.

Because of the mutations that have taken place in animals, probably due to radiation from nuclear fallout, some types of animals have become intelligent. The grubbers, who call themselves weenitok, are peaceful, but the reen (which Armindor realizes are a mutated variety of rat) actually want to gain access to old technology so they can conquer the humans and take over the world for themselves. These are Armindor and Tigg’s worst enemies, along with the human they’ve hired to do their dirty work. (Yes, the mutated rats are paying a human mercenary. Even the characters in the book realize that’s weird.)

When Tigg and Armindor finally reach the special place with the magical devices, it turns out to be an old military base. Much of what they find there has been destroyed by time. Armindor tells Tigg to look for things that are made out of glass, metal that hasn’t corroded, or “that smooth, shiny material that the ancients seemed so fond of” (plastic) because these are the things that are most likely to still be usable. Tigg makes a lucky find, discovering a “Spell of Far-seeing.” It’s a tube that can extend out far or collapse to be a smaller size, and it has glass pieces similar to the magnifying lens, and when you look into it, it makes things that are far away look much closer. (Three guesses what it is.) Tigg also discovers a strange, round object with a kind of pointer thing in the middle that moves and jiggles every time the object is moved but which always points in the same direction when it settles, no matter which way the object is turned. Most of what they find isn’t usable or understandable, but they do find four other objects, including a “spell for cutting” that Armindor thinks that they might actually be able to duplicate with technology and materials that their people have. Each object that they find is described in vague terms based on its shape and materials because Armindor and Tigg don’t know what to call these things. Modern people can picture what they’ve found from the descriptions, and it isn’t difficult to figure out what they’re supposed to be. Sometimes, Armindor and Tigg can figure out what an object is supposed to do just by experimenting with it, but others remain a mystery. Armindor explains to Tigg that is what magicians do, investigate and solve these types of mysteries, “to take an unknown thing and study it, and try it out in different ways, and try to think how it might be like something you are familiar with.” (They’re using a form of reverse engineering.) Tigg decides that he really does want to be a magician and make this his life’s work. He’s going to become a scientist.

I liked it that none of the objects they find are any kind of advanced super weapon or a miraculous device that instantly solves all of their society’s problems and launches them back into an age of technology (although there is an odd sealed box that proves to be important in the next book). There are no easy answers here. In the grand scheme of things, they risked their lives for things that nobody in modern times would risk their lives to retrieve, but they have to do it because, although these things are common in our time, they are unknown in theirs. If they can figure out not only how the objects work and what they were supposed to do but why they work the way they do, they can gradually rebuild the knowledge of the past. The objects that they find are generally useful. Some are labor-saving devices, some are examples of scientific principles they would use to create other things (demonstrating concepts like optics and magnetism) and one is a medical device, which if they can figure out how to use it, will help advance their medical knowledge and treatments.

One of the fun things this book inspired me to do was to look at the world around me while imagining that I had never seen some of the basic objects in the world before. This could be a fun activity to do with kids, something like the archaeology activity that some teachers of mine did with us years ago, where we had to intentionally create objects from some kind of “lost” civilization for our classmates to analyze, to try to figure out what they were supposed to do and how that civilization would have used them. But, you don’t even have to create anything if you use your imagination and try to think what a traveler from another time or another world might think if they saw some of the things in your own home right now. Imagine what someone from a world without electricity would think of something even as basic as a toaster. How would you explain such a thing to someone who had never seen anything like it?