2015 modern fantasy. Magic is in the world, but "'mancers" only use it
to cause chaos – and it's still true that nothing is free. Flex is a
drug, distilled magic, but the mundanes who take it are even less able
to deal with the backlash than the 'mancers are. Paul Tsabo, ex-cop
and once known as the only mundane to have killed a 'mancer, tries to
track down the terrorist who's filling people with Flex and sending
them out to destroy themselves and others.
There are obvious parallels with Myke Cole's Shadow Ops series:
Europe is an unvisitable hellhole (though this time it's because too
much concentrated magic allows chaos and demons into the area, which
here happened during WWII), and magicians are either nasty evil
criminals or in the Army. But it's a vastly better book.
Paul, of course, becomes a 'mancer, and has to try to balance that
with thinking of himself as a good person. Magic here is the product
of obsession: be sufficiently unhappy, be sufficiently determined to
escape into a specific activity, and that activity can become the
source of magic for you, such that your own beliefs determine the
power you have. Paul, a detail-freak who's been working in an
insurance office since a 'mancer destroyed his foot before he killed
her, finds that he has drifted into being a bureaucromancer: his power
is in forms and routine and procedure. Another major character is a
videogame-mancer: she can manifest first-aid kits and Portal guns, or
re-skin herself to look completely different.
But all this comes at a price: the more improbable things you do to
make good stuff happen, the more the universe needs to make bad stuff
happen back to you. That's also channelled through the subconscious,
and it means you lose the things you care about. Active 'mancers don't
tend to have cars, or homes, or long-term friends, any more. On the
other hand, magic is beautiful: it's the thing you care about most
in the world, given physical form.
So yeah, this is clearly a magic as drugs metaphor, but it manages
mostly to avoid cliché. Paul is, as all 'mancers must be, a rather
broken person: his wife has divorced him, his daughter's been badly
burned in one of the Flex-inspired events, and now he's realised he
has an illegal power. If he turned himself in, he'd be brainwashed to
the point he wouldn't have a personality any more, and become a
Unimancer for the Army (what one knows, all know). Or he could track
down the mysterious "Anathema" behind the attacks, while also trying
to get proper medical treatment for his daughter (it's an American
health-care system after all), and to stop his flux from rebounding on
her.
It's all decent stuff, and I particularly liked the appreciation that
having Great Power doesn't necessarily solve all one's problems. By
the end of the book Paul is still divorced and still on uneasy terms
with his ex-wife; his daughter is still burned and getting treatment,
not magically healed (in fact magical healing never gets mentioned
here, presumably being too prone to flux backlash); a drug-dealing bad
guy still has something of a hold on Paul.
Because although each magician is different, they can all make Flex:
it's distilled magic, squashed down into crystalline form. Most of it
carries its own flux with it, but occasionally the flux can be shifted
somewhere else, at which point the user can do magic without
consequences. Everything just works out for him: a gun fired at him
blows up in the firer's hand, he trips just in time to avoid a blow,
the woman he wants to pick up has just had a fight with her boyfriend.
(And even that doesn't make people's lives perfect…)
There are flaws: in particular, what characters can achieve or even
think of trying tends to wax and wane with the needs of the plot. Paul
tends to go on and on in his internal monologue about how he's a
terrible father and horrible person in general. Valentine, the
videogame-mancer, has a bit more of a sense of fun, but everyone else
in the book is pretty one-note. Some of the plot twists are distinctly
predictable. It seems odd that there should be so many recognisable
named elements of the modern world (particular TV shows and video
games) in one that diverged from our own over seventy years ago.
But this is a first novel, and in spite of the flaws it's a
distinctly good one. Followed by The Flux.
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