Oddities from My Bookshelf: The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster
Yeah, this happens but it’s not the image I’d’ve chosen.
Sometime during my youth I picked up a copy of Wizard War, by Hugh Cook. I like wizards. Fantasy war is often entertaining. Seemed like a natural choice. Nevertheless, as often happens, it sat on my shelf for a couple of years before I got around to reading it.*
It wasn’t what I was expecting. Oh, the magic system intrigued me, but that is to be expected. What surprised me is that it was less a battle of good and evil and more about interesting characters opposing each other because of how they viewed the world. I read it, enjoyed it, and moved on. After all, it was a standalone novel.
Or so I thought.
Years passed, perhaps a decade, and I ran across the author’s name again on a book called The Hero’s Return. It had a subtitle: Wizard War Chronicles III. Three? This was a series?** Well, they had book three but not book two, and who knew when I would ever find book two? I sighed and moved on.
But I kept thinking about it, and the internet kept expanding. Finally these two factors came together and I decided to dig around for what I could find out about this series. It turns out that Wizard War was the American title of The Wizards and the Warriors, a British book with a more accurate title. The Wizards and the Warriors was the first novel in a ten volume series called Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. The series covers a period of thirty years, with each book taking the perspective of a different character (although some main characters show up as minor characters in other books).
The series sounded deep and fascinating. And here I had only the first book.
I think you see what’s coming. I listed the titles of the series and kept it on me whenever I visited a used book store. I tagged the books in Paperback Swap in case any surfaced. The books had been reissued in expensive trade paperbacks (over $30 each), but I wanted the old mass market paperbacks. They had better cover art.
I built up my collection slowly over the course of more than a decade, a copy here, a copy there. By 2010 I had all the books except one: The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster. That one seemed impossible to find. It hadn’t even been reissued in the trade paperback the way the others had. Instead the author put it up on Lulu for about $40 ($20 for the .pdf).***
Two weeks ago I got the e-mail notification from Paperback Swap: a copy had come in and I was first in line, if I wanted it. No picture. No statement about condition. But it was there. I pounced on it.
It’s on my desk as I type.
One of my summer plans now is to sit and read the whole series. I haven’t read Wizard War in some twenty years. After all this legwork, I don’t honestly know if I’ll love these books or hate them. But I get to find out firsthand now, and that has made it all worthwhile.
*This is never a statement about an individual book, just about how backlogged I am on my reading.
**I once asked Holly Lisle how to approach writing a series. She said, “Don’t.” She pointed to limited shelf space in book stores, unavailability of other books in the series, declining orders and so forth. All valid reasons in the old days, and this series was an example of those problems in action.
***Actually, I found a website that says Hugh Cook put it up. But Wikipedia says he died in 2008 and Lulu says the book was posted in 2011, so I don’t know the facts.
