Madwand

Madwand is a 1981 fantasy novel by American writer Roger Zelazny. It is a sequel to Changeling.

Madwand
Dust-jacket illustration from the first edition.
AuthorRoger Zelazny
Cover artistRowena Morrill
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreFantasy
PublisherPhantasia Press
Publication date
1981
Media typePrint (Hardcover)
Pages254 pp
ISBN0-932096-11-5
OCLC8388617
813/.54 19
LC ClassPS3576.E43 M3
Preceded byChangeling 

Plot summary

Pol Detson, son of Lord Det, has come home, now a powerful sorcerer of unsurpassed natural ability. But Pol is still an untrained talent, a "madwand". To take control of his powers, to rule in his father's place, he must survive arduous training and a fantastic initiation into the rites of society.

During this process, Pol discovers that he is being monitored by a powerful magician. He has recurrent dreams of opening a portal into another world where a dark bestial erotic magic reigns supreme. Eventually he is drawn to a castle occupied by two magicians who are working to make the dream real, and want him to take his father's place in the scheme, so they can all reinvent themselves as gods in the new world.

Pol's loyalty to the world that he lives in, which will be destroyed by the dark world, causes him to resist and, with the help of a dragon, he stops the portal being opened. One of his enemies is killed and the other flees by flying away. He leaves behind a garment containing a label that says "Made in Hong Kong".

The story implied that a sequel was necessary to complete the story, but no sequel was ever written.

Reception

Greg Costikyan reviewed Madwand in Ares Magazine #13 and commented that "A bad Zelazny, to be sure, is considerably better than a lot of good others; but Zelazny will have to do some work to equal his previous books."[1]

Sources
  • Levack, Daniel J. H. (1983). Amber Dreams: A Roger Zelazny Bibliography. San Francisco: Underwood/Miller. pp. 53–54. ISBN 0-934438-39-0.
  • Chalker, Jack L.; Mark Owings (1998). The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Bibliographic History, 1923-1998. Westminster, MD and Baltimore: Mirage Press, Ltd. pp. 507–508.
gollark: Destroying the Earth is annoyingly hard and expensive.
gollark: People value consistency and fixed numbers even when on average the result is worse.
gollark: It's interesting, but just randomizing the changes would be way too slow.
gollark: Everyone manages some other people and is managed by some too.
gollark: Idea: replace the boring tree structure of hierarchical companies with arbitrary randomly generated graphs.

References
  1. Costikyan, Greg (Winter 1983). "Books". Ares Magazine. TSR, Inc. (13): 42.
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