But some odd matters obtain. The youths never seem to age, remaining perpetual adolescents, thus forever postponing their graduation in a perpetual imprisonment. They have strange quasi-memories and dreams. And they are beginning to exhibit weird powers. Vanity can detect or create hidden passages. Amelia can see and reach into hyperspace. Victor manipulates matter mentally. And so forth.

Such is the setup we encounter in Orphans of Chaos (2005), the first book in this trilogy. By the end of this lead-off novel, our quintet have discovered that they are key players—the children of the four realms of Chaos (Vanity being a slightly different but equally potent breed)—enrolled willy-nilly in a supernatural war of monsters and gods to determine not only certain heavenly victories but also the continued existence of the entire material universe. Learning this, they've tried to escape the school and been recaptured and mind-wiped.

In Fugitives of Chaos (2006), after much hardship and fighting, the five friends reclaim their identities, mature in their abilities and succeed in stowing away on the Queen Elizabeth II, heading for New York, where they hope merely to live out normal lives. But once more they are attacked.

This final book opens precisely where the second left off. The children endure a huge sea battle but emerge out of it intact and free. In their magical Silvery Ship, summoned by Vanity, they reach not New York, but, anomalously, San Francisco. A brief sojourn in the city makes them realize they must isolate themselves from humanity, whom they endanger simply by existing. They find a deserted Polynesian island where they can refine their powers. The complex emotional dynamics among the five hormonally charged teens play out at length.

Returning to California for more supplies, they are detected by their enemies once more when Amelia makes a slip, and are drawn into a long involved apocalyptic combat that ranges across numerous dimensions and occupies almost the entire last half of the novel.

Sci-fantasy gets a masterful reworking

Science fantasy is a blend that requires enormous skill to bring off. The author must mix the improbable with the probable, the fanciful with the hard-nosed, the rational with the supernatural. Luckily, John Wright is just the man for the job. In his first trilogy, The Golden Age, he proved he could write hard-core post-singularity SF. His next duology, War of the Dreaming, saw him crafting Hodgson/MacDonald-style fantasy. In this new series, he effortlessly blends the two.

Astute readers will detect flavors here of Philip K. Dick (the games with the nature of reality); A.E. van Vogt (the recomplicated shifting alliances); Roger Zelazny (the mythology mixed with contemporary slang); James Branch Cabell (the droll speech patterns of Boreas, the school's headmaster); Clark Ashton Smith (the descriptions of otherworldly realms); A.A. Attanasio (the gnostic interplay between gods and humans); C.S. Lewis (the Narnia-style trope of teens with noble secret identities); and so forth and so forth, with more allusions that I've probably even overlooked.

This kind of homage-laden, deep-lineage fiction can get over-intellectual and stultifying in the wrong hands. But Wright keeps it fresh and sprightly, mainly thanks to never losing sight of the teenage high spirits of his protagonists, especially his perfect narrator, Amelia. But I did find the series a little tiresome now and again in two aspects, which explains the less-than-perfect rating above.

The rules of magic here are continually being redefined as the children learn more. A realistic process, perhaps, but one that requires constant mental readjustments on the reader's part. Compare this series to, say, Steven Gould's Jumper (1992). There the "magical" power of teleportation is swiftly and simply outlined and the paradigm remains constant. This allows more room for character development and plot. But here the children spend so much time dissecting and refining their theories, with new developments thrust at them continously, that the reader feels occasionally like he's the one trapped in school.

Second, Wright favors numinous Doctor Strange dimensions for much of the action. The arcane and necessarily incompletely adumbrated nature of these imaginary realms comes off second best to the scenes where the quintet mingle with humans amid concrete settings.

A little more Thorne Smith and a bit less Steve Ditko would have gone a long way.