secrecy-shrouded government project becomes a source of limitless disaster when its scientists lose control over their research. In an instant, the whole arsenal of human technology fails, leaving miners
trapped underground, high-rise elevators frozen in place, food stores rotting in useless refrigerators and communications in disarray. Life-sustaining medical equipment fails, leaving those dependent on it to die, and commercial airliners fall from the sky by the hundreds. In a single moment people are reduced to the most basic of inventions—fire, the wheel and hand-to-hand weapons.
To make things worse, the blackout—as it is originally thought to be—is only the beginning. Many of the survivors find that they are changing, that their inner selves are being expressed in new and disturbing ways. While a predatory lawyer becomes deadly and reptilian, one of his young employees struggles to keep his sister, an aspiring ballerina, from transforming into someone radiant and lighter than air.
Magic Time, by Marc Scott Zicree and Barbara Hambly, follows a scattered group of Americans who each take on the change in their own way. One, an African-American Secret Service agent, travels through the crash-strewn area of the Washington, D.C., airport, searching the wrecks for information his president hopes will reverse the damage. In a town called Boone's Gap, a schoolteacher finds herself becoming more and more like the cats she loves as she organizes civic defenses against the monsters coming out of the town coal mine. Elsewhere, a homeless man begins having visions that lead him to join a small group of New Yorkers who may hold the key to restoring the old order.
To do so, though, he and the others will have to travel the shattered landscape between Manhattan and Boone's Gap, fending off desperate humans, ravenous monsters and the effects of their own transformations.
Characters come first
Magic Time's great strength is its characters—a pleasing cast of heroes whose interdependence and camaraderie draw reader sympathy. The motivations of the New York group, on whom the story is focused, are especially complex and believable. As they respond to danger—from ravenous dragons to violent hoarders—their developing friendship gives the story a genuine warmth. Fans of alternate-family adventures will therefore enjoy this novel greatly.
Hambly and Zicree are less successful in offering a close look at the change which has disabled the world, and which threatens Boone's Gap in particular. The plot is compressed into a short time period, and in that time the scenery provided is all disaster footage. People are caught in the crisis, unable yet to analyze it ... and readers are in the same position. Questions are raised, both explicitly and implicitly, that are never answered. Why do some low-end technologies remain functional while others—ones that seem just as simple—refuse to work? What exactly were the scientists working on ... and for whom? By the end of the novel, the mysteries are unresolved and the heroes still have work to do. It will take at least one more book to get them there.
Another side effect of the disaster-novel format is, of course, that character death forms a large part of Magic Time's emotional impact. Some of the book's more promising characters are thrown away in the process. As if this weren't regrettable enough, many of their deaths are telegraphed. The remaining band of heroes could certainly carry reader interest if they took on the ill-defined threat and—most importantly—carried the day. Unfortunately, the story does not conform to this structure. The result is a book that offers plenty of build-up, but minimal payoff.
