izard, the second book in John Varley's Gaean Trilogy, opens decades after the events chronicled in the opening volume Titan. The sentient world/artifact/creature named Gaea has become a mecca in all dictionary senses of the word--tourists and adventurers flock there, but so do the incurably ill and the hopelessly disenfranchised. In an attempt to become indispensible to the dangerous, warlike people of Earth, Gaea has set about performing miracles--at least, for those who can properly impress or amuse her.
Among the newest supplicants are two wildly mismatched malcontents.
Robin, a tough young witch from The Coven--an all-female separatist commune
orbiting in one of Earth's LaGrange points--suffers from uncontrollable
palsies. Chris'fer Minor is classified as "crazy," but his affliction
doesn't have a name--during his infrequent and unremembered mental
fugues, he becomes wildly violent, horny and lucky. The Gaean consulate
clears only 10 supplicants a year, but Chris and Robin are apparently particularly fortunate; Gaea herself has requested examples
of humans who are crazy or religious.
An even bigger break awaits them inside Gaea. Former NASA
captain Cirocco Jones, now a Gaean demigod, and her "freelance" demigod
friend Gaby, offer to take the pair along on a circum-Gaea trek, where they
might have the chance to perform the unspecified acts of impressive heroism
Gaea demands as payment for healing. Unfortunately, Cirocco has become a
hopeless alcoholic, Gaby has a dangerous hidden agenda, and the seeming
coincidence that brought them all together turns out to be far from coincidental.
A grand and gutsy tall tale
Where Titan starts off almost as an Arthur C. Clarke pastiche and then takes a pulp turn, its sequel Wizard defies such comparisons from the start. If Roger Zelazny was writing quirky-character novels with the precision and detail of Larry Niven, he might come close to this, one of Varley's best. More ambitious than Titan but less overabundant than the trilogy's third volume, Demon, Wizard is a
perfect balancing act between humor and drama, hyperkinetic energy and
intellectual control.
The book's huge scope is typical of Varley novels--the picaresque
protagonists cover hundreds of miles and a dozen wildly disparate and
fantastical settings on their way around Gaea's rim, but they also move in
and out of plot lines, belief systems and points of view like minnows
traversing a marsh. Varley starts off with his characters at comedically
polar ideological opposites (Robin, for instance, sees men as
semi-mythological monsters, non-Coven women as deluded victims of "peckish"
society, and heterosexual intercourse as rape) and moves them together
deftly, providing human concessions without author-itarian compromise. If
the process were at all clumsy or heavy-handed, it might look as though Varley
were trying to preach a humanitarian morality. As it is, he simply seems to
be weaving a grand and gutsy tall tale.
But Wizard goes dramatically further than humor or humanism. It's
also very serious science fiction about a genetic manipulator with the
power of a god and her sentient creations' struggle for self-determination.
It's clever, complex and confusing, but never confused. And it's the
highest point of this roller-coaster series.
