Books Read

[dsrtao]

90. A Pocketful of Stars, by Margaret Ball

Stop me if you've heard this one before: it turns out that magic is done by thinking about the right kinds of mathematics in the right way. Unlike the Laundry Files, however, this series (Applied Topology; 7+/-2 books as of April, apparently) seems to be tilted a little ways away from horror and towards comedy and perhaps romance, or at least lust intermingled with bad decision-making. Not great but certainly good, and likely to be a good remedy when I've read something bleak.

Comments

[alexxkay]

Didn't The Compleat Enchanter also work similarly?

[dsrtao]

The mechanism for travelling between universes was to write down their physical laws in symbolic logic and think about it really hard; other forms of magic were, I think, akin to physical laws in those universes and were only more accessible to the protagonists by virtue of being known. The ability to fly rugs in the Thousand Nights and a Night didn't mean that you could levitate back on Earth.

In both the Laundry and the Applied Topology 'verses, doing the math in your head is always applicable.