Here's Why

Midnight Lamp

“Midnight Lamp” by Gwyneth Jones, was a fun, engaging view of a future not very far from now when the instability of Britain predicted by Ken Macleod and other authors has come to pass. Rockstars have taken control. The world has quietly been complicated by the discovery of “effective magic” and “Zen Self” technology, accessing the “information space” that underlies reality and the rockstars are at the heart of it.

This is the third in the series starting with “Bold As Love” and “Castles Made Of Sand”, which I haven’t read yet. Jones is such a good writer that I had no trouble with starting the story AFTER the major magical battle between the heroes and the monster. She gets the best of both markets by having very English rockstars wandering around a very American Hollywood landscape.

The three-way romance between the rockstar heroes is believable and touching. Ax, Sage, and Fiorinda are all walking wounded, but all are a lot more than they appear to be and always looking out for each other. Ax Preston, with his digitally animated skull mask, is the super-powerful rockstar Ozzie Osbourne fantasized about being, and like Osbourne, he’s now older and trying to cope with responsibility and having survived his youth. Sage is a bodhisattva, brought to Zen enlightenment by information space technology, and returned to the Earth with wisdom, but badly injured and recuperating from his magical battle. Fiorinda is a fragile, beautiful redheaded diva who has effective magic without any technology, but who dare not use it because of the schizophrenia the magical battle has brought upon her.

The heroes are in retreat on a beach in Mexico when they get drawn into an American plot to “weaponize” effective magic by the Pentagon. Somebody wants to use black magic to pump a talented candidate up to “Fat Boy” status - a human weapon of mass destruction. The rockstars have to stay free of other people’s plans and save the world.

Midnight Lamp will be published by Allen and Unwin in Australia in February 2004, don’t miss it.

Bold As Love website

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Physics, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, Cisco CCNA tutor, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to professional writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Discovery science show on radio 2SER 107.3Fm Mondays at 9am in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Discovery sound archives.