A Wizard in Peace
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
IN A POLICE STATE, LIBERTY IS TREASON
Interstellar liberator Magnus Gallowglass, the renegade psychic wizard, travels the stars fighting injustice and oppression. But this time the Rogue Wizard may have encountered a tyrant even he can’t overthrow: a stern Protector whose oppressive regime makes Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth look like a Sunday-school picnic.
For hundreds of years, this lost colony planet has preserved order by dictating every detail of its citizens’ lives—where they live, what they think, even whom they may love and marry. Any dissent is punished with the torturer’s rack.
So successful is this brutal system that Magnus is hard-pressed to find anyone willing to oppose it—until he recruits a pair of star-crossed lovers to lead the revolution, and reeducates a band of deluded would-be aristocrats to become the planet’s new rulers.
Here is Christopher Stasheff in top form: swashbuckling, stylish, and slightly subversive adventure from the author of the bestselling Warlock of Gramarye series.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Interstellar fix-it men Gar and Dirk and their trusty computer, Herkimer, battle injustice again in Stasheff's fourth Chronicle of the Rogue Wizard (after A Wizard in War). On a long-lost colony world, Puritanism, "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," has dominated the lives of the planet's citizens for a thousand years. To combat Puritanism and its Cromwellian Protector, who rules with an iron fist, Gar--aka Wizard Magnus Gallowglass--recruits dissenters such as Miles, who's fleeing from a state-mandated marriage, Orgoru, a quixotic misfit, and Ciletha, an embryonic feminist. Stasheff's usual wit is in sleep mode here, overwhelmed by gratuitously grisly torture scenes and heavy-handed injections from the Bill of Rights. Insipid characterizations and limp dialogue will enhance only the ennui likely to strike all but the most loyal Stasheff fans.