Young Wizards
Hi y'all! I'm here to talk to you about my favourite EVER fandom, the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane (on LJ at dduane). Not to be confused with That Other Series about wizards, the YW fandom is tiny and intimate and unfortunately very very quiet. But! There are lots of good things about it, and a ginormous pimping overview is under the cut! NB: There are some giant honking SPOILERS under the cut, starting from the "minor characters" section. Really, you should go out and read So You Want To Be A Wizard and come right back here.
INTRODUCTION
Not to be confused with That Other Series about wizards, Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series commenced way back in 1983 with So You Want To Be A Wizard. Over the last twenty-three years, eight Young Wizards books and two short stories have been published, along with two adult novels set in the same universe (the Cats of Grand Central novels). The ninth book in the main series, A Wizard of Mars, is set to be published some time this year (or next year...), and there’s no end in sight - luckily for the fans. It’s not a big fandom, but it is a friendly one and one that’s very lucky in its author, who chats regularly with fans, publishes excerpts from upcoming novels, is sympathetic towards fanficcers and is generally highly approachable and lovely.
THE PREMISE
Wizardry is real, and it’s not the same thing as magic. YW is separated from almost all other young adult fantasy, and most adult fantasy, in its determination to pay as much attention as possible to the laws of physics and the natural world, a decision which ultimately makes it one of the most satisfying fantasies on the market. Wizardry has its costs: every action has a reaction. Going to the moon? Better use a calculator to figure out how much air you’re going to need, because if you don’t take enough all the wizardry in the world isn’t going to stop an untimely death by asphyxiation. And don’t forget you need to reach escape velocity to leave the Earth. Even the reason for wizards has its roots in science: wizards exist to fight “in Life’s name and for its sake” against the eventual heat-death of the universe, entropy, embodied in the ambiguous Lone Power.
Wizardry is usually performed with the aid of the Manual, a combination spell book, encyclopedia, and guidance manual of the universe. Again unlike most mainstream fantasy, wizardry derives from the power of words in the wizardly Speech, in which it is possible to describe anything and everything perfectly accurately - and thus change it by changing the words used to describe it. With a sufficiently powerful vocabulary, a wizard can speak directly to the Universe and get an answer. It just might not always be the answer desired...
MEET THE CHARACTERS
Juanita Louise Callahan - known on pain of death as Nita - is a wizard, and the main character of the novels. She starts off as thirteen, but by now is probably closer to fifteen (timelines can be problematic when you’re dealing with wizardry); she’d happily call herself a Geekette and a luddite. Her most treasured possession is a battered telescope. She’s an enthusiastic reader, bright and well-balanced, occasionally picked on at school but content in the company of her family and best friend Kit. Like her sister, one of her most defined character traits is stubbornness, and an unwillingness to compromise her own principles... occasionally sending her in the wrong direction altogether. At the beginning of the series, Nita showed wizardly aptitude with living things, especially trees; she has strengths in healing and lately has spent time inspecting and influencing the inner workings of universes themselves. She’s developing a talent for precognitive dreaming. She has a guilty love of horse books and can’t live without potato chips. She’s shipped with Kit, Ronan, and the Lone Power most often.
Why we love her: Nita takes her Oath to defend and care for Life seriously. She’s hard-working and if she decides something needs doing, it’s done: better not face off against her, because if she decides you’re wrong she’ll walk all over you and then she’ll turn you into a soggy beer mat.
Christopher K Rodriguez (call him Kit, or else) is Nita’s best friend and wizardly partner. About a year younger than her, he’s skipped a couple of grades, takes advanced courses and tutors younger kids; he plays pool and spends a lot of time with his dog, Pancho. Keenly intelligent, Kit’s also a sassy, bold Hispanic guy. He’s fiercely committed to his wizardry, with aptitudes with mechanical and inanimate objects (spending some time communing with meteorites and seashores); he’s loyal and insauciant and almost always cheerful. He has a weakness for poetry, particularly Shakespeare. He’s usually shipped with Nita but has a lot of potential; the partnership in canon and out of it between him and Nita is the pivotal relationship of the series.
Why we love him: Nita thinks of Kit that “the only thing that wasn’t casual about him was the way he worked to do what he said he would.” He loves his job and he loves his friends and although he’s not the main character, Kit’s one of the chief anchors. He’s smart and he’s funny and he’s not above giving someone early-onset smoker’s cough if they mess with his friends.
Dairine Callahan is Nita’s ferociously brilliant younger sister. All three of the main characters are bright: but the eleven year old Dairine’s exceptionally intelligent even by their standards. Unlike her sister, Dairine does her wizardry with the aid of her semi-sentient computer, Spot; she’s a very powerful wizard, moreso than any other individual in the series, and as such frequently deals with crises like moving planets and creating timeslides to the dawn of the Universe. Because she’s Nita’s little sister, she’s a brat; and just like Nita, she’s stubborn as all get out. She loves Star Wars and wants to beat up Darth Vader some day, cheats at poker, has taken jiu jitsu lessons and can kick your ass. Her computer, Spot, is an Apple, but his logo does not have a bite out of it.
Why we love her: Dairine has Yoda pajamas and a bad attitude, prodigious wizardly talent and the ability to piss off almost anyone. Also, she’s a redhead.
The Lone Power is the big bad guy of the series, except when It’s not. Wizards exist to combat the heat-death of the universe, or entropy; the Lone Power is the demiurge responsible for creating entropy at the beginning of time, after a knock-down drag-out falling out with his family (especially his close sister the Michael Power or Winged Defender, who appears frequently in canon.) It’s greeted by wizards as “Eldest, Fairest and Fallen”, and is an analogue to Satan- among others. However in later books It has become more ambivalent. It appears in many different forms both make and female, human and non-human, but most commonly appears to Nita as a handsome, redheaded young man in a business suit. He’s frequently shipped with her.
Why we love him: he’s evil and beautiful, pretty much a fangirl’s dream.
RECURRING MINOR CHARACTERS (in order of appearance)
Harry and Betty Callahan are Nita and Dairine’s parents, which is probably something of a trial to them. A Wizard’s Dilemma concerns Betty’s diagnosis with a brain tumour from which she eventually dies, and is the subject of a lot of fic.
Tom “Crazy” Swale and Carl Romeo are Senior wizards, who advise Nita and Kit from time to time. They are universally loved, quick with a joke, patient, sympathetic, and basically saintly. Just don’t ask them to do your wiring unless you’re really unattached to your light fixtures. They have an irascible pet macaw, Macchu Picchu (really a deity in disguise), three dogs (Annie, Monty and Dudley) and oracular koi; they live together near Nita and Kit. Tom/Carl is the biggest slash pairing in the fandom, bar none.
Fred and Ed feature in So You Want to Be A Wizard and Deep Wizardry, respectively. Outside those books they don’t feature, but they do appear in fanfic reasonably frequently; all you need to know is that they’re both dead. Fred was a star, specifically a white hole, and the most friendly being around; Ed was the Master Shark, who sacrifices himself rather than eat Nita at the end of DW. They’re also pretty beloved of the fandom.
S’reee is a humpback whale and Senior wizard in charge of the Atlantic Ocean. Nita and Kit meet her in Deep Wizardry. She’s patient, gentle, and smart.
The Rodriguez family consists of Juan and Marina, Kit’s parents, and his elder sisters Helena and Carmela. Helena and his Mama and Pop appear rarely in fic and fandom discussion. Carmela Rodriguez is the sister nearest to Kit’s age; she’s four or five years older than him and has featured in the most recent books as a giant pain in his ass. She’s the proud owner of a laser disassociator shaped like an egg beater, and is an interplanetary chocolate smuggler; she appears to speak three or four languages (English, Spanish, Japanese and the Speech); her talent with the Speech led Kit to fear groundlessly she too was going to become a wizard. Instead Carmela uses her talents on the interstellar IRC channels, giving Kit a whole new set of worries...
Kit’s dog Pancho, or Ponch, begins to play a major part in the books in A Wizard’s Dilemma. He’s cheerful and fond of mealtimes, and has a number of mysterious abilities (the source of which is resolved in the latest book, Wizards at War.) including being able to create worlds and find people throughout the multiverse.
Ronan Nolan first appears in A Wizard Abroad. He’s Irish and brooding, and he and Nita nurse mutual crushes throughout the book (although in later appearances, they both seem to have gotten over it.) Tall, dark and handsome, he’s also an avatar of the One’s Champion. His chief attributes are sarcasm and a big spear.
Darryl McAllister appears in A Wizard Alone as an autistic ten year old about to become a wizard. At the end of the book he undergoes an extreme reduction in the severity of his autism, becoming significantly higher functioning; unbeknownst to him, as well as being a wizard he is an Abdal. Because of the intense nature of his appearances in AWAl not too much is known about his personality when not fighting the LP in his own mind, but he appears to be smart and friendly; also, his Manual appears as a WizPod, possibly the most coveted item in the series.
Roshaun ke Nelaid, King of Wellakh, has his first appearance in A Wizard’s Holiday. Along with Sker’ret and Filif, he is on a wizardly exchange with the Callahan family. Affectionately known as Prince Unlikely, he’s tall, arrogant and very, very good-looking. There is considerable canonical chemistry between him and Dairine; Dairine/Roshaun is possibly the most popular pairing in fandom at the moment.
TERMINOLOGY NOTES
The OATH is the mission statement of wizardry. Every wizard takes the Oath before going on ordeal.
In order to become a wizard, potentials must undergo their ORDEAL. This takes the form of a direct confrontation with the Lone Power in one way or another, or a particularly difficult wizardry. Many wizards die on Ordeal; Ordeals are considered private and are intensely personal. The nature of an Ordeal varies from person to person; in A Wizard Alone, the Autistic Darryl’s Ordeal consists of just saying the Oath, because the concepts it expresses were so difficult for him to understand and commit to, while Nita and Kit’s Ordeal consists of a face-off with the Lone Power himself.
The MANUAL is a spellbook-encyclopedia-guidance manual-journal hybrid containing anything a wizard needs to know at any one time. It’s usually a book, but also appears as a computer and an iPod, and several kinds of wizard learn the manual by heart or receive information directly into their minds when it’s needed.
A wizard is ON ERRANTRY when they are on a specific wizardly mission.
Every species is offered THE CHOICE by the Lone Power at birth, usually in a way very reminiscent of the apple/eve story (hence Spot’s apple-without-a-bite logo). The Lone Power usually gets his foothold in a species by offering them immortal life and tricking them into accepting it and finding out it comes with pain and death and entropy.
PLOT OVERVIEW
In So You Want To Be A Wizard, Long Island teenager Nita takes the Oath to become a wizard and soon meets Kit. Their first team-up wizardry produces the white hole Fred, who leads them on a series of adventures that make up their Ordeal, including a trip to a twisted alternate New York. At the end of the book, they defeat the Lone Power and make a crucial change to his personality allowing him to grow and change; in the process Fred dies. In Deep Wizardry, the Callahans and Kit are on holiday at the beach when Nita and Kit are called to help new Senior S’reee with a major ritual wizardry called The Song Of The Twelve, which is performed on a regular basis to keep the Sea working as it should. In every Song one wizard must sacrifice her or himself. Nita unwittingly signs up to sing this part as the Silent Lord. When she figures out that, hey, she volunteered to get eaten by a shark, she has a crisis of faith before deciding that she has to go through with it. However at the last minute Ed willingly sacrifices himself in her place, continuing the theme of willing sacrifice for others as a powerful action.
In High Wizardry, Dairine takes the Oath and sets off with her computer Spot to explore the Universe and beat up Darth Vader. To Nita and Kit’s chagrin, because she’s young, she’s also very powerful, and leads them both a merry dance until she ends up on a planet well over the event horizon of the universe, where she creates a new sentient machine race. Craziness ensues until at last the Lone Power appears and as part of her Ordeal Dairine must defeat him. This defeat, known as the Reconfiguration, is absolutely crucial to the fandom’s mythology, because Dairine uses the combined wizardly might of the entire new species to defeat the Lone Power and refuse the Choice. As a consequence of this epic loss, the Lone Power is forever altered, and later appearances of the Lone Power have been ambivalent or ineffective rather than the pure evil of the earlier books.
In A Wizard Abroad, Nita, Kit and Dairine go to Ireland where they meet Ronan and defeat an incarnation of the Lone Power, Balor. Nita and Ronan engage in a brief flirtation before Nita’s return to New York. In A Wizard’s Dilemma, Nita and Kit are fighting when Nita’s mom is diagnosed with cancer: a brain tumour. For the rest of the novel, Nita is preoccupied with finding a cure for her mom while Kit works with Ponch on developing his surprise new talents. At the end of the book, Nita’s attempted cure on her mom is only partially successful, while Ponch’s talents are just as mysterious.
In A Wizard Alone, Nita and Dairine’s mom has died, leaving Nita, Dairine and their Dad mourning her. Kit’s still trying to figure out what’s going on with Ponch, and is asked by Tom and Carl to investigate an Ordeal that seems to have gotten stuck. He soon finds that Darryl McAllister is autistic and begins to identify with him and contract autistic behaviours. Meanwhile Nita is meeting Darryl in dreams and despite still grieving her mom is able to help both Kit and Darryl, figuring out what caused his Ordeal to get stuck in the first place. She also finds out that Darryl is an abdal. After completing his Ordeal Darryl appears to have ditched much of his autism, and Nita is recovering from her mom’s death.
In A Wizard’s Holiday, Dairine signs herself and Nita up for a wizardly exchange programme to another planet... without checking with her Dad first. As a consequence, she gets grounded- but Kit takes her place on the exchange with Nita, while Roshaun, Sker’ret and Filif, alien wizards, come to live with the Callahans. Although Dairine doesn’t get on too well with Roshaun at first, eventually all three exchangees help to prevent the sun exploding. Meanwhile, Nita and Kit destroy their host civilisation and come home early. In the latest book, Wizards at War, all the wizards join forces to fight the mysterious Pullulus, which is causing the universe to expand faster and making a whole bunch of problems for wizards everywhere. Nita, Kit and Dairine eventually discover that the Pullulus is intended to distract the wizards from the birth of the Hesper, a wholly good personification of the Lone Power. Eventually they are able to assist at the Hesper’s birth anyway, although not without considerable psychological wear and tear. In the final chapter, Roshaun disappears, apparently dead, and Ponch is revealed to be a personification of the One Power (not to be confused with the Lone Power).
FANDOM & RESOURCES
The fandom centers around a discussion forum and the two websites run by DD and co:
http://www.youngwizards.com and http://www.youngwizards.net. They also host DD’s blog, Out of Ambit, which is syndicated on LJ at dduane; news about the books is available on the main websites.
On LiveJournal, the excellent youngwizards exists for discussion, news and general blether about the books, while myriadwords (modded by yours truly) is the community for fanfic and art and fanfic discussion. Other fanfic is mostly found at Fanfiction.net, and there are few or no personal recs pages. However! I do have fic recs at my del.icio.us (Caution: that page also indexes my own fic, so if something says NOT A REC on it, it's mine, read at your own risk.)
There are a number of great canon resources around, above all the Errantry Concordance, which is an online encyclopedia of all things YW. Difficulties with the timeline and associated trivia were archived by the late & much-missed Peter Murray on his timeline page (and, boy, some of those dates are really damn creative); sadly after the page is currently offline, and plans to host it elsewhere are still up in the air.
In short: I really, really love this fandom, and I think you should too. If you already do love it, come talk to me about it!
INTRODUCTION
Not to be confused with That Other Series about wizards, Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series commenced way back in 1983 with So You Want To Be A Wizard. Over the last twenty-three years, eight Young Wizards books and two short stories have been published, along with two adult novels set in the same universe (the Cats of Grand Central novels). The ninth book in the main series, A Wizard of Mars, is set to be published some time this year (or next year...), and there’s no end in sight - luckily for the fans. It’s not a big fandom, but it is a friendly one and one that’s very lucky in its author, who chats regularly with fans, publishes excerpts from upcoming novels, is sympathetic towards fanficcers and is generally highly approachable and lovely.
THE PREMISE
Wizardry is real, and it’s not the same thing as magic. YW is separated from almost all other young adult fantasy, and most adult fantasy, in its determination to pay as much attention as possible to the laws of physics and the natural world, a decision which ultimately makes it one of the most satisfying fantasies on the market. Wizardry has its costs: every action has a reaction. Going to the moon? Better use a calculator to figure out how much air you’re going to need, because if you don’t take enough all the wizardry in the world isn’t going to stop an untimely death by asphyxiation. And don’t forget you need to reach escape velocity to leave the Earth. Even the reason for wizards has its roots in science: wizards exist to fight “in Life’s name and for its sake” against the eventual heat-death of the universe, entropy, embodied in the ambiguous Lone Power.
Wizardry is usually performed with the aid of the Manual, a combination spell book, encyclopedia, and guidance manual of the universe. Again unlike most mainstream fantasy, wizardry derives from the power of words in the wizardly Speech, in which it is possible to describe anything and everything perfectly accurately - and thus change it by changing the words used to describe it. With a sufficiently powerful vocabulary, a wizard can speak directly to the Universe and get an answer. It just might not always be the answer desired...
MEET THE CHARACTERS
Juanita Louise Callahan - known on pain of death as Nita - is a wizard, and the main character of the novels. She starts off as thirteen, but by now is probably closer to fifteen (timelines can be problematic when you’re dealing with wizardry); she’d happily call herself a Geekette and a luddite. Her most treasured possession is a battered telescope. She’s an enthusiastic reader, bright and well-balanced, occasionally picked on at school but content in the company of her family and best friend Kit. Like her sister, one of her most defined character traits is stubbornness, and an unwillingness to compromise her own principles... occasionally sending her in the wrong direction altogether. At the beginning of the series, Nita showed wizardly aptitude with living things, especially trees; she has strengths in healing and lately has spent time inspecting and influencing the inner workings of universes themselves. She’s developing a talent for precognitive dreaming. She has a guilty love of horse books and can’t live without potato chips. She’s shipped with Kit, Ronan, and the Lone Power most often.
Why we love her: Nita takes her Oath to defend and care for Life seriously. She’s hard-working and if she decides something needs doing, it’s done: better not face off against her, because if she decides you’re wrong she’ll walk all over you and then she’ll turn you into a soggy beer mat.
Christopher K Rodriguez (call him Kit, or else) is Nita’s best friend and wizardly partner. About a year younger than her, he’s skipped a couple of grades, takes advanced courses and tutors younger kids; he plays pool and spends a lot of time with his dog, Pancho. Keenly intelligent, Kit’s also a sassy, bold Hispanic guy. He’s fiercely committed to his wizardry, with aptitudes with mechanical and inanimate objects (spending some time communing with meteorites and seashores); he’s loyal and insauciant and almost always cheerful. He has a weakness for poetry, particularly Shakespeare. He’s usually shipped with Nita but has a lot of potential; the partnership in canon and out of it between him and Nita is the pivotal relationship of the series.
Why we love him: Nita thinks of Kit that “the only thing that wasn’t casual about him was the way he worked to do what he said he would.” He loves his job and he loves his friends and although he’s not the main character, Kit’s one of the chief anchors. He’s smart and he’s funny and he’s not above giving someone early-onset smoker’s cough if they mess with his friends.
Dairine Callahan is Nita’s ferociously brilliant younger sister. All three of the main characters are bright: but the eleven year old Dairine’s exceptionally intelligent even by their standards. Unlike her sister, Dairine does her wizardry with the aid of her semi-sentient computer, Spot; she’s a very powerful wizard, moreso than any other individual in the series, and as such frequently deals with crises like moving planets and creating timeslides to the dawn of the Universe. Because she’s Nita’s little sister, she’s a brat; and just like Nita, she’s stubborn as all get out. She loves Star Wars and wants to beat up Darth Vader some day, cheats at poker, has taken jiu jitsu lessons and can kick your ass. Her computer, Spot, is an Apple, but his logo does not have a bite out of it.
Why we love her: Dairine has Yoda pajamas and a bad attitude, prodigious wizardly talent and the ability to piss off almost anyone. Also, she’s a redhead.
The Lone Power is the big bad guy of the series, except when It’s not. Wizards exist to combat the heat-death of the universe, or entropy; the Lone Power is the demiurge responsible for creating entropy at the beginning of time, after a knock-down drag-out falling out with his family (especially his close sister the Michael Power or Winged Defender, who appears frequently in canon.) It’s greeted by wizards as “Eldest, Fairest and Fallen”, and is an analogue to Satan- among others. However in later books It has become more ambivalent. It appears in many different forms both make and female, human and non-human, but most commonly appears to Nita as a handsome, redheaded young man in a business suit. He’s frequently shipped with her.
Why we love him: he’s evil and beautiful, pretty much a fangirl’s dream.
RECURRING MINOR CHARACTERS (in order of appearance)
Harry and Betty Callahan are Nita and Dairine’s parents, which is probably something of a trial to them. A Wizard’s Dilemma concerns Betty’s diagnosis with a brain tumour from which she eventually dies, and is the subject of a lot of fic.
Tom “Crazy” Swale and Carl Romeo are Senior wizards, who advise Nita and Kit from time to time. They are universally loved, quick with a joke, patient, sympathetic, and basically saintly. Just don’t ask them to do your wiring unless you’re really unattached to your light fixtures. They have an irascible pet macaw, Macchu Picchu (really a deity in disguise), three dogs (Annie, Monty and Dudley) and oracular koi; they live together near Nita and Kit. Tom/Carl is the biggest slash pairing in the fandom, bar none.
Fred and Ed feature in So You Want to Be A Wizard and Deep Wizardry, respectively. Outside those books they don’t feature, but they do appear in fanfic reasonably frequently; all you need to know is that they’re both dead. Fred was a star, specifically a white hole, and the most friendly being around; Ed was the Master Shark, who sacrifices himself rather than eat Nita at the end of DW. They’re also pretty beloved of the fandom.
S’reee is a humpback whale and Senior wizard in charge of the Atlantic Ocean. Nita and Kit meet her in Deep Wizardry. She’s patient, gentle, and smart.
The Rodriguez family consists of Juan and Marina, Kit’s parents, and his elder sisters Helena and Carmela. Helena and his Mama and Pop appear rarely in fic and fandom discussion. Carmela Rodriguez is the sister nearest to Kit’s age; she’s four or five years older than him and has featured in the most recent books as a giant pain in his ass. She’s the proud owner of a laser disassociator shaped like an egg beater, and is an interplanetary chocolate smuggler; she appears to speak three or four languages (English, Spanish, Japanese and the Speech); her talent with the Speech led Kit to fear groundlessly she too was going to become a wizard. Instead Carmela uses her talents on the interstellar IRC channels, giving Kit a whole new set of worries...
Kit’s dog Pancho, or Ponch, begins to play a major part in the books in A Wizard’s Dilemma. He’s cheerful and fond of mealtimes, and has a number of mysterious abilities (the source of which is resolved in the latest book, Wizards at War.) including being able to create worlds and find people throughout the multiverse.
Ronan Nolan first appears in A Wizard Abroad. He’s Irish and brooding, and he and Nita nurse mutual crushes throughout the book (although in later appearances, they both seem to have gotten over it.) Tall, dark and handsome, he’s also an avatar of the One’s Champion. His chief attributes are sarcasm and a big spear.
Darryl McAllister appears in A Wizard Alone as an autistic ten year old about to become a wizard. At the end of the book he undergoes an extreme reduction in the severity of his autism, becoming significantly higher functioning; unbeknownst to him, as well as being a wizard he is an Abdal. Because of the intense nature of his appearances in AWAl not too much is known about his personality when not fighting the LP in his own mind, but he appears to be smart and friendly; also, his Manual appears as a WizPod, possibly the most coveted item in the series.
Roshaun ke Nelaid, King of Wellakh, has his first appearance in A Wizard’s Holiday. Along with Sker’ret and Filif, he is on a wizardly exchange with the Callahan family. Affectionately known as Prince Unlikely, he’s tall, arrogant and very, very good-looking. There is considerable canonical chemistry between him and Dairine; Dairine/Roshaun is possibly the most popular pairing in fandom at the moment.
TERMINOLOGY NOTES
The OATH is the mission statement of wizardry. Every wizard takes the Oath before going on ordeal.
In order to become a wizard, potentials must undergo their ORDEAL. This takes the form of a direct confrontation with the Lone Power in one way or another, or a particularly difficult wizardry. Many wizards die on Ordeal; Ordeals are considered private and are intensely personal. The nature of an Ordeal varies from person to person; in A Wizard Alone, the Autistic Darryl’s Ordeal consists of just saying the Oath, because the concepts it expresses were so difficult for him to understand and commit to, while Nita and Kit’s Ordeal consists of a face-off with the Lone Power himself.
The MANUAL is a spellbook-encyclopedia-guidance manual-journal hybrid containing anything a wizard needs to know at any one time. It’s usually a book, but also appears as a computer and an iPod, and several kinds of wizard learn the manual by heart or receive information directly into their minds when it’s needed.
A wizard is ON ERRANTRY when they are on a specific wizardly mission.
Every species is offered THE CHOICE by the Lone Power at birth, usually in a way very reminiscent of the apple/eve story (hence Spot’s apple-without-a-bite logo). The Lone Power usually gets his foothold in a species by offering them immortal life and tricking them into accepting it and finding out it comes with pain and death and entropy.
PLOT OVERVIEW
In So You Want To Be A Wizard, Long Island teenager Nita takes the Oath to become a wizard and soon meets Kit. Their first team-up wizardry produces the white hole Fred, who leads them on a series of adventures that make up their Ordeal, including a trip to a twisted alternate New York. At the end of the book, they defeat the Lone Power and make a crucial change to his personality allowing him to grow and change; in the process Fred dies. In Deep Wizardry, the Callahans and Kit are on holiday at the beach when Nita and Kit are called to help new Senior S’reee with a major ritual wizardry called The Song Of The Twelve, which is performed on a regular basis to keep the Sea working as it should. In every Song one wizard must sacrifice her or himself. Nita unwittingly signs up to sing this part as the Silent Lord. When she figures out that, hey, she volunteered to get eaten by a shark, she has a crisis of faith before deciding that she has to go through with it. However at the last minute Ed willingly sacrifices himself in her place, continuing the theme of willing sacrifice for others as a powerful action.
In High Wizardry, Dairine takes the Oath and sets off with her computer Spot to explore the Universe and beat up Darth Vader. To Nita and Kit’s chagrin, because she’s young, she’s also very powerful, and leads them both a merry dance until she ends up on a planet well over the event horizon of the universe, where she creates a new sentient machine race. Craziness ensues until at last the Lone Power appears and as part of her Ordeal Dairine must defeat him. This defeat, known as the Reconfiguration, is absolutely crucial to the fandom’s mythology, because Dairine uses the combined wizardly might of the entire new species to defeat the Lone Power and refuse the Choice. As a consequence of this epic loss, the Lone Power is forever altered, and later appearances of the Lone Power have been ambivalent or ineffective rather than the pure evil of the earlier books.
In A Wizard Abroad, Nita, Kit and Dairine go to Ireland where they meet Ronan and defeat an incarnation of the Lone Power, Balor. Nita and Ronan engage in a brief flirtation before Nita’s return to New York. In A Wizard’s Dilemma, Nita and Kit are fighting when Nita’s mom is diagnosed with cancer: a brain tumour. For the rest of the novel, Nita is preoccupied with finding a cure for her mom while Kit works with Ponch on developing his surprise new talents. At the end of the book, Nita’s attempted cure on her mom is only partially successful, while Ponch’s talents are just as mysterious.
In A Wizard Alone, Nita and Dairine’s mom has died, leaving Nita, Dairine and their Dad mourning her. Kit’s still trying to figure out what’s going on with Ponch, and is asked by Tom and Carl to investigate an Ordeal that seems to have gotten stuck. He soon finds that Darryl McAllister is autistic and begins to identify with him and contract autistic behaviours. Meanwhile Nita is meeting Darryl in dreams and despite still grieving her mom is able to help both Kit and Darryl, figuring out what caused his Ordeal to get stuck in the first place. She also finds out that Darryl is an abdal. After completing his Ordeal Darryl appears to have ditched much of his autism, and Nita is recovering from her mom’s death.
In A Wizard’s Holiday, Dairine signs herself and Nita up for a wizardly exchange programme to another planet... without checking with her Dad first. As a consequence, she gets grounded- but Kit takes her place on the exchange with Nita, while Roshaun, Sker’ret and Filif, alien wizards, come to live with the Callahans. Although Dairine doesn’t get on too well with Roshaun at first, eventually all three exchangees help to prevent the sun exploding. Meanwhile, Nita and Kit destroy their host civilisation and come home early. In the latest book, Wizards at War, all the wizards join forces to fight the mysterious Pullulus, which is causing the universe to expand faster and making a whole bunch of problems for wizards everywhere. Nita, Kit and Dairine eventually discover that the Pullulus is intended to distract the wizards from the birth of the Hesper, a wholly good personification of the Lone Power. Eventually they are able to assist at the Hesper’s birth anyway, although not without considerable psychological wear and tear. In the final chapter, Roshaun disappears, apparently dead, and Ponch is revealed to be a personification of the One Power (not to be confused with the Lone Power).
FANDOM & RESOURCES
The fandom centers around a discussion forum and the two websites run by DD and co:
http://www.youngwizards.com and http://www.youngwizards.net. They also host DD’s blog, Out of Ambit, which is syndicated on LJ at dduane; news about the books is available on the main websites.
On LiveJournal, the excellent youngwizards exists for discussion, news and general blether about the books, while myriadwords (modded by yours truly) is the community for fanfic and art and fanfic discussion. Other fanfic is mostly found at Fanfiction.net, and there are few or no personal recs pages. However! I do have fic recs at my del.icio.us (Caution: that page also indexes my own fic, so if something says NOT A REC on it, it's mine, read at your own risk.)
There are a number of great canon resources around, above all the Errantry Concordance, which is an online encyclopedia of all things YW. Difficulties with the timeline and associated trivia were archived by the late & much-missed Peter Murray on his timeline page (and, boy, some of those dates are really damn creative); sadly after the page is currently offline, and plans to host it elsewhere are still up in the air.
In short: I really, really love this fandom, and I think you should too. If you already do love it, come talk to me about it!