Fiction 21 Jul 2004 07:20 am
Wiz Biz II - Cursed and Consulted
Wiz Biz II - Cursed and Consulted
Rick Cook
The Wiz series is Harry Potter for computer geeks. And just as addictive as the kid wizard.
“Cursed and Consulted” is a collection with the second and third third and fourth books of the series, “Wizardry Cursed” and “Wizardry Consulted”. In the first book (”Wizard’s Bane”, later republished as “The Wiz Biz”), William Zumwalt, “The Wiz”, a Silicon Valley programmer, is kidnapped by wizards from another world, a parallel Earth where magic, not technology, is the dominating power. He is brought into that world by a powerful wizard to help the people who are fighting an evil group. Unfortunately, the wizard dies before telling anyone just how, exactly, a programmer will help in a magic battle.
As Wiz learns more about the world (while being helped by a local witch), he finds out that magic is very much like programming, and that he can write complex spells starting from very basic ones. This is something that no one else knows, as they all learned magic the “classic” way and do things from scratch every time. He goes on to write a “magic compiler” that allows him to become the most powerful magician around and, in the process, defeat the evil wizards and win the heart of the beautiful witch. To do that, however, he needs the help of a group of other Silicon Valley programmers, whom he hires for the project.
In this book, there are two stories: in the first one, two crackers from our world find out about the magic world and are brought there by some very powerful beings to try to conquer it for them; in the second, Wiz is kidnapped by a dragon and is put to work as a consultant for a small town that has a problem with, of course, dragons.
The beauty of the series is that, for computer geeks, programming the world is quite a good notion, and a good way of seeing the way magic works. One could think of Harry Potter as a hacker-in-training, and his spells as function calls (or calls to command-line utilities); that’s why he needs to be so careful with enunciation.
You more or less have to be a geek yourself to truly enjoy this book; you will miss a lot of the references if you are not (and even if you are, you may miss a few). But if you are, I can’t recommend it enough, especially if you are also a Harry Potter fan.
on 01 Jul 2005 at 23:49 1.Nick deJager said …
As a fan of this series, I must point out that this is books three and four compiled, not 2 & 3.
Book two is Wizardry Compiled, in which the League hires a team of programmers to write a end user quality version of Wiz’s magic program.
on 04 Jul 2005 at 20:19 2.Wilson said …
You are correct, of course. I’ve fixed the entry. Thanks for the tip.
on 07 Jul 2006 at 13:42 3.wen wen said …
question: what ever happened to Rick Cook? does he have a homepage or any update if he will be putting all five ‘wizardry’ books into one gigantic book? (heh i think it’s cool that you seem to get a comment a year after the original post, then another two years after.)