THE COMPLEAT ENCHANTER Book

What is the world but our way of looking at it? Psychologist Harold Shea and his colleagues guess that all you have to do to travel to worlds of myth and legend is rewire your personal logic so that it suits better --to the world of the Norse gods, say, or that of Spenser's "The Faerie Queen". Once there, of course, he discovers that handy gadgets like flashlights and rubber boots no longer work, but that magic does--and that a 20th-century man with the insights of folklore and a fair knowledge of poetry can make himself a fairly decent wizard in any reality he ends up in... The three books which make up The Compleat Enchanter are fantasy classics from the American pulps--L. de Camp and Fletcher Pratt were genteel scholarly men with a wicked sense of fun and Harold Shea is an entertainingly fallible hero with an eye to the main chance. Adventures with Odin and Loki, or the enchanters of Spenser and Ariosto, or the heroes of Finnish and Irish legend, all culminate in well-imagined hairsbreadth escapes and marvellously entertaining moments of sheer comedy. --Roz KaveneyRead More