Wizard

3.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
It's been 75 years since Captain Cirocco Jones became official Wizard of the ancient Saturn-orbiting construct Gaea. Now, she's a serious drunk, and her long-time companion Gaby is the one that has to keep her focused. When two damaged Terrans come to Gaea hoping to cure their ills, they get swept up into Cirocco, Gaby, and Gaea's complex machinations.

Review
The Gaea series continues to defy my memory of it. While I remember the books as being interesting, but dense and philosophical, in fact they're pretty breezy adventure. Wizard is, in fact, a quest story, though it takes a sharp turn toward the end.

The book has a rocky start. Varley takes his time getting the quest fellowship together, and it's not always time well spent. While the new actors are (despite the title, which is prior protagonist Cirocco Jones' title) the core of the story, and Varley needs to set the up well, it feels like a very long time before the story really starts to get moving.

There is, as before, a now-odd, but then-normal, focus on sex, but it doesn't really get in the way. It doesn't even trigger my Star Trek human-alien sex alarm, since there's something of an explanation. Varley does press pretty hard on one character being in love with another, only to pretty much drop the idea late in the game without much warning.

The story as a whole is a bit disjointed - the slow start, the solid center, the abrupt and none-too-appealing ending. This is a book that would have benefited from another couple of rounds of editing to really get it settled in, but it's okay otherwise. It's intensely irritating, though, that, throughout the book, Varley uses ‘anterior' when he means ‘posterior' - and he uses it a lot. Hopefully fixed in newer editions.