“A Wizard of Mars” by Diane Duane

This is the ninth book in the “Young Wizards” series and it’s actually one that I’ve written about before. (You can read posts on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth books. My previous post onthis book is also available.) I’m also going to try and write this before going back to that other post to see if my perspective has shifted at all. (Alright I went back and read it and it's not a very good post, I was trying to introduce everyone to the series more than anything else. But I also wasn't a huge fan of the book back then either.)

The book opens with Mamvish, a very powerful alien arriving on Earth and going with the squad of Earth wizards to Mars. Kit is ecstatic, because they found something they’re calling a superegg on Mars and it could have clues for what happened to the Martians. Ronan, Darryl, Nita, and Carmela are all there as well. Nita is juggling her dad keeping an eye on Dairine (who is looking for Roshaun) along with all this, and Carmela brings news that Kit’s older sister Helena is coming home early from college too. Kit comes back on his own and accidentally activates the superegg, which then sends out signals to other areas of Mars. He pings Darryl and Ronan and they all head to Mars. There they are confronted with these projections of pop culture depictions of Mars. Kit decides to face the last one alone, and he heads off as Nita catches up with them. Nita meanwhile was exploring an old cave with Carmela and S’ree, allowing Carmela to pick up what some of the writing means. She heads off on her own to find the boys. Kit at the final site though is met with a gorgeous alien princess who appears to recognize him. He learns to play along with the vision, but it is ended prematurely by the presence of Nita.

Back on Earth, Kit gets grounded for going off on his own. However his consciousness is being invaded by the alien he was playing in the vision, and he heads back to Mars independently. Mamvish returns and grabs Nita to go to Mars and figure out what’s going on. They find Kit taken over by this other character, in theory an old version of him, and Nita battles the princess he was talking to. Mamvish manages to send this whole people that Kit woke up back in time so that they wouldn’t interfere with Earth. The book ends with Nita calling Kit her “boyfriend” and him being pleased about this.

Alright well there’s a lot going on in this book. I think I understood it more this second time around, but there’s just so much to keep track of. This race that gets woken up is fighting with a second city also on Mars but they also came from a different planet originally. So it’s a lot to remember when reading about them. I think the other sub-plots suffer as a result, there isn’t as much about Dairine or Kit’s family as I would have liked. And while I love seeing characters like S’ree she was mostly a cameo here.

I do think a strength of this is how it incorporates pop culture images of Mars. The whole idea is that the things happening on Mars have found a way to infiltrate the presence of it, the people on Mars are constantly fighting and therefore a lot of depictions of Mars involve war. It would be nice though to hear about how that gets filtered through the lens of the people on Earth as well, like how early depictions were more fanciful and there was an increase in optimism in sci fi in the 50s and things like that. The series is usually pretty good about not focusing on Earth, but this one felt more so, probably because it is so close to home.

The time travel thing with sending the aliens back in time is also amusing to me. There’s a whole conversation at the end of the book that’s just like “it’s complicated, but we’re fine, so don’t worry about it.” Which I kinda appreciated, at least the author isn’t getting too bogged down in the details (after a book that was very detail heavy) and just accepting that things are fine. Less is definitely more!

There’s one more book in the series, and I hope that Nita and Kit’s relationship gets fleshed out more since that definitely ended on a cliffhanger. And hopefully there’s more to the series after that as well!