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Thirteen-year-old Nita Callahan's magical adventures began in 1983 in So You Want to Be a Wizard. In this first novel of the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane, Nita and another new wizard, Kit Rodriguez, find themselves attempting the world from the evil of the Lone Power.
So You Want to Be a Wizard captured my imagination. Nita was a young girl, like me, but the novel didn't talk down to me when I read it; in fact, I felt like Nita's magic was difficult to grasp, but enthralling at the same time – just how magic should be.
Author Diane Duane recently announced that So You Want to Be a Wizard would be updated for a new generation of readers. In the New Millennium Edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard, to be released today at 6 PM EDT, several edits were made to update the technology in the novel and add in some new scenes. I can't wait to read the new edition, and one day I will give it to my daughter to share Nita's journey.
Diane Duane is a beloved author of mine because of the Young Wizards series, as well as some notable Star Trek novels like Spock's World and Dark Mirror. With considerable giddiness I had the chance to ask her some questions about the new edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard, her background, and more.
GeekMom: What inspired you to write So You Want to Be a Wizard? Diane Duane: It was a joke.
No, really. During my growing-up years – and often later on when I was practicing as a nurse in Manhattan – I found myself wishing that human beings came with an instruction manual of some kind. I'd known the So You Want To Be A... series of career books from my childhood, and one day, without warning, when I was thinking about them, and for no reason I can understand at this end of time, the word "...Wizard" plugged itself onto the end of the title template.
And almost immediately I started wondering, what would such a career book look like? Or might it, itself, be the necessary Manual – the full instructions and background material you'd need for understanding life and doing magic? A book as big or as small as you needed for the work in hand, and full of the answers to questions you never thought you'd get answers to.
From that concept, the whole series gestalt – meaning the concept of wizardly culture – built itself up over the next couple of years until the first book was ready to write. I'd naturally already read Le Guin's Earthsea books long since, and had noted and passed over the concept of a School-for-Wizards as interesting enough, but something that had already been done.
I preferred the DIY approach, where you learn by yourself, do things that interest you, and join up with other like-minded practitioners when the mood moves you or circumstances require. (This latter idea being affected, I'm sure, by two other old media/literary loves: the Green Lantern Corps, and the band-of-brothers feel of Doc Smith's Lensman series, in both of which it doesn't matter what you look like or where you come from because you're all fighting the same Good Fight together.)
All the plots of all the books in the series – when reduced to their LCDs – are based on the existence of the Manual, and what its existence implies about the universe in which it appears.
GM: Did you always plan for it to be a series?
DD: I think I may not have been clear about that when I was working on SYWTBAW proper, but when I finished it I knew there would be more, though I had no clear idea how many.
There's a misapprehension here and there among readers and reviewers that I intended for there only to be three, High Wizardry being the last in the sequence, but this isn't so. The way things are at the end of book 3 makes it plain that though there's a new hope for the universe, the wizards' work of beating Evil when they can, managing or containing it when they must, and always, always trying to turn it, is going to be going on for a lot of weary aeons yet.
GM: Would you say there's something of yourself in Nita Callahan? DD: Oh, yeah. Most notably, Nita and I both have a hot temper, but she gets to express hers far more freely than I ever allow myself to. Part of this is naturally due to my nursing training, especially the psychiatric nursing part: flying off the handle whenever you feel like it is not OK. Not many InRealLife people have seen my temper flare, which is probably all for the best.
Nita and I share a continual interest in the sciences in general, and astronomy in particular. Other than that, she pretty much gets on with her life and I get on with mine.
GM: My local library keeps So You Want to Be a Wizard in the juvenile/children's section. Is that your target audience, or would you consider the Young Wizards series as Young Adult/Teen?
DD: I really don't have an opinion. These books – maybe appropriately, considering how the Manual is supposed to work – seem to have a gift for finding their readers and keeping them, wherever they're shelved and whatever age they're offered to.
My first generation of young readers now have not only children, but some of them have grandchildren to whom they're introducing their old passion. Which is one of the reasons I'm starting the business of updating the books now, because the newest intake of readership has different expectations for how a YA fantasy looks, and some of those, I think, should be addressed.
GM: You are a beloved author of many geeks (many now geek moms) who read the Young Wizards books when they were young. Who were your favorite authors as a child?
DD: I was a very early reader, and so hit some of the great names quite young: E. Nesbit, all the [Insert Color Here] Fairy Books, Albert Payson Terhune's collie books (Lad: A Dog, etc), Howard Garis's Uncle Wiggily books, Thornton W. Burgess's long series of talking/dressed-up animal books... and all the Oz books and a whole lot of fairy tales in general.
I hit Robert Heinlein at the ripe old age of eight ... and immediately thereafter got into what probably for me holds a record as the most bizarre argument of my life, as the Heinlein book I'd stumbled onto was Starship Troopers. I read the book in one sitting and then attempted to explain to my father, at length and with increasing impatience that he couldn't see how obvious it was, that all wars were caused by population pressure. This got me spanked for being offensively precocious.
Fortunately the event didn't put me off the Heinlein juveniles, all of which I then inhaled, along with a lot of Andre Norton, Andrew Nourse, James White's Sector General books, and all the other science fiction I could get my hands on. Somewhere during that period, between eight and twelve, I also began a lifelong love affair with Sherlock Holmes.
GM: Your magic system is based on words and descriptions. In the updated New Millennium edition, do Internet mainstays like Twitter affect magic?
DD: Well, the rollout of new technology always affects how wizards do business. In earlier books, for example, we've had to deal with the very complex business of getting the Manual online. When the iPod started becoming widespread, the Manual software naturally rolled out onto that version of iOS.
Since the Speech, the specialist pre-Adamic language in which wizardry is conducted, has its own large and complex character set – 418 characters in the basic written form – Twitter would need endless tweaking, and no matter what you did to it, would never really shine as a way to work the really complex and nuanced spells.
For that there are custom apps like iSpell and Charmr, and some Web-to-device clients... though Twitter's still quite useful for telling someone on Pluto, "COME HOME RIGHT NOW YOUR DINNER'S GETTING COLD." Naturally there are wizardly Twitter apps for appropriately tweaked Android devices and iPhones/iPads, with their IM routines built to sidestep such boring minor problems as lightspeed delays.
In the new version of So You Want to Be a Wizard, there won't be much opportunity for the characters to get to grips with some of the more exciting stuff; they've got to find their feet with the regular print Manual first. But later books will get more into the digital-wizardry end of things.
GM: Speaking of new versions, how did you feel about the 2009 Star Trek film? Did it get your wheels turning about an entirely different Spock's World?
DD: I loved the movie dearly, especially when I found out that the producers had been giving the actors pages from Spock's World as background material. Rebooting something so complex and so much loved is always sticky business, and I think they did a beautiful job.
As regards this new iteration of Trek, though, I'm quite happy to put my feet up and watch what they do next. I may have one more Star Trek novel in me, but it would be in the old universe, not the new one.
