David A. McInteeRezensionen

A seventh Doctor and Ace novel. This one takes place in America, specifically New Mexico, just before the launch of Sputnik. I grew up in Alamogordo, NM in the early seventies and still live in the next valley over. I will give the author credit for at least looking at a map- he got the names of the towns mostly correct but he seems to think the area is much more closely spaced and densely inhabited than it actually is. For example, it is impossible to stand on a dune in White Sands and look down on the airstrips of Holloman Air Force Base. This makes me wonder what other errors are in the book.
The plot is fairly consistent and there is lots of action with Ace even acting as a pilot. Benny does not get much time in this one.
Amusingly, phased pulse rifles are due to be invented in 2024.

re-read 12/19/2023½

A novel of the seventh Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith. This takes place in Hong Kong before the changeover. Sara Jane has gone to Hong Kong to get an on-the ground perspective of the hand-over. She becomes embroiled with a Chinese gang whose leader is a white man known as the Doctor.
This book suffers a little from having too big a cast and a lot of plot lines to track, the author is only semi-successful in joining the whole thing at the end.

re-read 7/11/2023

Do you want a Doctor Who novel that hardly features the Doctor, is angsty and squalid for no reason, casually kills the most important companion in the show's history and all hinges upon an extremely cliched story?

Then this is the Doctor Who book for you. McIntee may be the worst of the repeat Doctor Who novelists. He seems actively hostile to the show, to science fiction and to the idea that these books should be entertaining.

I liked his book about The Master, for some reason, but the others I've read of his are terrible.

The worst Doctor Who novel I've read. And there are some bad ones.

Pointless, aimless, and devoid of wit. Jampacked with useless, boring characters who take up most of the novel, leaving the Doctor on the sidelines most of the time.

This story follows the broadcast episode The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Instead of London, the Doctor and Romana find themselves in Shanghai in 1937. Romana is finding traces of the fourth segment but cannot confirm these readings. The readings she is picking up are anomalous chronon particles. They are menaced by Tong and other rival criminal gangs, aided by a mysterious club owner, arrested by a diligent policeman and endure a Japanese air-raid. K-9 comes to the rescue more than once , The plot is complex and the characters remain in character which is certainly not something I can say for most Dr Who novels.

re-read 2/17/2023

This is a Missing Adventure featuring Five and Turlough on a human colony planet called Raghi that becomes the latest battlefront in the ongoing war between the Sontarans and the Rutan. I found this book very slow to get going and to maintain its momentum, even though it had a fair bit going for it (namely a female character who is also a pilot). The book really didn’t pick up until the Sontarans and Rutans showed up, and that was about 2/3 of the way through. Of the three Missing Adventures I’ve read so far, two felt ponderous and not really much FUN. Not sure if I’ve just been having rotten luck with this line of stories or whether the one I read and liked (The Plotters) was an exception rather than the rule. I’ll have to try another (I have several) to see what the answer is.

David McIntee’s The New Doctor Who Adventures: First Frontier picks up after the events of the show’s twenty-sixth season, which ended in 1989, and featuring the Seventh Doctor as portrayed by Sylvester McCoy and his companion, Ace, as portrayed by Sophie Aldred. The novel finds the Doctor and Ace with archaeologist Bernice Summerfield as the three travel to 1957 and the dawn of the space age. The Doctor brings them to the United States as he’s already visited the launch of Sputnik twice and worries about how being there a third time could affect the timeline. In the United States, they find what appears to be a flying saucer, reports of abductions by little grey men, and alien spies working to steal nuclear weapons. Where many historians contextualize the UFO fears of the 1950s in light of the escalating Cold War, McIntee uses the Cold War to add a sense of paranoia to his story.

The flying saucers turn out to belong to the Tzun Confederacy, a warrior people who should not be active at this time period. Further, they have three distinct physical forms including a green, hairless form with oblong eyes, genetically-developed bodies for spaceflight that are the typical grey aliens from science-fiction, and a tall, Nordic type with blonde hair and violet eyes (pg. 105-106). In this, McIntee incorporates elements of UFOlogy into his story to form a unified theory of extraterrestrial biological entities. In addition to focusing on UFOs and Cold War fears in the 1950s, the novel picks up plot threads from the final serial of the show’s original run, Survival, in which the Master seemingly died. It explains how he and a Kitling escaped the destruction of the Cheetah Planet. This leads to a dramatic confrontation between the Doctor and his friends and the Master and his allies.

Playing on the history of postwar science-fiction, McIntee incorporates references to Ed Wood (pg. 67) and Red Dwarf (pgs. 62, 115), with Ace using “smeg” as a replacement for profanity. There’s also a possible reference to Roger Corman in the name of an Air Force base (pgs. 63, 80). Further references include Dr. Scott from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (pg. 92), Richard Donner’s 1987 film, Lethal Weapon (pg. 97), The Day the Earth Stood Still (pg. 120), This Island Earth (pg. 176), Star Trek (pg. 226), and Star Wars (276). The book does take advantage of the relaxed censorship as compared to broadcast television pre-watershed, with characters saying “shit,” “bastards,” and even “sonofabitch” when appropriate for plot and characterization (pg. 60, 96, 97). Further, a character yells out “Qu’vatlh,” which is Klingon for “a hundred tasks,” as an epithet (pg. 197). As an historian, I feel that I must point out one inaccuracy: McIntee describes the Washington Monument as having a copper point and, while there were once copper lightning rods attached to the apex of the monument, the apex itself is made of just under 100 ounces of aluminum, a metal as valuable as silver at the time of its casting that cost $1.10 per ounce when it was installed in 1884, though two years later the Hall-Héroult process made aluminum smelting significantly less expensive (pg. 175).

After retrieving the third piece of the Key of Time, the Doctor, Romana and K-9 follow a telltale trace of chronon radiation to 1937 Shanghai. Instead of finding the next segment, however, they stumble into a dangerous conflict involving the Black Scorpion, a ruthless gang the Doctor last faced in Victorian London during their service to the time-traveling war criminal Magnus Greel. Now leading the gang is Hsien-Ko, the daughter of Greel's former lieutenant Li Hsien-Chang, who has been transformed after being irradiated by chronon energy and is embarking on her own dangerous experiments. With Hsien-Ko on the brink of realizing her goal, the three time travelers search for allies in the treacherous world of wartime Shanghai as they work to stop her before she fractures time itself in her quest for revenge.

In writing an adventure involving the most popular Doctor of the classic era that is a sequel to one of the best-received serials of his tenure and is set in one of the most tightly-plotted seasons of the original series David McIntee sets himself a number of challenges. It's a mark of his ability as a writer and his understanding of the Whoniverse that he pulls it off so successfully. His insertion of his story into the Key of Time quest is virtually seamless in its justification, giving both the Doctor and Romana (whose first incarnation is extremely under-utilized by the show's related media because of the nature of the season) a reason to address the problem while in the midst of a much greater mission. The underused setting of China (one to which he would subsequently return in future Doctor Who novels) also allows McIntee to expand the Doctor's scope and introduce story elements new to the long-established franchise. Yet none of this would work without McIntee's success in his characterization of both the well-established TARDIS crew and the people he introduces into the tale. It makes for one of the best of the Virgin Missing Adventures series, one that is well worth the time for fans of the franchise to seek out.

When the TARDIS materializes in China in 1865, the Doctor and his companions arrive in a land plagued by foreign occupation and a shadowy threat. Mistaken for the commander of the local garrison of British troops, Ian is attacked by the patrons of a local restaurant. As he recovers from his injuries, the Doctor, Barbara, and Vicki discover that an unknown group has infiltrated the Black Flag militia and is using the organization to their own mysterious ends. With their forces seizing various locations and their men ordered to kill scholars and teachers, the Doctor begins to suspect that the threat before him may not be of this world — and is one that knows more about him than he does about it.

David McIntee's book is an interesting entry in the Past Doctor Adventures series. Focused on the First Doctor and one of his teams of companions, it evokes nicely the sort of slow-developing (for better and for worse) history-centric adventure that was common to the series at that time. McIntee's characterization of the crew is particularly strong, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the locals the encounter are featured more prominently in the narrative. What makes the book stand out, though, is McIntee's subtle employment of an antagonist from later in the televised series, one whom a subsequent regeneration of the Doctor defeated hundreds of years prior to the events in his book. It's a neat twist, and one that manages to avoid any of the logic-twisting issues that so often come up in time travel stories premised on such a scenario. The book cemented for me McIntee's status as my favorite author of Doctor Who novels, and I plan on reading all of his other contributions to the franchise as soon as I can get my hands on them.

On the surface David A. McIntee's novel is a curious contribution to the "Past Doctor Adventures" series, given that it's a Doctor Who novel without the title character. Yet McIntee pulls it off superbly by drawing upon the rich collection of supporting characters that have been introduced over the years. Setting it during one of the Third Doctor's unwilling excursions on behalf of the Time Lords, it's premised around two seemingly unrelated events: a violent bank robbery and the crash of a jet containing the body of a junior governmental minister — one who is still very much alive in London. Called in to investigate the latter mystery, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart finds a substitute for the absent Doctor in the form of a husband-and-wife team with familiarity with the unusual: Ian and Barbara Chesterton, two of the Doctor's original companions.

Over the course of the book McIntee has to mix both the show's well-defined characters with his own original creations in a context that is unusual for a Doctor Who story. This is a challenge that he pulls off with considerable success, devising a novel that manages the difficult feat of offering an original mix of story elements that still demonstrates considerable fealty to his source material. And as successful as he is in depicting the portrayals of the Brigadier, Ian, Barbara, and the Doctor's other friends in the show, his greatest success is in capturing the Master in all of his Third Doctor glory. Though the character of the Master has been a longtime foe of the Doctor's he was never better than in Roger Delgado's original portrayal of him as the suave sadist. McIntee depicts him with his full arrogance and deviousness, making for a very different sort of dynamic than is possible with any of the Doctor-UNIT combinations. It all makes for an adventure that demonstrates the rich storytelling possibilities that exist in the Doctor Who universe, even with its eponymous character is absent.

This novel is branded "The Next Generation," but though it might be so de jure it has much less claim to that label de facto than several other novels I've read that don't have "The Next Generation" printed on the title page. Events begin on the Enterprise-E with the whole Destiny-era gang-- Picard, Worf, Choudhury, La Forge-- but soon La Forge has joined the crew of the USS Challenger on detachment.

Instead of being a TNG installment, the book feels like the pilot for a slightly retooled S.C.E./Corps of Engineers series (with the exception of how it ties up; I'll get to that later). Scotty, still heading the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, captains the USS Challenger, a Galaxy-class testbed for experimental technologies. The ship is crewed by a bevy of familiar engineers from across Star Trek: in addition to Scotty and La Forge, Reg Barclay and Dr. Leah Brahms are the major ones, plus Nog is chief of security. On top of that, you have some familiar guest characters like Berlinghoff Rasmussen and Guinan, and some new characters, including the Challenger's delightful chief engineer and a very enthusiastic Klingon woman pilot. It reminds one of set-ups for new ongoing series like New Frontier or Titan. It's the kind of thing that could be overly fannish, but McIntee keeps it on the successful side. We would never ever see Barclay, Nog, and Brahms work together on screen, but this is what tie-in fiction is for.

The main plot of the novel begins with the Challenger investigating the mysterious reappearance of the NX-07 Intrepid, fresh out of the era of Enterprise, but with a dead crew far from its last known position. This part has a pleasing technical mystery to it: of course, a lot of it is bafflegab, but as in some Golden Age sf, it's fun to watch a team of highly competent professionals do their thing. Berlinghoff Rasmussen, as a native of the 22nd century himself, is brought on as a consultant, but soon things are disrupted by an it's-so-crazy-it-just-might-work plan from an old villain, and La Forge and Barclay have to save the day while prisoners. It's good, if generic Star Trek fun. Like I said, this is what tie-in fiction is for. Then, as the Challenger investigates the phenomenon that caused the displacement of Intrepid, things get bigger and crazier, and unfortunately, somewhat rushed. There are a lot of cool concepts in the second half of the novel, but I often felt like the characters were rocketing through them. (Though what happens to Scotty, plus his memorial service, are quite nice.)

Characters rocketing through things is actually the big fault of the novel. La Forge goes through a whole lot here, and it's curiously understated; we get very little sense of how La Forge feels about this all, what's at stake for him personally and emotionally. La Forge becomes captain of the Challenger halfway through, in a nice piece of continuity with Voyager's "Timeless," but surprisingly there's no coherent subplot about him adjusting to command or what captaincy means to him or how he has to act differently than he was. Similarly, he gets together with Leah Brahms, but I'm not really sure why: it's like they see each other again, and huzzah, they're back together.

What comes after the climax is disappointing. Indistinguishable from Magic is not the pilot for a new S.C.E. spin-off, because the book ends with the destruction of the Challenger and the return of La Forge to his old post on the Enterprise. It's a little annoying, because it seals that the events of this novel don't actually matter to La Forge. He gets two months of captaincy, and then he's back to doing the same thing he's been doing for the past eighteen years. Sure, he's "captain of engineering" now, but he doesn't really seem happy or sad or anything to lose a ship so quickly. The end kind of confirms all these characters will get rolled back to where they were; Barclay will go to the Voyager fleet again, and I'm very willing to predict Nog will be back on Deep Space 9 (if we ever get to see the station again, that is).

I kind of liked this book, but in the end, it just feels hollow.

Continuity Notes:

• Among the Challenger crew is Alyssa Ogawa, last seen as head nurse on Titan, now a doctor and chief medical officer on the Challenger... just two months after Fallen Gods! That novel, despite being written later, did nothing to set this up. Indistinguishable from Magic tries to paper over how a nurse becomes a doctor in literally moments, but I didn't buy it, and she pretty much could be any doctor character, so I'm not sure why McIntee bothered. Also the Challenger crew spends a lot of time being amazed at gigantic space life-forms, but Ogawa never mentions the time Titan spent exploring the ecosystem of gigantic space life-forms.
• On the other hand, Nog gets a good couple scenes; I really enjoyed it when he flushes information out of a Ferengi underling by implying Grand Nagus Rom (his father) bought the Challenger from Starfleet. But like Ogawa's, Nog's presence doesn't quite line up. Not for timeline reasons (I don't think we've seen Nog for six years, in universe, though Memory Beta tells me he was mentioned as being on DS9 in Rough Beasts of Empire), but career ones. He's obviously there as part of the novel's engineering all-star team set-up, but he's the Challenger's chief of security because that was the only position available. Okay, I buy that, because Nog was interim chief of security on DS9 between Odo and Ro. However, later in the novel, La Forge considers Nog for first officer, but then passes him up so he's not denied the opportunity to be a chief engineer one day, because he'll be a great one. But Nog already was a chief engineer! If that's what he wanted, he could have just stayed on DS9.
• I spent a lot of time wondering why Leah was willing to romance La Forge, given that she's married. It turns out that her husband died in The Genesis Wave novels. But if McIntee mentioned this fact for those of us who remember "Galaxy's Child" but do not remember The Genesis Wave, I did not notice, so I was very disconcerted until I read her Memory Beta entry halfway through.
• You can't expect every thing to reference every thing, but it also jarred me that, when discussing if the Challenger can breach the galactic barrier, no one mentions the attempt of the Enterprise-E to do so in The Q Continuum trilogy.
• Sonya Gomez puts in a couple brief appearances, which is nice given this book's pseudo-S.C.E. status. I don't think any other member of the da Vinci crew rates a mention, though; Mor glasch Tev is seen, but La Forge doesn't know his name, so he's just "a Tellarite."
• Scotty may seem to be dead by the end, but we know from Engines of Destiny that he's still around in 2422, so he must get back somehow. Plus, he needs to invent transwarp beaming and give Spock the equations prior to 2387. Maybe his experience here is how he figures it out...?

Other Notes:

• In the acknowledgements, McIntee praises the cover artist. I can't imagine why, because it is the most generic uninspired thing I can imagine. A Galaxy-class ship with some motion blur, and a swirl. The book has much more interesting imagery that could have made a much better cover.
• McIntee has a weird tendency to let dialogue scenes go on too long. Like, characters keep talking two or three or four lines after the point which the reader has gotten the point, either to just restate something yet again, or to squeeze in an ultimately irrelevant continuity reference.
• According to the novel The Return, the captain of the Challenger in 2371 was a Vulcan named Simm. By the time of Indistinguishable from Magic, the first officer of the Challenger is Tyler Hunt, a man obviously named after the characters Sam Tyler and Gene Hunt from Life on Mars. The actor who played Sam Tyler: John Simm. Spooky.
• There's a joke about how quitting Starfleet was the biggest mistake Scotty ever made aside from bleaching his hair, a reference to how he appeared in early issues of the Gold Key comics. I actually suggested this joke to Dave McIntee, but by the time I read the book, I had forgotten all about that discussion, so I was pretty delighted to discover it.

Scotty, Geordi, and Nog - oh my.

The most talented Starfleet engineers of two generations unite to solve a two-hundred-year-old technological mystery that turns out to be only the beginning of a wider quest. With the support of Guinan and Nog, as well as the crew of the "U.S.S. Challenger," Geordi La Forge and Montgomery Scott soon find themselves drawn into a larger, deadlier, and far more personal adventure. Helped by old friends and hindered by old enemies, their investigation will come to threaten everything they hold dear. Seeking out the new, and going where no one has gonebefore, Geordi, Scotty, and Guinan find that their pasts are very much of the present, and must determine whether any sufficiently advanced technology is really indistinguishable from magic.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2765570.html

The final Seventh doctor novel in terms of continuity, actually it is much more about Sarah Jane Smith in Hong Kong just before the 1997 handover, getting sucked into what at first appears to be a criminal conspiracy but turns out to be the work of aliens - well, one alien in particular... I felt that Hong Kong itself was well conveyed, and the plot had enough twists involving characters I was interested in to make up for the fact that it's relatively light on the Doctor. I'm also not in general a big fan of the Seventh=Doctor-as-cosmic-manipulator, but it worked OK here. However, certain events at the end don't sit so well in overall Who continuity.½

Being my first entry into this new series of books focused on Lethbridge-Steward, I am now very interested in continuing to read more adventures from the line. McIntee was always one of my favorites from the various Who lines, especially his historicals, and his excellent attention to detail is a highlight in this novel's prose, especially with how each variation of Earth bends history a little. The side-Earth with dirigibles and Nikola Tesla is a memorable section of the novel and one wishes more time could be spent on that Earth. Lethbridge-Stewart proves a robust hero for the novel and I look forward to seeing how he gets to the Brigadier we see in Spearhead from Space. The story, involving the side-universes and the unfolding mystery keeps you guessing whether the alternate Earth seen in Inferno is a part of this at all.

Long ago I was a big fan of Harry Sullivan's War by Ian Marter and I always longed for more UNIT-based novels. These Lethbridge-Stewart novels seem to be nest best thing, and I recommend them to any fans of Pertwee-era Who.

The glorious return of the Master (his first in the New Adventures) and a hell of a cover to boot. A good Ace subplot helps keep this book a page turner, as well as a great characterization by the Master. Although lacking in a really good final confrontation, its still a winner.

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2646776.html

Candy Jar's series of books about the earlier career of Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart have not been getting as much buzz as I feel they deserve. For a lot of us, the UNIT days are the defining period of Who, and the idea here is to look into their backstory, the four years that the Brigadier say in The Invasion since The Web of Fear. The previous couple of books I'd read in the series were pleasing enough, but here McIntee plays with the format and timeline very inventively, to bring Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart (and Professor Travers, etc) into a parallel timeline or two with confusion about his own family history. It's very nicely done, and wholly respectful of the traditions of canon while at the same time subverting them just a bit.½

Star Trek representations of the 7 Deadly Sins:
Pride - Romulans - The First Peer - Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore
Greed - Ferengi (obviously) - Reservoir Ferengi - David A. McIntee
Envy - Cardasians - The Slow Knife - James Swallow
Wrath - Klingons (obviously) - The Unhappy Ones - Keith R.A. DeCandido
Lust - mirror Humans/Bajorans/Andorians - Freedom Angst - Britta Burdett Dennison
Gluttony - Borg - Revenant - Marc D. Giller
Sloth - Pakled (obviously) - Work is Hard - Greg Cox

The Borg to represent Gluttony is an interesting choice, "Revenant" used their insatiable hunger to assimilate to drive the story, scariest on in the book by far.
Ferengi greed provided a bit of comic relief as partners in a deal out maneuver each other.
The Klingon story was my favorite, looking at an event in the early careers of Kor, Kang and Koloth.
I didn't much like the Mirror-DS9 story, "Freedom Angst", odd considering I love both individually.

Very good characterization, I could hear Tom Baker as the Doctor here. Nice tie-in with a favorite episode as well.

More Doctor Who. Well, Doctor Who minus the Doctor, who is on Peladon with Jo while this whole thing is happening. The short version is that UNIT requires the Master's help to deal with a mysterious business connected with an international criminal syndicate. Who are working with -- or possibly are -- aliens. The Master agrees, because (naturally) he can spin the whole thing to his advantage, and the chase is on. It's an entertaining story, but holy cow is the body count high. Yes, I know who we're talking about here, but throw in a Mafia-type organization and it turns into a Hollywood gore-and-explosion-fest. Eugh. The best bits of Face of the Enemy are the little character sketches, such as the Master listening to Bowie (who knew?) and reading the Financial Times, thinking that the stock market is so stupid that the humans might as well just give him all their money and save everyone the headache. Heh.½

New Mexico, 1957: the US Army is working with experimental aircraft. Because this is a Doctor Who novel, it is in fact alien technology. But who are these aliens, what do they want, and why do they keep appearing to this one random guy? Also, who the heck is that deeply suspect Air Force scientific adviser? The Doctor, Ace, and Benny show up to sort things out and/or make a crazy mess, and it’s great. Stuff blows up, in-jokes fly past every couple pages, and someone grows fur. Good times.

I had high hopes for Lords of the Storm, but it fell a little short. Well, maybe it's better to say that we met in the middle, the book and I. It's a tidy, engaging story of the Doctor and Turlough stumbling into a Sontaran plot against a human colony. The plot itself is fairly clever, but it seems to take forever to for the reader to come around to seeing the full scope of it. After all, what do Sontarans want with a bunch of humans? Matters pick up speed once the Rutan Host arrives in all their blorpy alien glory and the Sontarans actually have something to do. There are the usual close scrapes, heroic sacrifices, and wild dashes through corridors, and the story ends with People Doing the Right Things.

It's a solid, workmanlike offering, but it didn't leave me craving another Doctor Who book, as some of the best ones do.

It has been many years since the Moon was thrown out of the Earth's orbit. The inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha have become a generational station with the hope that future generations can keep the station running. They are starting to realize that their ships, called Eagles, which were created for short hops between the Earth and the Moon, are starting to malfunction. They were not made for the stresses of deep space flight. Computer is also starting to malfunction with strange read outs. A ship of refugees from the planet Psychon land on the Moon. Maya, Alpha's head of Science, is astonished to see her brother commanding the ship. She thought she was the last Psychon after her home world destroyed. This puts more tension in her relationship with Tony Verdeschi, head of security. They have been unsuccessfully trying to have a child, but human and Psychon DNA are not comparable. Commander Koenig is hopeful that the Pyschon's will exchange their advanced technology for supplies and help in repairing their vessel. Unfortunately the Psychon's have something else in mind.

This is a hard science fiction novel with a lot of detailed explanations of how everything works on Moonbase Alpha yet it moves at a rapid pace. The dialog is intelligent and written the way the characters would speak on the television show.

The book was written as if it was the first episode of the third season. It answers some questions regarding the changes between seasons one and two and rectifies some of the problems with the second season.

There are a few plot holes, but I enjoyed the book non-the-less. I recommend it to Science Fiction fans and especially to Space 1999 fans.

Pros: covers several wizards, lots of good information

Cons: too short!

Like the other books in Osprey’s Myths and Legends series, Wizards is a great jumping off point for further research on the topic. The book covers a variety of wizards throughout history, first through an engaging story and then explaining what we know about the historical person or people that gave rise to the myths. Some of the wizards you’ll encounter in this collection are Hermes, Virgil, Zhang Guo Lao, Nicholas Flamel and Dr. John Dee. There’s a great mix of well known and not so well known figures and while most of the wizards mentioned are Western, there are a few famous Eastern wizards as well. There are some great images, both historic and new ones commissioned for this volume.

As with the other books, it is simply a beginners guide, and as such is definitely too short. But it’s a great volume and if you’re interested in wizards, alchemy, the occult or fantasy, you’ll find this an interesting read.

A small collection of men, historically and mythologically, considered wizards. The illustrations and pictures are great, but get the epub version so you can see them all. Wizards from different time periods and from all over the world are included. This work is introductory.

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A funny handbook on how to take over the world, from an alien's point of view. The "manual" is put together well. The book includes a fair amount of historical tidbits, scientific facts, and Sci-Fi pop culture info. For Sci-Fi fans with a sense of humor.

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