The Plastic Magician

 
The Plastic Magician

by Charlie Holmberg
47 North

2018

 

 

I read Charlie Holmberg's first magician book, The Paper Magician, back in grad school. It turned into a trilogy, although I never read the second or third entries. Now Holmberg has started a new trilogy with new characters, set in the same world. Holmberg was mentored by Brandon Sanderson when she first started out writing, and it shows in the way she treats magic in these series - as a rational system with knowable rules that can be studied and applied much like science.

 
The Plastic Magician tells the story of Alvie, an American magician who just graduated from magician college, and gets accepted to a prestigious apprenticeship in England. Alvie and her supervisor, Magician Praff, are 'polymakers,' or plastic magicians. In Holmberg's world, magicians can each bond with a single man-made substance, and then imprint spells on things made from that substance. There are magicians who work with paper, glass, metal alloys, rubber, fire, and plastic is the newest man-made material to get a branch of magic. It's the late 19th century, and there's a Magical Industrial Revolution underway. Praff is an inventive Edison- or Tesla-like figure, and so Alvie's story is all about the thrill and competition of new discovery.

 
In short order after arriving in England, Alvie meets Magician Ezzell, Praff's biggest rival, the handsome young Bennett, a fellow apprentice studying paper magic, and Ethel, Bennett's sister who recently lost an arm in a factory accident. She also learns that someone has been burglarizing plastic magicians around London. Praff wowed the world a couple years ago with a plastic dome that projects images inside, but is in a bit of a creative rut. Alvie suggests making a plastic prosthesis for Ethel, and we're off to the races.

 
Praff wants to show off the prosthesis at the annual Discovery Convention, but first they have to figure out how to make a prosthesis that works, which includes studying anatomy, hydraulics, and inventing a new spell. Alvie also very tentatively starts dating Bennett, although they both keep getting interrupted by work, and the whole crime mystery ... which isn't really that mysterious, since there's only one suspect, and Alive, at least, suspects him immediately.

 
So, they invent a working prosthetic arm, Alvie and Bennett successfully confirm their feelings for each other, and it's time for the Discovery Convention. The final major bit of plot involves the mysterious criminal sabotaging Praff's car to stop him from getting to the convention, and stealing his trailer of inventions to present as his own. The criminal accidentally kidnaps Alvie because she was checking on the trailer, and locks her up in a basement. Alvie escapes, makes it to the convention, alerts the police, the police handle things competently and correctly, and the day is saved! Alvie also does a bit of magic that's supposed to be impossible while escaping, and so the fire of discovery is lit within her. I'd guess she'll finally figure it out in the eventual third book in this series.

 
Alvie is a fun character. She wants to wear pants instead of skirts, which Holmberg talks about somewhat too often. Alvie is good at focusing, good at mental math, and bad at 'turning it off' to interact socially. She's also really interested in discovery in a way that's easy to root for.

 
Holmberg treats the world of her stories as a basically just world. There's no reexamination of real historical inequalities associated with industrialization, and despite the wonders that magic can produce (including some paper magic that works like texting) the technology level is basically the same there as in the real Victorian England. It's light reading in that sense. An eventual third trilogy about "The Atomic Magician" would probably be too dark to fit in with the others, though perhaps "The Silicon Magician" about magic computers is an eventual possibility.