I recently read The Galactic Mage by John Daulton. I had never heard of him before. I had never heard of the book before. But Amazon recommended it to me, and the kindle version is only $3.99. It has good reviews, so I picked it up (months ago!) and only just now got around to reading it. I have a few more cheap Kindle books that I haven’t read yet, and I hope they all are as interesting as this book.

There is an embedded book “trailer” on the left. Book trailers are a relatively new phenomenon to me, but apparently they have been around for a while. I know that I saw something about a Spanish trailer for Patrick Rothfuss’ Wise Man’s Fear, but that was the first I had heard of them. Since then, I’ve seen one or two youtube trailers for books. I like the idea. It still seems a bit strange, but it is a good idea.

The Galactic Mage has a few properties that I really like in fantasy books: it has a consistent seeming set of rules for its magic, and in this case the author really follows through with them. His main character applies a kind of scientific method to magic, and we get to see magic applied in interesting ways in the world. Most interestingly, the juxtaposition of high tech and magic is explored a little bit. I really like the consistency and the logical process used in the book. The characters are for the most part interesting (it seems like some of them are exaggerated for the purposes of the story, but that is fine by me) and the story itself is very involving. I really wonder why I haven’t seen the idea of space exploration in any fantasy books before, and this one does it very well.

I kind of see this book as another side of the coin to Rick Cook’s Wizardry series (first two books are available from the Baen Free Library – they are very good, and it is worth buying the others!) That series has a computer programmer transported into a land of magic. This series has a wizard out there somewhere in the universe (how magic works and why is never explained, but the usage seems to have good rules and limitations) that just happens to also be a universe where (not too far away) technology has developed to an advanced level as well.

I really enjoyed this book, and if you have a kindle can wholeheartedly recommend it for the great price it is currently at!