In Secondary 3, I read Her Majesty's Wizard and discovered Christopher Stasheff for the first time. It was quite a pleasure then. I was a voracious reader of fantasy, mystery and action stories, but the transition from children's books to mature books was not easy.
For some reason, many adult book authors popular with my peers were either hard-boiled, or cynical, or into gratuitous sensualism.
Her Majesty's Wizard was different. Not only was it cerebral, modest in language, what distinguished it most significantly from other books of the same genre was its unabashed Christian references, explicit in a way that J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis were not.
I was a new Christian then, and I remembered well the condemnations and caveats from "Christian" parties about fantasy stories and RPGs. Though they didn't convince me to give up on fantasy genre, Stasheff offered me new lines of thought about the matter.
Being a voracious reader didn't mean I was a "good" reader. Alas, I had so many choices then I often failed to take note of the authorship of the good ones. At that time, I thought I could always find the book again, either in a major bookstore, or a second-hand bookshop. It didn't occur to me that titles would go out of print, or not carried on a regular basis.
Thus it was, for nearly two decades, I could never recall the exact title of the book I enjoyed so much, nor its author. Often, when I ran out of ideas of what to read to get my fix, I'd recall the story about the rhyming wizard from our own world, who gained his wizardry after being transported to a magical world, mirroring our own, but with a different history ... well ... almost different history.
At least now I can stop kicking myself about it when managed to use the internet to search for the book, and discovered the author got so many other titles published.
The problem now though is that the National Library seems to be phasing out its collection of A Wizard in Rhyme series. I managed to borrow the second book in the series, but the third book, originally listed as 2 copies available in Woodlands branch, is now listed as "Trace Placed" ... after I placed an online reservation ...
I just hope I can find the series somewhere in Singapore.
