Elegy Beach - Steven R. Boyett

Elegy Beach is a sequel of sorts to an earlier book Boyett wrote set in a world after the Change. The Change being some odd thing that happened that made technology shut down around the world, and made most of the people in the world disappear, I guess. There are a lot fewer people around at any rate, but there is magic, though people mostly fumble about in the dark, trying different things until something works without killing them.

Fred and Yan are a couple of teenagers with a fair amount of ability to cast, and the curiosity to push the boundaries. Fred seems mostly curious for the heck of it, while Yan is in it for more power. The power to return the world to the way it was, and he's not concerned about hurting others along the way. So it falls to Fred, along with his father, Yan's father, and a unicorn named Ariel that knows Fred's father from the earlier book.

The biggest problem I had with the story was the seemingly arbitrary nature of the Change. Fire is still possible, but gunpowder in a bullet won't ignite so firearms are useless. Why? Who knows. I understand electrical devices not working, but even hand-powered coffee grinders don't work, because it relies on gears. Boyett tries to lampshade it by having the characters discuss it, but the best explanation any of them can come up with is something about intent. So that's usually in the back of my mind throughout.

That issue aside, it's a good book. There's one section about a wild party that drags on for 30 pages I hated, but the rest of its good. Boyett works in a quick recap of the events of the earlier book, and also what happened to Ariel and Peter (Fred's dad) in between these two books. He's very good at providing these hints of the wider world and what's happened in the years since the Change. For the most part, it's not pretty. People reacted pretty much how you expect when all the physical stuff society's built on becomes dead weight. But some people rebuild, and the conflict between the ones who remember the world as it was before and those who don't is pretty key. Some of the longing is nostalgia or rose-colored glasses, because it always is, but some of it is a genuine recognition of things that made the world better that are lost, that the kids won't have ever, unless they can devise a magic equivalent.

I'd probably end up like Peter. The idea of moving to a new house when your current one develops a leak in the roof (because there are so many empty ones to choose from), just sounds odd. Ideally, I would have picked that house because I liked it, why would I want to abandon it at the first little difficulty? I don't know if it means that humans will always take it for granted that they don't need to conserve resources, or just that when life becomes more challenging you learn to save your energy where you can.