Review: The Accidental Sorcerer

The Accidental Sorcerer is a 2008 fantasy novel by K. E. Mills, a nom de plume of the Australian writer Karen Miller. It is also the first book in the Rogue Agent series, which may bring to mind James Bond-style espionage, but really shouldn't (at least not yet).

The protagonist of The Accidental Sorcerer is one Gerald Dunwoody, a third-rate washed-up wizard who, naturally, gains and/or discovers spectacular and largely undetailed powers in a way that gets him cast out of society.

This is, fortunately, not a fair summary.

To start, the setting is one in which magic is a science; standard science is advanced enough that electric lights exist; and poor Dunwoody starts out a thaumatological safety engineer, which is to say, a regulatory civil servant.

The novel throws the reader into the thick of things with no introduction whatsoever, letting character background filter in through dialogue and the rare narrative hint — the kind of quasi-in-medias-res opening and introduction that most authors reserve for sequels. It had me wondering what the prequel to this book was nearly all the way through. But there is no prequel — the protagonist and his circle simply start out as fully developed as those in most authors' sequels. It sounds like the sort of thing that could easily be a train wreck, but Miller seems to have made it work.

Despite being called the first book in the Rogue Agent series, Dunwoody isn't recruited as a secret agent until the denouement of the book; for most of it, he's the Court Wizard of New Ottosland. His hiring is the one event that really doesn't make any sense, in retrospect: ur'f cerffherq ol gur erpehvgre gb orpbzr na ntrag, jvgu gur uvag bs n guerng bs qrngu; ohg ng guvf cbvag ur'f nyernql orra guebhtu avar qnlf bs gbegher. V jbhyq unir gubhtug vg terngyl nccebcevngr vs uvf erfcbafr gb Fve Nyrp unq orra fvzcyl, "Ab. V jvyy abg znxr lbh n qentba."

Of course, then it probably wouldn't be titled the Rogue Agent series (if indeed there were a second book at all).

Except for that last, the story, characters, and setting hang together well, and it's an entertaining read from cover to cover. I suppose that's enough for me. 1/1.

(... oh, almost forgot: the incantations and magical terms consist of atrocious dog-Latin. As a student of the classics, I weep.)