Mandrake of Oxford has released The Octavo: A Sorcerer-Scientist’s Grimoire, by Peter J. Carroll.
This book sounds rather intruiging, with an unusual premise. From the publisher’s website:
Every universe potentially has its own Supreme Grimoire containing the spells which define its reality and the magic which you can perform within that reality. In this Octavo we have assembled scattered secrets for a Supreme Grimoire for Roundworld, the universe in which you’re standing.
To this end we have taken some inspiration from Pratchett’s Discworld, and a lot from Theoretical Physics and Practical Chaos Magic.
The Octavo was released October 2010, and retails for £10.99 or 20$US.
I haven’t read any of the Discworld titles since I was a teenager, but I recall them fondly. This should be an interesting read!
Practical magicians deal with a lot of unknowns when it comes to getting results in the “real world”. Sometimes a magickal operation will be met with stunning and hard-to-doubt success, sometimes with an ambiguous success (the old “would that have happened anyway?” or “just a coincidence” conundrum), sometimes with a totally unknown degree of success (for example, if it is possible that the operation succeeded in an unobservable way), sometimes with an apparent failure. Navigating through the jungle of mixed results can be a real headache, especially where a magickal operation has apparently failed when it (of course) should have succeeded.
When testing out or trying to perfect a new technique, these kinds of issues can cost a lot of time and effort. If you have Continue reading »
Back in July Scarlet Imprint announced their intention to create a line of books “simple affordable paperbacks” which will be published alongside their “hardback and fine editions”.
The editions, under the heading Bibliothèque Rouge, takes its name from the Bibliothèque Bleue tradition, which “changed the magical and social landscape of Europe by wresting books from the hands of the aristocrats, clerics and middle classes”, by providing simple editions of otherwise prohibitively expensive deluxe editions of certain titles in their catalogue. Continue reading »
