Magic Time by Marc Scott Zicree, Barbara Hambly

From Barnes & Noble

This first collaboration between talented writers Marc Scott Zicree and Barbara Hambly is the beginning of an innovative fantasy series. An enthralling and entertaining read, Magic Time mixes supernatural forces and elements of classic epic-quest fantasy with modern technology and contemporary themes in a fascinating "What if?" scenario that presents a world where science is turned on its head as magical forces -- and strange new creatures -- blossom in its place. Zicree and Hambly discuss the inspiration behind their first novel together in our exclusive author essay.

From the Publisher

For rising young lawyer Cal Griffin, it's just another day in the Big City — until the lights go off ... for good. Suddenly packs of pale crouched figures are stalking the darkened subways, monsters prowl Times Square, and the people all around Cal are ... changing. Similar weirdness is happening everywhere, from the dank, cold heart of a West Virginia coal mine to a remote lab in South Dakota — where a team of government scientists has unwittingly invited something catastrophic into the world — to the highest levels of power in Washington, D.C. And Cal Griffin is not the only one struggling to comprehend the surreal, devouring chaos surrounding him — nor the only one who will be forced to accept a new role in this brave new world of nightmare and wonder. For the forces bled from the stilled machines are fueling a consciousness both newly born and ancient — and more than one unlikely hero will be needed for the titanic battle between the darkness and the light.

Booklist

If one's reading goal is sheer entertainment, this book is a rousing success.

Cinescape

Even though MAGIC TIME was written well before September 11, its depiction of Americans facing a global threat is relevant and uplifting. If, as Joseph Campbell indicated, myths help us to process the world, then MAGIC TIME may help readers explore the aftermath of the tragedies.

Publishers Weekly

Television writer Zicree teams with fantasy and SF bestselling Hambly (Knight of the Demon Queen, numerous Star Wars and Star Trek novels) on a story straight out of the Hollywood mold for vintage sci-fi disaster films. A government experiment so secret even the president doesn't know about it produces strange energy flows that wreak havoc with the space-time continuum, resurrecting skeletal prairie wolves and disturbing ancient Indian burial grounds. Despite his misgivings, Dr. Fred Wishart continues the questionable experiments, only to blast the United States with a force so destructive all electricity and communications are knocked out nationwide. The bulk of the book concerns various characters' attempts to adjust to the chaos left in the wake of the catastrophe one made still more dangerous by the frightening mutations it produces in the population. Cal Griffin, a young New York City lawyer, finds his vibrant teenage sister turning into a near-translucent ghost of herself. Meanwhile, Cal's boss is transformed into a demonic, reptilian killer who stalks Cal as he tries to lead his sister and a hodgepodge of friends safely out of the city. Zicree's TV experience he's written for Star Trek: The Next Generation and Sliders, among others is obvious in the swift, episodic pacing; unfortunately, that doesn't give Hambly's usual gift for characterization much to work with. Like the pilot for a new television series, this effort promises much and delivers only hints of bigger things. (Dec. 4) Forecast: Before the World Trade Center attack, this would have been a natural candidate for screen adaptation. Chances are the public will now have less of a taste for fictional disasters set in NewYork City. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

When a top-secret government experiment goes wrong, a burst of energy nullifies the effects of technology and reawakens magical forces that transform some individuals into monsters with supernatural powers. To save his sister from a similar fate, New York lawyer Cal Griffin sets out on a difficult and dangerous trek across a devastated landscape in search of the cause of the transformation. Screenwriter Zicree collaborates with veteran sf and fantasy author Hambly (Knight of the Demon Queen) in this series opener that features a modern world suddenly infused with magic. Complex and unusual characters support a tale of personal heroism and self-sacrifice. A good choice for most fantasy collections. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Zicree (The Twilight Zone Companion, not reviewed) and Hambly (Traveling With the Dead, 1995) join talents -- and lavish, crackling research -- to envision a post-disaster Manhattan fallen into chaos. Cal Griffin, 27, an overworked lawyer, and his sister Tina, 12, a ballet student, have left Hurley, Minnesota, so that Tina can train at the School of American Ballet in New York. Meanwhile, what kind of monster is it that's flaying buffalo out at Medicine Creek and leaving the animals to wander skinless? And why does FBI agent Jerri Bilmer, her thoughts monster-haunted, hang garlic around her motel room windows? American President Stu McKay waits for Bilmer's secret info about the "Source Project," which may lead to . . . well, it's all telekinetic, and project director Fred Wishart knows that energy leaks from Source have been resurrecting packs of skeletal prairie wolves. And one of those leaks has been at Medicine Water Creek. Will the energy someday help Fred get his crippled brother Bob out of bed, perhaps even restore their mother's wandering mind? Suddenly, a blue force-field flies everywhere. All electricity gets sucked up, even from car and flashlight batteries: no power exists anywhere. Mineshafts go black on miners, their helmet lamps dead. Planes fall from the sky and splatter all around D.C. A running strange blue force keeps people boxed into large areas. Slowly, the Change changes people's characters, deepening them. Tina herself floats like a soap bubble, glowing pastels, hears a Call to go south-and she and Cal's newly formed survivor group leave Manhattan. The stars move. What now? Well, a sequel for sure.

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Interviews & Essays

It began in fire, flood, and earthquake.

Or, as they're more popularly known, the Northridge Quake, the L.A. riots, and El Niño.

Living in Los Angeles, we both witnessed these events up close. What struck Marc -- even with the riots -- was how in the midst of crisis most people pulled together and rose to their best selves. What struck Barbara was how different people reacted so differently to the same events.

Being writers, we reflect the world that we see. Media is a mirror that helps us define who we are: Marc in particular felt that the news media tended to reflect the darkness, rather than the light.

This was the beginning of the road that started out with "What if...?"

What if there were a traumatic event that brought people to their truest selves? What if all the machines in the world stopped running and magic blossomed in place of technology? What if, though most people remained human, a few transformed into the mythical creatures they were by their nature, and some developed remarkable powers?

But mostly, what if all the barriers of race, class, and income were swept away, the masks torn off, and we saw each other for who we truly were...which, in spite of the calamity, proved not to be such a bad thing?

Marc's experience was in TV and films -- Barbara's in novels. Together we explored the initial idea of Magic Time in varied settings, among different groups. Each contributed experiences of persons, places, and outlook that the other did not have, a shared odyssey that ranged over the Internet, over time and space, over memories of Anoka Minnesota, the sacred hills of South Dakota, Merton Station and Havertown and Gunpowder Falls. The people are real: we've met them all along the way -- the shy homebody from Middleburg Heights, Ohio; the bookish cat lady; and the bright, sad half Cherokee who lived on the streets of West Hollywood and read the encyclopedia all the way through.

In Marc's Art Deco office overlooking the Hollywood sign we tracked the many threads in colored Post-its on a huge white board. In time, the focus centered on two locales, and two themes: the tough self-reliance of a small West Virginia town -- and New York City.

Marc has always loved New York and felt it got a bad rap. Most New Yorkers he'd encountered were honest, helpful, generous of spirit, and forthright in their opinions. So in Magic Time, New Yorkers come together in trying times, help each other, put aside their differences. They shine in the face of adversity...and they prevail.

It wasn't prediction, merely observation.

But it feels good that we got it right. (Marc Scott Zicree and Barbara Hambly)

Read an Excerpt

He knelt by the steam grate with Colleen and Doc. Although it was only late afternoon, Fifth was barely populated, the stores closed up tight. The smell was worse far worse than it had been yesterday. A few timid passersby glanced their way curiously, then hurried on at Colleen's challenging glare. The crossbow and quiver of arrows hung easily across her back. Cal noted she was taking the weapon everywhere now, its polished steel and wood a fierce kind of beauty. It suited her.

And she was far from the only person he saw armed.

Colleen's pry bar eased under the grate, and now the three of them put their shoulders to it, dislodging years of accumulated muck, forcing the barred covering up and off the square hole in the sidewalk. They dropped the grate clattering onto the pavement, then stood over the open, waiting maw. A black murmur like distant ocean reverberated out of it, accompanied by a wafting, stale stink.

"This doesn't impress me as the greatest idea," said Colleen.

"Yeah. sure wish I had a better one." There was no way to track his quarry with any certainty, to get a lead. But at least the many times Cal had seen Goldie, it had been around these few blocks, they seemed to be his stomping grounds. Just maybe, when he’d gone below each night, burrowed beneath the earth, he’d been inclined not to go far.

Or maybe not. But it was all Cal had, and it was a place to start.

He peered down into the darkness, tightened the straps of his backpack. "Wait forty-five minutes."

"Then?" Doc questioned.

"Then." Cal realized he didn't have a then. Saying no more, he slid into the opening.

It's like climbing into a grave. Cal pushed the thought away. He focused on the task at hand, gripping the metal rungs set in the concrete wall of the midline vent shaft, lowering himself how far? He couldn't see clearly below, couldn't gauge the depth. As far as it took. That was all the answer he had, for any of this.

The metal and concrete and air about him were sharp with chill, but he felt flushed nonetheless, the wound on his scalp screeching, his head an overinflated balloon. Everything had a slightly dreamy aspect to it, a muzzy edge of unreality. Glancing up, he saw the world above was now no more than a distant square of blue surrounded by blackness. Rung by rung, arms straining with effort, moving stiffly as though needing lubrication. Oil can, he thought sardonically. Oil can what?

He felt a subtle shift in the flow of air around him and abruptly his feet found support. He released the last rung and stood, gaining his balance. His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and the light from above cast a pallid radiance he could barely discern as he glanced about.

He was in a subway tunnel, was standing, in fact, on the track itself, which snaked away into the darkness. Another time, this would have been cause for alarm, but there was no roar of an approaching train, nothing save the hushed ocean-like murmur that was a sound and not a sound. His fingertips brushed the cold wall and found no vibration in the stone, no rumble of distant engine and cars. A dead place. at least as far as the machines were concerned.

As all the world seemed to be dead.

He leaned against the wall and considered his options. Goldie had said, "I prefer the subterranean," but had he meant directly below them or some other hidey-hole? How many hundreds, thousands of miles of tunnel serpentined under the streets? I'm looking for a crazy man, Cal thought. Does that make me crazy?

Cal shrugged out of his backpack and unzipped it. His probing hand found the cool glass and metal of the Coleman lantern. He withdrew it, closed up the pack and replaced it, then dug in his jeans pocket for the lighter.

Suddenly, his ears pricked at a strange flitting sound, here and there about him, like an immense, unseen hummingbird. He spun, trying to detect the source.

And then he spied it, in an arched recess against the tunnel wall, twenty feet off. There, seeming to hover in the blackness, was the glowing face of a pale boy, eyes all liquid blue with slitted pupils, regarding him with wary surprise.

Cal saw him just for a twinkling, then the boy darted back into the darkness, face wild with fear.

"Wait!" Cal ran a few strides after him, lantern banging in his hand. The sound of his voice rebounded off the walls, frighteningly loud, his footfalls staccato accompaniment. But the boy, there was no sound of the boy running at all, just that odd thrumming tone, higher now, climbing in pitch then cutting out to silence.

Cal reached the archway, saw that it was an opening between inbound and outbound tunnels. He dropped onto the other side, eyes straining the darkness, alert for any sound. But there was nothing.

The boy or whatever it had been was gone.

Slowing, Cal lit the lantern, watched it flare, dingy light spreading slowly along the tracked. Ahead of him, vast and still, lay a subway train like a row of steel coffins. He moved cautiously along it, raising the lantern high to illumine the interior of the cars, the untenanted seats and straps, the ads for skin treatments and personal injury lawyers. “You may have been the victim of an injustice,” one proclaimed. “Have you suffered a recent calamity?”

In the darkness, a pebble thwanged off a metal rail, sending up an echoing reverberation. Cal snapped to wariness, ears keen. The boy? No. Something else. Listening intently, not breathing, he could make out a soft padding of many feet. Voices too, whispery, guttural. He had a sudden flash of the clump of shadowy figures he'd seen the other night on the street, moving in that queer, flowing rhythm. They had sounded like that. It had made his skin crawl, he'd felt an immediate, unaccountable revulsion.

The sound of their steps was growing louder, coming his way. And with their approach, their voices grew into a din of expectation, excitement. hunger.

Cal felt a stab of terror. They know I'm here.

He took to his heels, lantern grasped, knowing he should extinguish it, unable to bear being alone with these pursuers in the dark.

Hearing him take flight spurred them, and they broke into a clamorous run behind him, shouting with frenzy and cries of delight. Cal rounded a bend, could hear them closing. His free hand shot to his belt, to the buck knife in its sheath. He pulled it free in a wild arc, heart hammering, the blood loud in his ears.

And then his foot caught on something, a wire strung taut. Abruptly, he was flying, tumbling headlong. He landed hard, breath knocked out of him, lantern and knife skittering away. He floundered wildly, fighting to rise, and something heavy fell on him from above. A net, it was a weighted net. Snared, he cried out in fear and rage, tore at the ropes. It held fast.

His pursuers slowed, watching. The lantern lay on its side some yards off, miraculously unbroken, its sickly light rendering a grotesque tableau.

They were perhaps fifteen in number, grunting among themselves, chuckling malignly as they drew near. There was something loathsome, furtive in the way they moved. In their oversized, bunched clothing, they looked like some demented, stunted street gang, pale as grubs, eyes milky white with slitted pupils.

Cal's eyes darted to his knife, impossibly out of reach. A bare hairy foot came down on the handle. Cal lifted his gaze to the figure, took in the baggy jeans, scuffed bomber jacket, ragged "I Love NY" t-shirt. With a thrill of surprise, Cal realized he knew this one.

It was Rory.

“I seen you….” Rory’s lips curled nastily, revealing stained icepick teeth. "You were with my chick.”

Rory scooped up the knife. As he advanced on Cal, the others followed, pressing close. Cal struggled against the net. Futile. They reached toward him with hideous malformed fingers, as Rory swung the knife high and back….

Suddenly, from the far end of the tunnel came a flashing of lights and booming sounds, like myriad skyrockets going off. The creatures gaped, shielding their eyes. Astonished, Cal turned his head, craned his neck to see through the netting.

A figure was approaching, fireballs of light shooting out of his hands and bouncing off the walls.

"BEGONE!" The voice was huge and commanding, God on the mountaintop -- and a vengeful God, to boot. Terrified, blinded, the little brutes skittered down the tunnel into the darkness, their frantic screams floating in the air and then evaporating.

The fireballs ceased. The figure reached Cal, bent down to him.

"Well. Hello, Cal."

It was Goldie.

He looked the same as before, with his cascade of hair, electric clothing, cacophony of buttons pinned to his padded vest. Through his amazement, one of them caught Cal's eye REALITY'S A BITCH.

"How " Cal was gasping, breathless. "How did you ?"

Goldie wiggled his fingers. "That? Little something I just picked up. Doesn't do jack, but it scares the hell out of them."

Cal tried to speak, but he was overwhelmed.

"I can see you're a little freaked. Lemme help you." Rory had dropped Cal's knife in his flight, and now Goldie grabbed it up, started to cut away the net.

Cal felt sheepish, ashamed. "I walked right into their trap."

"Hm?" The netting fell away and Goldie helped Cal to his feet, made sure he was steady on his pins. "Oh no, this is mine." He grinned, and handed him back his knife. "I'm very particular who comes to my place."

Read a Sample Chapter

Randy Waller had heard all the stories about Medicine Water Creek.

It was a load of bullshit, as far as he was concerned, dreamed up by some drunk sad-sack Sioux to make up for the fact that they'd got their asses kicked by the U.S. cavalry and hadn't done a damn thing since.

He drew rein at the top of the draw and lit up, scanning the fence line in the glimmer of first light. Fuckin' miles to cover today, and they were saying it'd rain tonight. That meant Black Hat Coulee would flood by tomorrow and he'd have to dick around with wire and fence posts and nails while standing knee-deep in muddy water, oh joy. Better to get up early and get the whole thing done today and talk the foreman into letting him take the truck into town tonight.

Under him his horse snorted, rubbed a cheek on the fence post. Randy nudged the animal forward along the fence, down into the long dip of bottomlands where the clay-colored stream appeared and disappeared among twisted hummocks of rock. The city kids who came up here in vans, with their long hair and their two-hundred-dollar hiking boots, to "find communion with the Earth" -- which, by all Randy could see, meant smoking pot and humping in the bushes -- talked about old Indian legends and ate up stories about how horses would spook here in broad daylight and even the coyotes would avoid the place at night.

Of course, they didn't come here at night. Randy blew a double line of smoke from his nostrils and scouted the matte-blue shadows among the rocks, the waving thickness of grass that grew everywhere on the level ground. They were allover at the ranch house, raiding the garbage.

And as for "Medicine Water" -- which Randy's dad had called Piss Creek ...

It was low this time of year, midsummer. A glistening thread among the dark convolutions of eroded rock, course echoed by the pale bands that marked the water-chewed banks. Mounds and turrets of gray-black lava lifted like sleeping buffalo from the deep grass. This time of the morning, before the prairie winds started up, the place was deathly silent, filled with the hard cold of the night.

That'd wear off goddam soon. Randy stubbed the butt on his boot heel, flicked it away into the creek. "Let's go, Bean," he said and twitched the reins. Whole place'd get hot as the inside of a cow by ...

Movement caught his eye. The horse flung up its head, reared and veered sidelong, and Randy hauled savagely on the bit. Just a goddam cow for Chrissake.

Only it wasn't a cow, he saw, when he'd dragged his mount around to a trembling standstill. It was a buffalo.

Shit, where'd that come from? Government herd taking up good grassland over in the national fuckin' monument ...

The smell of blood hit him, metallic and savage. He saw it glisten darkly on the buffalo's muzzle, long strings dripping down to the grass. The buffalo shook its horns warningly and lowed; Randy saw the nasty glitter of a small black eye. More blood smell; ol' Bean jittered and tried to run again, and Randy saw there was another buffalo close to the first. Holy shit, must be them ritual mutilators like in the newspaper! Because this one, a huge curly-haired bull, had been hacked savagely, the whole hump cut off its back, raw meat gleaming where the skin had been pulled back.

Like the old buffalo hunters used to do, he thought suddenly, the ones the city kids talk about -- the ones that killed a hundred animals for their tongues or humps or hides and left the rest to rot.

The world all around him seemed suddenly to breathe.

Where the hell the buffalo came from Randy couldn't imagine. Hell, he'd looked down this way not ten minutes ago from the top of the draw, and there hadn't been so much as a chipmunk, let alone six -- ten -- twelve -- full-grown buffalo. And why hadn't he smelled the blood?

It stank to Christ now. In the thin gloom of the place he shouldn't have been able to see, but he could. Some of them had had their humps torn away, others, it seemed, only their tongues. Something came around the corner of a rock pinnacle, and Randy screamed, for this buffalo had been skinned, meat gleaming naked and pearly and rubied with dots and runnels of oozing blood -- it worked its jaws, ruminatively chewing, and it looked at Randy with deep-set black eyes.

Bean reared, fighting the brutal drag of the bit, humped his back and fishtailed, throwing Randy to the ground. Randy cursed, scrambled to his feet, made a futile snatch at the reins as the horse pelted wildly away, and the buffalo -- how the fuck many of them WERE there? -- let it pass.

Bloodied mouths. Bloodied fur. The hot smell of them, like thunder in the ground. A glimmer of blue lightning crept half-seen among the rocks before sinking into the dust. The earth quivered, and voices seemed to cry out -- chants, maybe -- endlessly far away.

Randy screamed again and ran for the nearest hummock of rock. But something tore at his leg, what felt like huge broken tusks ripping through the leather of his boot, and looking down he saw the white bones of an old skeleton rising up through the grass and the earth. Ribs snapped shut on his leg like the bony fingers of a giant hand. He wrenched his leg free and stumbled two more feet, and then another skeleton speared through the topsoil, ribs closing around his ankle again. The ground shook a second time and there was a sound, and he looked up to see them -- hundreds of them now, robbed of humps and tongues and skins -- all lower their heads and charge.