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Title | Ariel
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Author | Stephen R. Boyett
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Cover Art | Barclay Shaw
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Publisher | Ace Fantasy - 1983
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First Printing | Ace Fantasy - 1983
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Title | Elegy Beach
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Author | Stephen R. Boyett
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Cover Art | Steve Stone
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Publisher | Ace Fantasy - 2010
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First Printing | Ace Fantasy - 2009
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Category | Post-apocalypse
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Ariel, Pete, Fred
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Main Elements | Unicorns, wizards
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Website | Steven R Boyett: Welcome!
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 Ariel
It had been fix years since the change...
Five years since the lights went out, cars stopped in the streets, and magical creatures began roaming the towns and countrysides of Earth.
Pete Garey, a young loner who survived the Change and the madness that followed, spent two years wandering and scavenging the near-deserted cities and towns. Then, one day, Arial walked out of the unpredictable wilderness: a unicorn whose dazzling beauty and purity captured his heart. She brought new meaning to Pete's life, and set him on the road to adventure.
Elegy Beach
Thirty years ago the lights went out, the airplanes fell, the cars went still, the cities all went dark. The laws humanity had always known were replaced by new laws that could only be called magic. The world had Changed forever. Or had it?
Fred grew up in a fishing village off the California coast, playing in abandoned buildings and rusting supertankers. He has no nostalgia for the remnants of his father's civilization, and seeks to make his own mark in the world by learning the science of magic, which leads him and his friend Yan to discover how to reverse the Change.
But Yan's recklessness and his growing obsession with humanity's former powers forces Fred to take a stand against his friend - and sets him on a journey in which the return of an extraordinary figure from his father's haunted past is inextricably bound with this world's future.
I'd been reading unicorn books all year now, but I kept Ariel and it's sequel for the end. I had some suspicion they might be good, after all, the first book was written in the 80's but it's still in print. I was not disappointed.
In the first book we meet Pete, who was coming home from a high school debate competition when suddenly the world as he knew it stopped. Inexplicably, certain rules of physics stopped working (while other necessary for life like cohesion between atoms, or gravity seemed to be unaffected, but one could no longer harness electricity, nor build a hand-powered machine even if all it needed were a few gears to turn, and gunpowder no longer combusted...one of those cases where you just have to accept the rules and enjoy the story). A good portion of the world's population also just vanished, including Pete's family. Somehow he managed to surive on his own for a while until one day, while bathing in a lake, he looked up to see an injured unicorn.
Jump ahead a few years and Pete has managed to teach Ariel how to talk...like a teenage boy. She could swear with the best of them, or quote poetry, depending on her whim. They travel the near empty roads, pretty much avoiding everyone else, after all a unicorn's horn is a prize much to be desired by the few magic users of the world. But you can only hide for so long, and then they needed help, in particular from a katana sword wielding hermit, a boy who couldn't go home till he slayed a dragon, and a woman who was to be the end of a beautiful friendship. But before the doom there were trips by whale and flying through an abandoned New York. But don't think this is a kid's book because of the sparkly horse on the cover, this book is for adults and touches on very serious themes, with some rather graphic violence...I labelled this as a post-apocalyptic tale because unicorn not-withstanding, it has all the other elements of one of that genre. That it was magic and not a nuclear bomb, the effect was the same and the world as we know it ended.
And talking of serious, there is Elegy Beach. Boyett never intended to write a sequel to Ariel, sure, it probably would have been popular because of the big fan base Ariel had, but he didn't want to do it just for the money. But one day, he thought, what if magic was a kind of software for the universe, as perhaps physics is for us today? And that just fit into his world of the Change so perfectly that he found a reason to return and explore the idea with Fred and his friend Yan. Pete and Ariel were to show up but be tangential.
But novels take on a life of their own, and while Elegy Beach is written from the point of view of Fred, it is really a story that wraps up Pete and Ariel's storyline. And didn't really get a chance to get into the whole magical software thing other than to mention the concept (which is a cool idea, seeing as I'm a software developer it quite appealed). A story of life, loss, and death. Of finding your place in the world. About longing for the past or looking forward to the future. That nothing can last forever and that the things will always Change, no matter how much we resist. I needed access to a kleenex box a couple of times along the way, sometimes because I was laughing so hard because there is a lot of wry humour mixed in with the deep philosophical moments.
These are very, very good books. If you only read a handful of unicorn books in your lifetime, then you must read The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, and this duology by Steven R. Boyett.
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