A Wizard Abroad

Nita's mother is sending her to Ireland to get her away from Kit for a while. She stays with an aunt there and right away hears some ghosts. She makes friends with a kitten that is a kitten-bard and travels into time (perhaps).

The book then goes into the history of Ireland from the viewpoint of the Wizards, noting that the Lone Power had interfered in its formation and corrupted its early human settlers.

Nita is going to have to solve a problem of reality slippage in Ireland, where people can go “sideways” into another Irish reality, perhaps closer to the one which is where the perfect universe is, the one that would have existed if the Lone Power had not messed things up.

It turns out that her aunt is a wizard.

They realize that situation could result in past events and beings, including mythological, becoming mixed up with present reality, and that is exactly what starts to happen. Things get quite wild for a while.

And then they get even worse in a final, climatic battle with the Lone Power and its minions in ancient, mythological Ireland.

It's another good book in the series, but there's still something I don't understand about these kinds of books. You've got a major battle and the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance. The battle takes place using wizardry, yet nowhere is it said that regular old-fashioned science, or a mixture of the two, is not allowed.

If you're in an army at position A, and you know you are facing a major force of the enemy who are in position B, then why can't you use your wizardry to cause large numbers of “regular” weapons, like bombs, appear and drop from the skies onto the enemy forces? Imagine a whole group of the evil enemy forces suddenly facing loads of napalm and maybe even nukes or anti-matter bombs falling from the skies on them.

Perhaps the weapons could even be teleported into the ground under their feet, and then set off. It's like battles such as these are always an either-or kind of choice; either it's all magic, or it's all science, and that's that.

If the author says something like “science does not work in this time”, then that's another matter, but if the author says nothing of the sort, then I would assume some forms, at least, of science would work.

Is a puzzlement.

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