Review: Oops! I Broke the Wizard's Android!

Oops! I Broke the Wizard's Android! by Royce Roeswood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mostly successful blend of SF (of the space-opera variety) and fantasy, as the title suggests.

That title refers to an event that occurs more than halfway through and isn't, perhaps, as crucial as its place in the title implies. The fix for the problem sets up for a "twist" that I knew was coming the moment the fix happened, and that I didn't believe would never have come up for anyone previously; but I read a lot of books, so I often see plot twists coming a long way off.

Something else I see a lot of is poor mechanics (punctuation, grammar, usage, vocabulary errors), and this book has many of the usual ones. (Disclaimer as always: I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and it is possible, though not highly likely, that there will be another edit before publication.) Excess commas between adjectives, of course, because nobody seems to know the coordinate comma rule; incorrect punctuation of dialog (a capital when the sentence resumes after a mid-dialog tag); apostrophes in the wrong place for things like the Lamplighters' Guild (which presumably has more than one lamplighter in it, so the apostrophe should go after, not before, the S); simple mistypings that happen to be valid words spellcheck doesn't catch, even though they're not the word intended, like "try" for "tray," "It" for "I," "add" for "and," "of" for "on," "she" for "see"; basic homonym errors like "diffuse" for "defuse," "horde" for "hoard," "loathe" for "loath" and (only once) "it's" for "its"; lack of the mandatory comma before a term of address; occasional lack of the past perfect tense where it belongs; and a number of other small issues, like grammatically distorted sentences, unusual word choices and hyphenation issues. It's about average for an indie book (trad-pub books sometimes have just as many errors, but typically different ones), but unfortunately, average means scruffy and, to me, at least, distracting.

What about the story? It's a simple enough plot. This is a universe in which high-ranking wizards are placed in charge of planets, moons, space stations and what have you, and aspiring wizards, after their university training, are sent for a year's apprenticeship - basically an internship - with a master wizard, doing their mundane chores in return for instruction in advanced magic. The protagonist, Ninienne, is such an apprentice, and her master wizard is incredibly old, not entirely compos mentis, and obsessed with portal magic (now mostly obsolete), whereas Ninienne intends to be a researcher in the field of creature healing - magical veterinary science. The creatures, by the way, are often a combination of a couple of Earth-type animals, like Ninienne's frogdog familiar, or the crowhorses that are used for farm work, or even of animal and plant.

There's an odd mix of eras in the worldbuilding; there are interstellar spaceships and androids, but the farming feels 19th- or early-20th-century, and rather than electric lights, the wizard's tower is lit with flame spells. In 1950s space opera style, all the inhabited worlds appear to have entirely Earth-compatible biomes, with no difficulties about being able to eat the local life or farm crops from other planets. Intelligent aliens in the SF sense don't seem to be a thing, but there are dryads and demons and such. It's basically a fantasy universe with a bit of light SF grafted on.

As the story progresses, Ninienne struggles more and more with her mentor, and he looks more and more sinister. Where is his previous apprentice? What about his wife and daughter? Why is he so obsessed with portal magic? Will he near-arbitrarily decide to fail her, in which case her magic will potentially be bound and she will be left in desperate straits? Meanwhile, her closest friend is having a great time in her apprenticeship (a long way away) and isn't much help, the android Ninienne tricks her mentor into buying to do the scut work is, perforce, on the mentor's side because of its programming (even if odd things are happening with it), and there's a guy from a nearby farm who seems to want to be the romantic interest, but Ninienne can do without the complication, given everything else that's going on.

As far as storytelling is concerned, while there's nothing amazing, it's all sound, solid stuff, entertaining, with a decent arc and good emotional beats. The worldbuilding isn't particularly in depth, but it does its job. The characters have believable motivations. It's a good first effort, and although of course I wish the author, like nearly every author I read, could level up his game when it comes to writing mechanics, I've read plenty of books that are far worse in that regard (I'm reading one at the moment, in fact). It earns a spot in the Bronze tier of my annual recommendation list, which is still a recommendation, even if not a high one.

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