mostly pretense, as she is preoccupied with what
she sees as the tragedy of her intellectually and so-
cially impoverished personal life.
Since money, or the lack thereof, is the un-
mentioned background theme to their lives, Paul
finally asks about it and is told that they have little
money because his parents are unlucky. Paul has a
rocking-horse that he orders to take him to where
luck can be found, with no visible effect, although
when an uncle asks the horse’s name, Paul indi-
cates that it changes from week to week. Coinci-
dentally, perhaps, the previous week’s name was
that of the winner of a major horse race. The uncle
subsequently discovers that Paul, with the aid of
one of the servants, has been quietly betting on the
horses for some time and has accumulated consid-
erable winnings.
With the uncle’s assistance Paul arranges for a
substantial part of his money to be funneled back
to his mother, hoping that this will lighten the at-
mosphere at home. Although he does experience a
significant improvement in the family’s lifestyle,
the unspoken wish for more money becomes, if
anything, more strident than before, and it is obvi-
ous to everyone except the boy that his mother will
never be satisfied. Paul rides the rocking-horse fu-
riously awaiting another winner, but as the days
pass unsuccessfully he becomes increasingly upset.
When he finally does find a winner, the strain has
been so much that he falls into a fever and eventu-
ally dies.
Paul’s mother is clearly the villain of the story,
guilty of neglect if not malice. By withholding her
love and by obsessing over their perceived poverty,
she has created stresses too intense and complex
for the boy to resist. To a lesser extent, the uncle
and even the servant are also guilty, exploiting the
boy’s abilities without being seriously concerned
about the toll it is taking on him. Ironically, he
dies leaving his mother with a small fortune,
which she will undoubtedly still consider inade-
quate for her needs.
Rohan, Michael Scott(1951– )
After a brief stint writing science fiction, Michael
Scott Rohan collaborated with Allan Scott on
Burial Rites(1986, also published as The Ice King),
a dark fantasy in which an ancient superhuman
Viking warrior is released from the ice and re-
stored to life, after which he begins a brief reign
of terror before finally being destroyed. The tone
is much closer to horror than fantasy, one that
Rohan largely abandoned for his subsequent
work.
The Anvil of Ice(1986) opened the Winter of
the World series, set in a magical land that is still
caught up in an ice age. A young boy becomes an
apprentice wizard and has a series of low-key ad-
ventures, setting the scene for The Forge in the
Forest(1987), in which we are shown the conflict
between two rival groups of magic users, each
striving for dominance in their ice-clad world.
The young wizard rescues an entire isolated city
but is given a fresh round of tasks to accomplish
in The Hammer of the Sun(1989). The Castle of
the Winds(1998) changes direction, following the
adventures of a blacksmith who builds a mar-
velous suit of armor and then must track down
the thief responsible for its disappearance. The
chronicles of that world are continued in The
Singer and the Sea(2000) and, at least for the time
being, seem to have ended with Shadow of the Seer
(2001).
The Spiral series began with Chase the Morn-
ing(1990), which has a considerably lighter tone.
A businessman discovers that our world is the
nexus among various realities and that it is possible
to move from one to another. An entrepreneur at-
tempts to set up an interreality trading consortium
in The Gates of Noon(1992) but runs into unex-
pected difficulties. The negative consequences of
the arrangement become more evident in Cloud
Castles(1993) when hordes of creatures, some de-
monic, invade the now accessible Earth, and the
insanity grows zanier and more general in Maxie’s
Demon(1997).
Rohan also wrote The Lord of the Middle Air
(1994), in which Sir Walter Scott teams up with a
wizard to battle evil, and A Spell of Empire(1992),
with Allan Scott, set in an alternate Europe. Both
novels are very cleverly done. Rohan is a reliable
source of entertaining adventure stories, is capable
of delivering a wide range of atmospheres, and is
particularly adept at creating colorful settings. De-
spite a period of considerable productivity in theRohan, Michael Scott 293