The book starts with Ravirn and Melchior having to dodge assassins as they try to save the multiverse from Atropos’ free-will-eraser-program.

The ramshackleness applies to the plot, as well. And then there’s the multiverse angle as well, where the book has a brief interlude in “Saint Turing’s,” a medevial Christian style monastery devoted to monks who chant in binary– which on paper is a fun idea, but it really doesn’t fit into the kitchen-sink of styles and ideas that McCullough tosses in. Except … Ravirn (and his Fate-blooded cousins) are basically Midsummer Night’s-Dream style fae, complete with pointy ears and fancy Elizabethan ruffles. For example, the inclusion of the Fates (and later, the Furies) gives WebMage a kind of Greek mythology foundation. On paper, Webmage works well enough– the problem is, the setting is an absolute mess. Oh, and there’s a sexy blonde elf-hacker-girl that Ravirn hooks up with on like page 50, too, so there’s a love interest. This, of course, is a Bad Thing™, so Ravirn proceeds to get chased all over the multiverse as he blunders around trying to stop it. Early in the book, Ravirn and Melchior discover that one of the Fates (you know, the Greek goddess ladies with the loom and all– they were the bad guys in S5 of Legends of Tomorrow!) is creating a magic-program to alter reality to eliminate free will. Melchior’s a webgoblin: a constructed magical goblin-guy who sometimes transforms into a laptop. Ravirn’s got the standard ‘urban fantasy snark’ thing going on, most often shown through his dialogue with Melchior, his familiar (read: sidekick). WebMage is presumably named after, well, the titular WebMage, a magic-hacker named Ravirn. Charles Stross gets a lot of mileage out of it in his Laundry novels, and I’m even reminded of an old Rick Cook book called The Wiz Biz that I read back when I was a kid. ‘Magic done by Computers’ can be a pretty interesting foundation for a story. It has to be coded, debugged compiled– and as such it can also be hacked. In the world of WebMage, magic is treated as a programming language. Though honestly that makes it sound cooler than the book actually is. So the Dresden Files gives us “Fantasy + Noir,” Weber’s Honor Harrington series is “Space Opera + 18 th Century British Navy” and Kelly McCullough’s WebMage gives us “Fantasy + Cyberpunk.” Book Review: WebMage, by Kelly McCulloughĪn easy, pithy way to describe a lot of books is “GENRE + THING.” I mean, every author wants their book to stand out, so one easy way to do it is to just mash stuff together.

Cybermancy by Kelly McCullough