#young wizards

• Astrophage is seeded all around the stellar neighborhood so fast that every planet's own wizards are too busy to work together right away. The Manual keeps everyone connected (the entry for astrophage is huge and updating constantly)

• Eridians just discovered space so the lone one isn't "Starsnuffer" to them but a bringer of the cold. The Hunter who invented his own function.

• the idea of evacuating earth is discarded because earth isn't the only planet that needs it.

• Project Hail Mary attracts an unusual concentration of wizards. Every team working on the problem has at least one wizard --Carl is Grace's. Carl is not aware Grace didn't volunteer until after launch: he thought Grace volunteered then panicked (book Stratt's story that Grace asked to be knocked out early).

• Movie Stratt's husband is a wizard.

• Adrian is a wizard. They were almost selected for the space mission too, but their larger size prevented it.

• (Rocky wishes Adrian were here. Rocky is thankful to all the Powers That Be that Adrian isn't here. Rocky wishes Adrian were here and Rocky was left behind. Rocky wishes he never wished that.)

• Yaó and Shapiro were both wizards. The Hail Mary is needed for life support on the mission, but there was definitely a lowkey plot that if the human wizards were able to figure out how to solve the astrophage problem, wizards from other worlds were prepared to help get the astronauts home and deploy the solution. This required a wizard on the Hail Mary and with Yaó gone...

• there is a message/information from the wizards of Earth alongside the golden plaques on the Hail Mary (same on the blip-A)

• wizardry is not totally unknown on Erid but seen as really odd. Wizard isn't the same kind of function as science or language or teaching even though wizards can do all those things and more.

• Adrian being a wizard helps Rocky deal with the fact that humans don't have functions the same way Eridians do

• Eridian wizards don't travel off planet that much --Erid as a whole only just discovered the sun. Eridian wizards being into space would be like human wizards treating the Mariana Trench as the showoff destination instead of the moon.

• Rocky's regular complaint of "I wish there was a wizard here" or "a wizard could figure this out" is completely untranslatable to Grace

• Rocky tries breaking "wizard" down into "Life-singer"

• (Grace thinks that means biologist, and insists that he is one. He gets really annoyed when Rocky is like...yeah no)

• the wizards get updates on the status of their ships. The day Yaò and Ilyukina died and the day the Blip-A stopped functioning everything got just a little bit colder.

• Grace's biodome and classroom is protected by xenonite and wizardry, which makes everyone feel safer.

• Eridian wizards build worldgates while the mission is going on, so by the time Grace and Rocky make it back to Erid the food problem is almost able to be solved by travel/trade. It's still deeply inconvenient to worldate directly from Erid to Earth but the Crossings is fine.

Grace tries not to abuse the privilege (his Eridian psychologist is trying to get him to believe he deserves to get to go home whenever he wants). A young lady from Earth stops by to sell him chocolate sometimes. He wants to stay here. He's the happiest he's ever been.

Alternatively:

Looking back over her arc in the books so far, I think it's probably safe to say that there hasn't been any kind of judgment call on Dairine's specialty because she doesn't know for sure what it is yet. (And possibly she doesn't feel any need for there to be a hard-and-fast determination of what it might be. Or alternately, she may not see it as particularly important to make any such kind of determination.)

I should probably clarify the general landscape on this issue by saying (speaking ex cathedra, as it were) that it's not an ironclad requirement for a wizard to have a declared or recognized (or even recognizable) specialty. Lots do, of course: especially early on in their careers. But these aren't seen as any kind of limitation, then or later. A wizard can shift declared specialties with no problem if they find their interests (and the kind of errantry work they enjoy doing) have shifted focus with age or experience. The Powers that Be have no intention to force any wizard to do work in which they don't find satisfaction. The exercise of wizardry is difficult and dangerous enough as it is without adding any kind of expectation-fueled compulsion to it.

Dairine in particular is kind of an interesting case, as—almost uniquely among the major YW characters we've met so far—her own practice of the Art keeps getting knocked sideways into interest areas that look to be mostly of benefit to others and only less directly so to herself. (Though this might be one of those judgments that's best left to the Powers that reside outside of time.)

The connection to machine life via the ability to connect in very basic ways with unusual forms of matter, though, which was initially laid out in High Wizardry, has (to my eye at least) some resonances in her ur-matter work during A Wizard Abroad, to her connection to the Sunstone, and to the plasma-based and other high-energy stuff that goes down at the end of Games Wizards Play. So we might be able to make a case that Dairine is (at least glancingly) a specialist in exotic-matter and -materials technology.

(I note in passing, BTW, that the only reference to her in work that's closer to our own time coordinates, in Owl Be Home For Christmas, merely says that at that point [2020] she was doing some "computer work" on Carmela's new starship. [shrug] It's also entirely possible this reticence had to do with main-timeline continuity issues intended to unfold in YW 11 that I wasn't prepared to get involved with at that point.)

Anyway: the tl:dr version of this: Jury's still out on this issue... and it's okay for it to be. 🙂 ...Anyway, thanks for the question!

(ETA: off the note from @mikailborg: (per this earlier post): "A girl never forgets the day she takes delivery on her first starship." :)

I hope your beverages are always the right temperature and you see a cool bird today <3

Thanks so much!

As for New York: there are times when it makes me a little sad that I'll probably never see the place again in the flesh. (My current physical condition—specifically meaning assorted annoying internal stuff I've got going on—makes it medically inadvisable for me to engage in long-distance travel that puts me more than two hours away from a hospital at any given moment. So no long-distance flights for me any more.)

prologue of diane duane’s so you want to be a wizard—

And here I am. :). Thanks so much for letting me know you like them. :)