Series
Magic Goes Away
Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Bob Shaw, Dean Ing, Dian Girard, Fred Saberhagen, Mildred Downey Broxon, Poul Anderson, Roger Zelazny & Steven Barnes · 2 novels · 2 novellas · 8 novelettes · 7 short stories · 1 collection · 2 anthologies · 1969–2005
The Magic Goes Away began as a Larry Niven novella imagining a prehistoric Earth where magic is a finite, minable resource — an explicit response, by Niven's own account, to the 1973 oil shock — in which sorcerers who draw too hard on the world's dwindling mana bring on catastrophe. Niven opened the setting to other writers for follow-up anthologies (The Magic May Return, More Magic) and let Fred Saberhagen write a solo novel in it, The Time of the Warlock, making it a shared-world series about the last age of magic rather than one continuous story.
Summary by Loreful, from public sources
Reading order
The order the books came out.
Best read in the order they were published.
- Golden Road(2 works)
- Omnibus editions(1 edition)
Map
Magic Goes Away at the centre, 1 subseries around it, its books fanned around what holds them. Pick anything for its details, and zoom out for similar series in orbit — the reading order above lists the same books as text.
Stats
By decade
- 1960s1
- 1970s3
- 1980s13
- 1990s0
- 2000s5
Shape
2 novels · 2 novellas · 8 novelettes · 7 short stories · 1 collection · 2 anthologies
10 authors
reads like:fantasywizardssecondary worldtimeless or unspecifiedadventurousadult
Mood
Bright and intense: 57% of this series' placed works, the catalog's 44%.
this series · the catalog · one dot = one book14 of 22 works carry a tone
Edges of the map
- "... but fear itself"darkest
- The Wishing Gamebrightest
- The Magic May Returncalmest
- More Magicmost intense