I probably read it in the late 90’s. The book starts out in a standard medieval fantasy setting. For what I remember, the main character is a boy who becomes and an apprentice to a wizard type character. The wizard has a “magic viewing glass” and is on a quest to find more magical artifacts. As the book goes on, it is eventually revealed to the reader that the book takes place in a post-apocalyptic future. The viewing glass is just a magnifying glass, and the other artifacts they find include scissors and a telescope. I believe the ending point is a modern day (possibly American?) army base. Looking around, it seems that “Medieval world is actually the future” trope is pretty common, so I’m having a hard time finding it.
At first I was thinking it might be The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson? But I don’t remember the teen protagonists considering the old man a literal wizard, just a specially knowledgeable old dude… and the wizard with his magic glass is ringing a bell somewhere.
I gotta think about this, and didn’t want the thread to sink!
Yeah, doesn’t look like it. The whole part about it being the Earth in the future is a twist near the end of the book.
Might be one of the books listed here http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AfterTheEnd/Literature
Someone asked this exact question on a SF forum, and they concluded it was The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks.
thread here:
Some other thoughts:
Dies the Fire, by SM Stirling
Tales of the Dying Earth, by Jack Vance
Yeah, Sword of Shannara popped up in a lot of my searches but it doesn’t seem to fit. From what I can remember, the world itself wasn’t too magical. Most of that seemed magical was just modern day mundane technology (like a microscope). I don’t think there were elves or anything like that.
SOS fits except for the looking glass and scissors scissors. However, that’s just SOS. You also have “Elf Stones of Shannara” and I think “Wish Songs of S.”
So, please explain to me [now that it is figured out to be the Sword of Shananananana series. Sorry, I couldn’t get past the first hundred or so pages and that was way back when it came out. First book I ever threw out the car window.] How did the scissors and whatever they were looking for get shrunken down so far they needed a magnifying glass to find them? Or am I misinterpreting things here?
The problem is the magnifying glass is a key part of the story. The big reveal basically comes when the reader figures out that this magical object is just an ordinary magnifying glass. Looking at the other stories on wikipedia, they don’t seem to fit, but I’ll check them out.
No, they didn’t need the glass to find them. Those were just other “magical” objects that they found along the way.
Ah, ok. Like I said, I couldn’t get past the first hundred pages. There are a couple of those interminable series that I couldn’t manage to even finish the first book on. That was the problem with reading Tolkien as a young sprog … the ‘knock offs’ were boring and unpalatable to me.
I think you’re still confused. That’s HIS – the OPs – memory of the book he’s looking for, and, it’s probably not Sword of Shannara (which is, indeed, a hideously stupid book) because SOS has elves and shit.
Absolutely not Dies the Fire - no points of resemblance at all. Apart from anything else, DtF starts with the Change - there’s no mystery about when it’s set.
Yeah, those were reaches, and not very good ones.
Its crazy but I feel strongly I’ve read this book. It’s killing me I can’t figure it out.
And (if I recall correctly) there’s narration fairly early in SOS that makes it clear that the book takes place in the future, after a catastrophe, but the characters never really figure that out (or particularly care). I don’t recall any magnifying glass (or scissors) in SOS, either. They’re looking for a sword…
How about a post-Christmas bump.
Question: Does the “wizard” know these are ordinary objects, or does he treat them as magical, and only the reader recognizes them as ordinary?
6 months later, I kinda forgot about this one so I’m bumping it one more time.
The wizard treats them as magical. Only the reader knows they are ordinary, and not until later in the book (or at least I was stupid enough that I didn’t catch the twist until later in the book).
Man, I totally read this book in school. I remember using the idea of mundane-modern-item-as magic in a story I wrote (rather transparently; I was a pretty blatant copier as a child). As I recall, the kid gets apprenticed to the sage character? Wish I could remember the title…
What, do you expect them to come out and say “Hey, wow, we’re living in the future!”? Even Brooks isn’t that incompetent. They know that the ruins they sometimes encounter were made by ancient folks; what more is there to realize?
What I meant is that the reader learns that the world of Sword of Shannara is the distant future from an infodump from the 3rd person narrator, not by interpreting the perceptions of the characters. Without the infodump, there’s no indication that the book takes place in the future at all (rather than in a generic fantasy world).