"'She didn't cause any trouble, did she?' Nita said.
'Trouble?' said the Stationmaster, and led them off across the bright floor and showed them the place where several large pieces of the ceiling had been shot down. 'Trouble?' it said, pointing out the places where the floors were melted, indicating the blaster scars in the kiosks and the large cordoned-off area where maintenance people of various species were scraping and scrubbing coffee-ground-smelling residue off the floor. 'Oh, no trouble. Not really.'"
- at the Crossings on Rirhath B, herein
At a minimum, read SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD (which introduces Nita, Kit, and to a lesser extent Nita's sister Dairine) before tackling this book. Ideally, you should also read DEEP WIZARDRY first, in which Nita's family found out that she's a wizard.
HIGH WIZARDRY differs from the earlier volumes in the series in that Nita and Kit, while present and even leading off as viewpoint characters, are not the focus. The main character is Nita's younger sister Dairine, who as the story opens - on the day their parents have just taken delivery of a new computer - has just got hold of Nita's manual, said the Oath, and is waiting for something to happen. Dairine, in fact, becomes one of the first human wizards to receive the beta-test version of the wizards' manual on a computer instead of in book form, so (as with each of the previous two books) we have another way of accessing wizardry being introduced.
The beta-test version of the wizards' manual. Think about that for a moment. This would be trouble even if a new-made wizard *didn't* face an Ordeal after taking the Oath, the problem for which he or she is a solution. Furthermore, since the youngest wizards are least likely to hesitate before attempting the supposedly impossible, wizards' Ordeals tend to deal with the toughest problems. And Dairine, just to make life interesting, would like to grow up to be a Jedi knight; she immediately dives into the bits of the manual that'll let her *really* travel. And thanks to the new version of the manual, it's set up in such a way that the wizard can access it without necessarily fully understanding how a spell will operate; she just has to be able to specify what she wants to do.
HIGH WIZARDRY puts me in mind of CS Lewis' PERELANDRA, because the core problem that Dairine faces in her ordeal is that of a world whose newly awakened inhabitants - essentially intelligent machines - face their first critical Choice that will determine how their species' history will play out. And how does one explain to an AI that fixing the bugs in the universe is not necessarily a good idea?
