| The stories in this collection of fantastical murder mysteries take place in an alternate universe where magic rather than science has become the primary human tool for manipulating the world. Frequent mention is made of the mathematics underlying it -- as if mathematics was "pure" magic that only a few people can understand and actually performing magic is a form of "applied math". Most of the comments are devoid of any actual meaning -- just "mumbo jumbo" -- but the discussion of the significance of the number 5 is interesting because it seems to be based on the longheld belief that there are no crystals with 5-fold symmetry. However, the discovery of the "Penrose Tiling" and "quasicrystals" has forced us to modify this belief!
The collection contains the stories previously serialized as "Too Many Magicians" which was also separately released as a novel.
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