Witch of the Federation: I quite liked this new series from Michael Anderle.

Witch of the Federation (Federal Histories, #1) by Michael Anderle
My rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ out of 5 stars

The future has amazing technology. Our alien allies have magic. Together, we are building a training system to teach the best of humanity to go to the stars.

But the training is monumentally expensive.

Stephanie Morgana is a genius, she just doesn’t know it.

The Artificial Intelligence which runs the Virtual World is charged with testing Stephanie, a task it has never performed before.

The Earth and their allies, may never be the same again.

Will Stephanie pass the test and be moved to the advanced preparatory schools, or will the system miss her? Will the AI be able to judge a human’s potential in an area where it has no existing test data to compare?

I have to say that I quite liked this new series from Michael Anderle. I have generally liked books from Michael Anderle. At least the ones he has written by himself. Unfortunately his name are on a lot of book covers but far from all of them have been written by him.

This book is not just another story in the Kurtherian universe but starts off a entirely new story in a new universe. The magic in this universe is “real” magic. No nanocyte stuff and all that. Something which I definitely like since the Kurtherian universe has been feeling a bit worn out lite.

In this universe Earth has science and their allies, the Meligornians, have magic and the two doesn’t really mix. That is technology, or rather the power source stops working at Meligorn and Meligornians cannot draw power to perform magic without a “magic battery” when away from Meligorn. That is, surprise surprise, until our main protagonist enters the scene.

The story is rather simple, almost young adult level, but it is well done and with enough elements in it that I quite enjoyed that I really liked it.

Stephanie Morgana is a young girl wanting to study to become someone but Earth is a bit of a dystopian world where those from the “lower classes” without money rarely gets the chance to do so. In order to be selected for higher studies one has to pass a test in a virtual world run and administered by a powerful AI. Unfortunately even if you pass you are probably not selected unless you have money and or connections.

Here is were it gets a bit weird though. The AI just exists and we get no explanation as to how he came about. Worse, the humans running him seems to not know what they are dealing with and how sentient and powerful he actually is. They monitor him just by monitoring the load and if it jumps up a few percent they get jumpy wondering what he is up to. As I wrote…weird.

I do like the AI as a character though and he does indeed play an important role in the character advancement of Stephanie.

The story really is about Stephanie though and how she actually manages to get into studying and much more. During course of the book Stephanie manages to evolve greatly, meet and befriend the highest Meligornian ambassador on Earth, discover that magic does indeed exist on Earth and do quite a bit of magical ass kicking in between. Oh, and there are a third alien species hovering in the background that I assume we will see more of in the feature. The story is indeed a bit simplistic and thus a bit unbelievable but I had great fun reading it.

I am quite looking forward to the next installment in the series.