conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled The Magicians about Casey, Solomon, Struggling with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Struggling PI Casey thinks he's finally found an easy score: an elderly woman has just walked into his office and offered him a thousand dollars to find out the real name of a man who calls himself Solomon. Solomon is a magician. Not only does he carry false identification, but he can change his physical appearance at will. One of Solomon's identities is nationally prominent, but another is a power-hungry crook with political ambitions. Casey finds himself at a magicians' convention where no one is who he appears to be and all the tricks seem to lead to death... Casey's death. Casey is caught in the middle of a power struggle between Solomon and Ariel, a young woman out to avenge the death of her father. It's a struggle between black and white magic, and when Casey throws his weight to the good, he may learn a few tricks of his own... the author has been a professional science fiction writer for more than 60 years, and in 2007, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him a Grand Master.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a story titled The Magicians.. Start with the sentence 'The Magicians (Priestley novel): Sir Charles Ravenstreet, finding himself unexpectedly dropped from his position as managing director of the New Central Electric Company, retires to his country house to consider his future'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Magicians (Priestley novel): Sir Charles Ravenstreet, finding himself unexpectedly dropped from his position as managing director of the New Central Electric Company, retires to his country house to consider his future.\nHe makes the acquaintance of three strange old gentlemen, Wayland, Perperek and Marot, who take an interest in his life and in his recent dealings with the imperious Lord Mervil, who plans to market a new drug.\nThe main character, Sir Charles Ravenstreet, is an industrialist in his mid-fifties, the managing director of the Birmingham-based New Central Electric Company.\nAt a meeting of the Board in London, he finds himself unexpectedly voted out of his position.\nHe turns down an offer to be named Production Manager instead, and later rebuffs the chairman\'s suggestion that he enter politics.\nLater that evening, at a dinner party at Mr Garson\'s house, he is introduced to Mavis Westfret, a youngish widow.\nHe sells his stock for £200,000 and begins to frequent fashionable restaurants and clubs, but they bore him, and he starts going out with Mavis.\nAfter a sexual encounter, she bursts into a sobbing confession of her dissatisfaction with her life, both past and present.\nThe next evening he goes, on the suggestion of an acquaintance named Karney and his friend Prisk, to meet the newspaper tycoon Lord Mervil, who has a new business proposition for him.\nThe proposition concerns a new drug called Sepman Eighteen, which produces a mild euphoria.\nInitially suspicious, Ravenstreet tries a sample back at his club bedroom, and it makes him so cheerful that he telephones at once to ask for another meeting.\nThe week after, Ravenstreet is driving to his country house, Broxley Manor, when he sees the crash of a jet fighter a few miles ahead.\nAn inn called The White Horse has been destroyed; the only survivors are a barman named Perkins, and three elderly male guests: Wayland, Perperek and Marot.\nThe three men strike him as harmless cranks, and Ravenstreet suggests that they stay with him at his house.\nOn their arrival, Perperek goes straight to the kitchen, waves away Ravenstreet\'s housekeepers, and starts making goulash for dinner.\nWhile he prepares it he perplexes his host by claiming that he and his friends knew in advance that the jet would crash, but that no-one would listen to them.\nAt dinner the three men assert that they are magicians, and although Ravenstreet will not discuss his recent meeting with the tycoon, he is sufficiently intrigued by their manner that he allows Marot to "show him his past".\nHe finds himself reliving, in full, an afternoon from September 1926, when he was on holiday with his girlfriend at a cottage on Pelrock Bay.\nThe day is a turning-point in his life, as it is the day on which he received a letter calling him back to work early, finally prompting him to break with Philippa to marry the boss\'s daughter Maureen.\nPhilippa realises what is happening, but Ravenstreet is resolutely dishonest, and his future self finds the experience a torment, particularly as the decision turned out to be a poor one.\nRavenstreet approaches the trio the next morning, and, still somewhat sceptical, asks for more information.\nThey are reluctant to talk in detail, but say that superhuman forces are battling for control of humanity\'s destiny, and they succeed in persuading Ravenstreet to reveal that his dealings with Lord Mervil concern a new drug.\nPrisk telephones, wanting him to meet Ernest Sepman, the inventor, at his home.\nThe magicians ask Ravenstreet to hold the next meeting at Broxley Manor so that they can inspect Lord Mervil and his associates.\nRavenstreet drives to Cheshire and finds Sepman to be a bitter, cynical and greedy man who idolises his serially unfaithful wife Nancy, even while she boldly flirts with Prisk.\nRavenstreet manages with difficulty to arrange a meeting at Broxley Manor.\nAt first, Karney and Lord Mervil are furious at finding other guests in the house, but soon accept the magicians as harmless cranks, and during dinner they find themselves speaking with unusual frankness about their views.\nLord Mervil asserts the necessity of a hidden elite in every society and Sepman loudly denounces him, in an outburst which causes his wife to run from the room with Prisk in tow.\nAfter dinner, the situation spirals out of Ravenstreet\'s control.\nPerperek announces that he has seen Karney somewhere before—in 1921, in a police station in Constantinople, charged with smuggling.\nThe revelation causes the ultra-respectable Karney to flee in irrational panic.\nLord Mervil demands to know who the three strangers really are; Wayland humiliates him and somehow prompts a decompensation which ends in his fainting.\nWhen Prisk returns with Nancy, Sepman rounds on her and forces her to admit her unfaithfulness, and they both leave at once in Sepman\'s car.\nRavenstreet pursues in his Rolls, accompanied by Perperek, but he is too late: the Sepmans are dead, having driven at high speed into a quarry.\nThe entire night is spent talking to police.\nWhen they return, Wayland gives the exhausted Ravenstreet another vision, of the happiest morning of his life, in the summer of 1910.\nWhen he wakes up, he finds that Lord Mervil and his associates have left, and that he has been called to the Birmingham factory to help with a technical difficulty.\nHe talks to the foreman, Tom Hurdlow, and surprises him by agreeing to finance his son\'s new business.\nWhen he returns home he finds that he and Perperek have been ordered to an inquest on the Sepmans\' deaths.\nThe inquest, presided over by a self-important coroner named Brigden Coss, descends into farce when Perperek is called as a witness.\nPerperek is charged with contempt of court, and taken to the police station.\nWhen the inquest is over, Ravenstreet hurries to the station with Inspector Triffett, where they find all the policemen aphasic and Perperek missing.\nAll three magicians have left Broxley Manor, leaving only a cryptic note from Wayland.\nNot long afterwards, Ravenstreet is called to Purchester Cottage Hospital on the request of a Mrs Slade, who turns out to be the betrayed Philippa, now on the point of death.\nWayland\'s letter gains meaning when Philippa informs him that one of her sons is also his, and that the two children he saw in the waiting room are his grandchildren.