The Castle of Iron , which is set in the milieu of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso . The Compleat Enchanter tales are seen as the ancestors of that strain of comic fantasy which has reached its current peak in the works of Terry Pratchett. It was the skewed-logic aspect that appealed to John W. Campbell Jr, the editor of Unknown who published the first three tales. The trouble is that it was, as stated, quite simply a pretence. And this is an ongoing problem with the Compleat Enchanter tales as entertainment.
Events tend really just to happen.
They're enjoyable enough, but, as there's no particular reason why one should follow the other, similarly there's no particular reason to keep turning the pages. Which leads to a further difficulty. There's not much new to say in each fresh story, aside from the change of venue. Certainly this reader's heart did not soar at the prospect of each new story's beginning. But one after the other may not be the ideal way to approach the five tales in this volume.