Elegy Beach — Steven R. Boyett

Thirty years ago the lights went out, the airplanes fell, the cars went still, the cities all went dark. The laws humanity had always known were replaced by new laws that could only be called magic. The world had Changed forever. Or had it?

Fred grew up in a fishing village off the California coast, playing in abandoned buildings and rusting supertankers. He has no nostalgia for the remnants of his father's civilization, and seeks to make his own mark in the world by learning the science of magic, which leads him and his friend Yan to discover how to reverse the Change.

But Yan's recklessness and his growing obsession with humanity's former powers forces Fred to take a stand against his friend -- and sets him on a journey in which the return of an extraordinary figure from his father's haunted past is inextricably bound with this world's future.