Unlike many fantasies written in earlier eras, Deep Wizardry counts as much on a strong female main character as a male one. Nita and Kit collaborate as equals on their wizardry and face equivalent dangers in the course of the story. Nita is never in any "damsel in distress" jeopardy that specifically depends on her gender. Another modern concern that Duane addresses in a subtle way is our responsibility for the environment. As Kit and Nita swim through the Hudson Channel to the site where they will begin the Song, they pass an underwater graveyard of industrial waste: "new, almost whole-bodied wrecks lying dead on their sides atop old ones long since gone to rot and rust . . . chemical drums and lumps of coal and jagged piles of junk metal . . . unexploded ordnance and bombs and torpedoes; all commingled with and nested in a thick ooze of untreated...