Both of the links I put for Vandervort's novels go to the Hadley Rille website, but you can also order these books through Amazon, or ask for them at your local bookstore. Just as a reminder, though -- Hadley Rille is still celebrating its fifth birthday with the giveaway of a free Kindle 3G. In addition to being able to register for the drawing for free when you visit Hadley Rille's website, every time you order a book from the site you get another entry in the drawing. For more information, click HERE.
Okay, on to today's topic: The 'Rules' of Magic
I'm not sure who first coined the term 'the rules of magic'. I'd like to credit Orson Scott Card with having used the phrase in his brief but very helpful book "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy", but in truth I'm not sure he did. The first time I heard "magic" and "rules" used in the same breath was at a meeting with my local writers group, the Dead Horse Society. The heart of the idea did not really become clear to me, though, until many months later when a member of DHS, having read an early draft of EOLYN, came back to me with several questions about magic in Moisehen. The one that has stuck with me to this day is this:
"If magas draw their power from the earth, how is it that they can shapeshift into owls?"
In the moment, I thought this a ridiculous question. Why would drawing power from the earth negate the ability to shapeshift into an owl? As it turned out, this person's confusion arose from a preconceived notion that flying creatures are associated with the power of air. Yet in the world of Moisehen, that's not how things work. All living creatures are associated intimately with the power of the earth, and practitioners connected to the earth can, therefore, shapeshift. Practitioners who draw their power from the air, on the other hand, cannot shapeshift -- even into flying creatures -- although they do have access to other distinctive gifts.
In any case, this question was a turning point in my journey as a fantasy writer. For the first time, I realized there would be readers out there with preconceived notions of how magic is supposed to work, and that if I wanted to avoid upsetting them with 'magic that made no sense', I needed to be more explicit throughout the novel about the underlying logic of magic in Eolyn's world. That day I went home and told my husband I needed to outline the "rules of magic" for Moisehen. To which he laughed and said, "I thought the whole point of magic is that it breaks the rules."
At the 2010 World Fantasy Convention, I attended a panel discussion entitled "The Fairy Tale as a Specific Form". There were five members of the panel, Leah Bobet, Terri-Lynne DeFino, James Dorr, Gabe Dybing, and Delia Sherman. Early in the discussion, the topic of magic came up, and one of the panelists mentioned that for JRR Tolkien, magic by its very nature could not be explained -- as so many readers expect it to be now -- it simply 'felt' right, though its inner workings would always be a mystery.
Now, I am no scholar of Tolkien, and all I have from this panel is that one brief note, but I do think it's interesting -- assuming the panelist's assesment is accurate -- the implication that we have moved from a period in which magic was accepted as an intuitive, essentially inexplicable endeavor, to a time when it's a fundamental task of every fantasy writer to elaborate, in an almost scientific fashion, on the 'rules of magic' for his or her world.
Does that mean the genre has advanced somehow, become better, more thorough in its approach to world building?
I'm not so sure. I have heard, for example, colleagues ruminating about the problem of 'conservation of mass' during shapeshifting. Yet as I see things, if you can turn a duck into a goose with a wave of a wand, the laws of physics are already irrelevant. What, exactly, do we gain by mixing science with magic? By distilling the infinite universe of imagination into testable hypotheses? By trying to fit square pegs into round holes?
Just one year ago, I was comfortable with this idea of 'rules' in magic, but -- as is probably clear from this post -- I'm starting to drift away from that. I no longer believe 'rules' is the correct word to use in association with magic. I do believe magic (like, say, religion or art or even literature) must have an underlying logic, a way of working that is tied intimately to the culture, history and worldview of the people who practice it. (Another way of saying, I suppose, that it has to 'feel' right.) In that sense, magic will always have limitations -- but limitations defined, I think, more by the vision of its practitioners than by any inherent 'rules' that govern what magic can and cannot do.
What do you think? Does magic need rules? Or is magic meant to break them?
6 comments:
"...if you can turn a duck into a goose with a wave of a wand, the laws of physics are already irrelevant."
Spot on. This is exactly how I feel. There have to be consistencies within a system of magic, but no two systems of magic have to be alike.
My kids are watching Harry Potter right now--ok, take that for example. Spells, potions, wands--it's a magic system that works on "tools." Then you have Lucas's Force that works on the powers of the mind. Consistency within a particular system of magic is crucial--and that's not to say you cannot have both kinds within the same story. But a woodswitch isn't going to use the same skill set as a wizard. Each sect is going to have its own rules, and they will have certain things in common.
This is what I love SO MUCH about Eolyn--your system of magic is so well thought out. Your characters move through the different systems of magic, from Simple magic like a midwife would use, through to the manipulation of the world through magical "mind" powers. And yet, as you mention above, the people of Moishen derive their powers from the earth. THIS is their commonality!
Ok, I'm rambling now. I wish we'd had time to get into a discussion like this at WFC! And I wish I'd more to say during that panel.
Thanks, Terri!
I actually put a lot of thought into the system of magic from the very beginning of writing the novel, though I didn't think in terms of 'rules' until I hooked up with DHS.
What I did think about is how the people of Moisehen would conceptualize magic -- I saw them as a culture that valued highly organized systems, finding order in the natural world, and so forth. So they have, in effect, 'imposed' a lot of categories on magic -- Primitive Magic, Children's Magic, Advanced Magic, and the subcategories of 'Simple' Magic, 'Middle Magic', 'High Magic'; then of course there's 'Female Magic' and 'Male Magic' and so on and so forth.
But "real" magic tends to violate these boundaries and slip out from under imposed categories. The magas and mages of Moisehen not only acknowledge this, they have made it the topic of ongoing and heated debates throughout the history of Moisehen. There's is always a tension between the rules they want to impose on magic and the reality of actually using it.
Working on a Fantasy novel myself, I also have thought over the rules of magic. I do feel that some limitations are in order. Otherwise, the people would abuse the magic and it would be as common place as heating a kettle. Or one could wish death upon your enemy and be done with it... end of story.
Yes, I created a base rule set on how magic would work in my world. It describes how special people can draw upon special power and how certain spells influence the caster.
We are dealing with an audience that has read many books about such things and probably formed their own opinion. We can't make it too easy for our protagonists.
At leasts that's my take.
I've been following the progress of your book and I'm very impressed with what I've read so far. I'm looking forward to read it in its entirety.
Hi Dina --
Yes, I think I like the word 'limitations' more than 'rules'. Or perhaps the 'consequences' of practicing magic -- what it takes to cast that curse, for example, that will kill your opponent and end the story. And do the benefits of the curse outweigh the potential costs?
It may just be a semantic thing.
While the magas place their magic in a certain structure that defines how they use and practice it, it's still true that magic sometimes behaves in unexpected ways in Eolyn's world. I think that is what I really want to conserve -- some aspects of magic that don't make sense, that have no ready explanation, that don't conform to the rules we or our characters impose.
That's great that you're working on a novel of your own! I hope to get to read it someday. :)
In my opinion, magic should be able to heavily BEND the laws of reality, but not outright BREAK them. Well... not easily, at least, and not without severe consequences. You don't have to divulge a huge explanation for it that perfectly obeys the laws of reality as we know them, but you should at least make sure they don't outright ignore them either.
So, let's take shapeshifting as an example. For shifting into smaller forms, that extra mass has to go somewhere. For that, I'd follow the Animorphs' example and say that the extra mass goes into a higher dimension of some kind. It's a plausible explanation that doesn't require you to have to have a doctorate in quantum physics, and will still satisfy anyone who's curious about the specifics (so long as they can suspend their disbelief a bit). And for shifting into larger forms, you could use the Dresden Files' example and say the extra mass comes from an equal amount of ectoplasm, which can take any form or consistency you'd like as long as a constant magical current is passed through it -- when you shift back into human, that mass falls away as clear sludge that will quickly evaporate without any traces.
Hi, Anonymous!
Thanks for stopping by.
So, a lot of people are into 'scientific' explanations of magic as a way of setting limits. I think it can work -- and has worked, for a lot of authors. The 'problem' of mass (if we must call it a problem) is a good & popular example.
The issue I see with applying scientific explanations to the process of magic is that it becomes a slippery slope.
Take shapeshifting again. How to resolve change in mass is actually one of the easiest questions to address if we want to explain it within the laws of the natural word. But there's a whole host of other issues that are much harder to resolve if we assume shapeshifting is a physical event, as opposed to a magical one.
Take DNA, for example. Not only does each species have a unique set of DNA, but the composition of the DNA is unique. The proportion of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine is different for every species. So, how do we account for that in a shapeshifting event? Where, for example, does the 'extra' thymine go to and where does the 'missing' guanine come from? And does our story really gain anything by figuring that out?
Another problem: How can the conscious thought of the practitioner be supported by the brain structure of the animal he or she has shapeshifted into? Impossible, except perhaps if one is shapeshifting into a dolphin or an orangutan -- and even then, it's not very likely the mage or maga will be able to 'think' in the same way.
This isn't to say limitations aren't important for magic, but from what I've seen applying 'scientific' explanations so that magic works within the known laws of the natural world can only take us so far. At some point, we still have to shrug and say, "It works that way because, well, it's simply magic."
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