Scientific Magic

Fantasy settings commonly have a magic system of some sort. It is often well-thought out and organised and more-or-less reliable. I’ve heard of authors writing themselves a “bible” about how it is supposed to work so that they don’t make mistakes.

Most of the magic in Harry Potter is reliable and repeatable, for example. Harry’s trademark Expelliarmus always fires. Fred and George’s joke candies always work. Yet the need to practice and perfect it is mentioned a lot of the time (it is a school, remember). And we also see the edges of an organised study of what magic can do. A major section of The Ministry Of Magic is for research, after all. And Dumbledore frequently talks about what they don’t know magic can do when talking to Harry about Voldemort.

The magic in most Dungeon and Dragons settings is reliable, too. I think this is because the settings inherit a game system because players use magic very frequently, either explicitly (like if they’re a wizard) or implicitly (a weapon or even a skill). Adding a reliability check to all magic in DnD would slow things down a lot. In the novels, it is common for a master thief to have an arsenal of magic objects, and they almost always function as designed.

There are sometimes multiple magic systems. Lyndon Hardy did this with his novel The Master Of Five Magics. Each is separate and a major piece of the world economy is built around them. In fact, a major industry is built around training for each magic. The whole story is about someone who sets about being trained in all of them, which is unheard of. With so many magic systems, Hardy created a structure for them all, and rules for each of them. He did this so well that with his sequel, The Secret Of The Sixth Magic, he could create a meta-magic system that describes how they could be changed. Both novels have been praised for creating such an organised description of magic.

The magic in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is more than a bit organised, too. The wizards of Unseen University are a lot more like scientists than practitioners of nefarious arts. In the later novels, we have everyday devices powered by magical means: cameras and personal organisers are the visible two Pratchett has fun with. Each have a tiny demon running things inside them and they are mass-market products. This magical-being approach is even lampshaded right in the first novel when Rincewind is given Twoflower’s camera to operate. He knows that there are certain chemicals that react to light and he begins wondering how to get from there to a functioning camera. At that point, the tiny demon inside Twoflower’s camera opens the access hatch for the first time to tell him that he’s run out of pink paint.

Pratchett even lampshades this in the large with four whole books that he co-authored with two scientist friends, beginning with The Science Of Discworld. These use the fictive construct of the wizards and their world to explore the sciences of our own world. And I mean “sciences” in a very broad sense of the word. Early excursions look at nuclear physics and cosmology, but later ones look at social sciences like narrative history, and how belief shapes our thinking.

This takes us back to where magic exists in our own history. And that is usually spirituality and religious practice. I know enough about both to recognise that neither are treated very much like science, though.

Praying to a deity is common in both the real world and in fantasy settings. In most fantasy settings, it is often like a magic spell: you say the right words and the deity automatically grants the supernatural effect you’re seeking. Except when they don’t because the plot requires it. And this also doesn’t work in the real world, either. It would be news all around the world if a Catholic Cardinal in the Vatican could reliably and repeatedly summon a fireball by prayer.

One of the allures of fantasy novels is, of course, reading the characters doing the impossible. Particularly in an analogue of our own world. This is one reason the Harry Potter novels are so popular. Who wouldn’t want to be able to wield magic with a simple stick of wood in their home or workplace? Except if lots of other people have one, too. And Hogwarts does teach a lot of offensive magic.

There are some fantasy worlds where magic is rare. I built one for a gaming campaign, yet only one player really grasped what that meant for playing. It was at least three sessions before they had access to magical healing, for instance. Settings where prayers (usually) don’t do anything, yet those who pray think they do are also rare. The Dragonlance novels had a period where that was the case. This was because the gods had deserted the world for a period of time, and people were calling to new gods that did not actually exist.

So how reliable is the magic in your fantasy worlds?

Handling Death in a story

Us human beings have a kind of macabre fascination with death. We always have. Maybe this is because death is a part of life. There are always things dying for us and near us. Plants. Animals. People.

Exploring death is a ripe subject for a story. In today’s modern western society, it has been said that we don’t see personal death as much as in other cultures or societies, nor as much as in past centuries. We do see old age death, though. I had a grandfather recently die basically of old age. And although it was sad to see him go, he was 71 and that is generally considered a decent length of life.

An untimely death of someone much younger is often handled differently. You might think that a violent and untimely death of someone we know, whether pre-meditated or an accident of circumstance, is not something the average person will encounter much if at all in their lifetime. But that’s not the case, as many non-caucasian people in the US would testify. So such people can and do tell stories to help share to those who have not. And also to help themselves understand the own reactions.

Anne McCaffrey’s famous novel The Ship Who Sings does that. It is a series of short stories and in the first one, we meet Helva (the titular spaceehip) and watch her story unfold as she begins life as a human brain wrapped in a spaceship. And we also see her as she falls in love and then sees her love killed in an accident basically right before her electronic eyes. It is a strongly emotional scene. McCaffrey is on record as saying she wrote this story as catharsis for dealing with the death of a family member.

The TV series Broadchurch also does this. It looked at what a death of a young boy does to the residents of a small, somewhat isolated British town. We see death dramatised on our movie and TV screens so much more than our parents and grandparents, particularly a most deliberate kind of death: murder. This story was an unusual telling, though. It begins as a Police Procedural. This is a modern version of the classic Murder Mystery story that’s been with us for decades and still makes for blockbuster movies and long-running TV series. Broadchurch takes one or steps in that direction, then does the narrative equivalent of stopping and taking a long look around. It is at that point it then becomes an exploration of how a murder creates ripples and waves in the relationships of the people in the town. Some people have to deal with the deceased not being there anymore. Others have to work out how to talk with others dealing with this. There are secrets uncovered, motives questioned and relationships sundered. There are many and varied reactions.

But that is holding a mirror up to the real world.

In speculative fiction, particularly classic Fantasy, death is not always permanent. Sometimes it almost feels like it comes with the genre. Almost. In settings like The Forgotten Realms there are numerous ways to be resurrected or to live on beyond death. This is kind of expected as its world rules are Dungeons and Dragons and in this world and others with highly pervasive magic systems, it is often possible to resurrect a killed person. This is not always the case, though. In David Edding’s Belgariad, resurrection is a highly dangerous exercise. It only happens when the plot demands it.

J. K. Rowling takes this further. Again, this is a magic-rich world where a lot of medical problems have magical solutions, from broken bones to the common cold. But not death. It is a key story-point in one of the later novels that even in Rowling’s world, death is permanent and irreversible. And it is significant that Rowling puts her characters (and readers) through the wringer over several deaths that happen. In fact, defeating death is the goal of the villain of the whole series. And look at what it does to him!

Rowling’s handling of death is a touch point curiously close to the real world. It was remarkable when I read it and still is when I re-read it.

But do we need to explore death in stories? In a sense, yes: it is an important part of being human. There is a certain fascination with it’s permanence and trying to put it off as long as possible. Or even entirely. And this is why stories get written about it.

 

Review: The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

This book is what Neil Gaiman does best: make the mundane meet the fantastic.

And I mean that in a quite literal way. In all of the Gaiman novels I have so far read (American Gods, Stardust and Neverwhere), the protagonist is an otherwise ordinary human being somehow thrust into or put in touch with an alternate world, sometimes by accident, sometimes by circumstance. Each does it differently, but each does it in a uniquely Gaiman way.

The Ocean At The End Of The Lane is no different. This time, the lead is a middle-aged man re-remembering when he was seven. And that’s an important detail that gives the book a frame. There is a single narrative, a single voice. Gaiman captures the peculiar point-of-view of a seven-year-old as a remembrance. All the action happens in and around an isolated farmhouse down the end of a laneway in rural England, one short of an even more remote farmhouse at the end of the lane.

It is easy to spoil this book. Too easy. There is so much that you simply need to experience for yourself by reading it. The titular ocean is a character of its own, though it is off-stage for much of the story. There are several cats with important roles. And there is another world complete with its own monsters and monster hunters that can touch ours in ways strange and yet completely logical.

There is loss, there are mistakes. There is hope and there is melancholy. It is a story both rich with emotion and room for the reader to add their own.

This is a story that shows you how to be happy with regrets.

This is a longer version of my GoodReads review.

When world-building overwhelms.

I may as well say right at the outset that whilst quality world-building is a great thing, you can have too much of it.

A number of years ago, I bought and read a fantasy series by a new author. An Australian imprint was looking for someone to spearhead their fantasy publishing down under and had found someone to publish. This was before the rise of ebooks, note. It is probably just as well I don’t remember the author’s name because the books were atrocious. My enduring memory was how little characterisation there was. Like most epic fantasy works, there was a great deal of magic, adventuring and gods dabbling in the affairs of men.

But the story was dry as dust. The world was interesting, the magic system fairly original, but everyone was a cardboard cutout of a cliched idea. It was difficult to discern anyone’s motives and most of the action was mechanical.

In other words, characterisation was sacrificed for world-building.

You wouldn’t be surprised to know I’ve long since gotten rid of those books.

More recently, I started reading another epic fantasy novel by a much more well-known author. Like most in the genre, there was a prologue filled with characters that I did not expect to see again and narrating events I would expect to be only referenced in legend in the rest of the story. So far, so good. The first real chapter started with some action – a somewhat mysterious assassin was at work, fighting off mooks as he sought his target in a place he didn’t really know. Completely tropish scene, clashes of culture driving action and interaction, plenty of opportunity for small info-dumps about the world. Which the author took. The assassin has a few magical skills unusual in the culture of his quarry and us readers were treated to quite detailed descriptions of how it worked.

There was a warning there, I think. Because it turned out it was a second prologue.

The next “chapter” was with another set of characters in a third location. And more world-building. The chapter after that did it again! But this time – finally – there was one character in common. His circumstances were vastly different, however, and I nearly didn’t recognise him. But then it happened all over again with the next chapter!

This novel has a lot of world-building. A lot. Maybe too much. Arguably too much to throw at the reader at this point in the novel. It’s all quite interesting, but I’d much rather have characters I can get to know instead of introducing them and then putting them on a shelf for a little while. It makes for a read that doesn’t engage me as well as it could.

And no, the novel I am describing is not A Game Of Thrones, although that work has also been accused of the same problem. The book I am referring to is The Way Of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I’ve seen other authors do the same: as well as George R. R. Martin, Peter F. Hamilton comes to mind. His space opera The Night’s Dawn Trilogy does the same thing: multiple interleaving threads, scads of major characters and an immense amount of world-building.

But Hamilton makes it work. The characterisation he lends his characters is a match for the world-building and the action moves at a solid pace. I don’t feel Sanderson is giving his characters enough room. However, it is early in the novel and this problem may sort itself out.

But I still maintain that world-building can crowd out characterisation. It’s not a good idea to let that happen.

 

My first rejection

Every writer always wonders what will happen when they send a short story off to a submissions mailbox. Experienced writers have obviously been through the process many times and many will happily tell you about how long it took to get a favourite story published, if you ask. But this was my first story submission.

To their credit, the turnaround was just two weeks. I don’t know if that was typical or because of the “fast-track” process they offer subscribers. Still, it was good to have. Many places have reputations of months.

It was only a week ago that I was telling a friend about this. And truth be told, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted it to be accepted or to be rejected. That might sound strange, but rejection from where I sent it comes with brief notes as to why it was rejected. And it was those notes I was interested in.

I was happy to read that the submission reviewers found a lot of good to say about it. I was not surprised they praised the rich world-building. I was gratified they found the characterisation strong and that the two were woven together well with a well-paced and engaging narrative.

What appears to have let it down, though, was the actual story. This blog is called “Just Add Story” for a very good reason. I’m beginning to understand this speculative fiction magazine much more with this rejection notice. Several times I’ve read stories they’ve published and wondered quite why it was accepted. Now I think I know why. My story is, at core, a very traditional one. The hero takes the side of a persecuted minority, jeopardising his own place in society. Risking his life, in fact. There’s nothing wrong with this as a story, of course. In some ways, my writing was an exercise in building a world a story could stand up in, rather than a new take on an existing story.

The catch is that it is some of the more traditional stories I am drawn to tell. A friend who critiqued a previous draft liked the romantic sub-plot – which I had added without quite realizing it was romantic; it was really added because my characters are human. And humans fall in love and get hearts broken. The mag I submitted to, however, kind of prefers new ways of interpreting existing stories. Mine is not.

One of my favourite collections of short stories is one by Anne McCaffrey called Get Off The Unicorn. It is a collection of a number of her earliest successful short stories, most of them written and published before she was an accomplished novelist. They are speculative fiction in the truest sense: they took then current memes and speculated. One of them, for example, is about surrogacy. When it was published, it was asking questions not just years but decades ahead of its time.

But I haven’t done that. My short story has a hero vaguely like myself taking choices and chances I wonder if I could take. That might not really fit what this mag wants to publish, which is fine. I am still learning story-craft, after all, and playing ‘what if’ with someone I can identify with is kind of an obvious place to write from. The questions it was asking of its readers were more human, more eternal. But it has made me aware that this magazine might not be my target market.

I’m not upset at the rejection. I’m not two thirds of the way through a bottle of cheap wine. I’m not halfway through a box of tissues. They haven’t rejected me: they’ve only said that specific story doesn’t make the grade. “Sorry, but we hope you try again.”

I’m cool with that.

 

Why do we love werewolves?

Western popular culture has a special relationship with certain Medieval European folk myths. The history of religious and spiritual beliefs across the continent as well as how Christianity developed and coloured a lot of them makes for interesting reading, to be sure. So when popular culture went looking for scary things to mine for stories, there is lots of material ripe for re-imaging.

Vampires are one example of that. Werewolves are another. Both have been frequently re-used and re-invented over the last few decades. I don’t even need to list any titles. The best writers come up with new angles, like Jandar Sunstar in The Forgotten Realms – an elven vampire who actively and successfully fights his vampiric compulsions to the extent a vampire hunter ends up badly misjudging him. Or the vampires in Sanctuary who actually bear little resemblance at all to the popular tropes (and it is such a delight seeing Jonathon Young portray a vampiric Nikola Tesla). The more average ones either disappear with little trace, or come in for considerable amounts of ridicule. Twilight‘s sparkling vampires are a good example.

Review: Shifting Reality by Patty Jansen

Hard science fiction does not ever have to mean a light story peppered with dense, science-heavy prose. And this book shows you why.

The setting is an orbital, rotating space station a few hundred years in the future. It is one of several mining the orbital debris around one of our gas giants. A lot of the population is a type of artificial human called a “construct”, but there is also a hefty proportion of real humans – and this is the first interesting part: they are Indonesian.