Magic in the Blank Magic Books

Magic

There is a real magic in the world: almost everyone experiences it every day, It has spells and all the trappings of fairytale magic.... it's called technology.

Almost everyone I know has a magic mirror in their living room. You can control it with a gesture and it will show you almost anything that you crave. It's known as a television.

Similarly there are magic wands (thin boxes really) that can affect our lives that most of us carry around in our pockets. They can switch the heating on in our home when we are miles away and they allow us to talk to people and see them no matter where they are in the world. They're called mobile phones.

What runs these things are spells. These are words written in arcane languages that must be accurately transcribed and which are subject to specific rules and forms. They are the software which runs almost everything these days and each language has its own name and peculiarities.

However, for these books, I wanted a magic that was much nearer the classical magic that we've all known since reading our first fairy stories as children. Magic that affects the world and is generated by humans, not machines. Still, I wanted my magic to be half-believable and constructed on some reasonable view of the universe.

There is a view that magic is magic and is by definition divorced from all the normal rules of physics. However, in even the most popular tales involving magic there are sometimes limits. Usually magical power itself is limited; if I were a magician the first thing I’d conjure up is a spell to make my own magic more powerful. The same principle applies to wishes; why be limited to three when the first wish could be to have unlimited wishes. This is known as bootstrapping.

Rule 1 Bootstrapping isn't allowed

So fictional magic will have limits; most authors limit the magic to the power (or the knowledge) of the individual wizard. This is a convenient get-out which serves magical fiction well. However the scientist in me sometimes baulks at the disregard for common conservation principles. A wizard can magically restore a city block regardless of the fact that said block would have taken hundreds of humans and thousands of hours to construct.
I have a feeling that such magical excess is brought about by Holywood. Almost from its earliest days running a film backwards was a cheap and very convenient special effect. Ok, I will grant you that a magician might be able to alter time but there is usually no explanation of how time reversal is controlled or limited to a certain specific set of objects without affecting others.
If a witch could wind back time wouldn’t she be wound back as well thereby removing said witch’s actions and negating the whole time manipulation... Time travel is full of paradoxes.

Rule 2 Avoid Generic Time Travel

Readers of my books will see that I have used time reversal (or, more accurately, entropy reversal at the biologic and microbiologic levels) in my plot but I did have the good grace to limit it to a single localised effect on a single object involving a complex apparatus. Reversing entropy ( which is akin to time travel) is also not without its physical effects. Notably, in reversible chemical reactions, reversing entropy is accompanied by cooling so I used heated tanks and made sure that the appropriate portal radiated cold: Note :Technically you can’t radiate cold you can only radiate heat but this isn’t meant to be a Physics lesson.

Rule 3 Magic has Consequences

Another niggle I have with fictional magic is that there is seldom any description of the mechanism underlying the magic. The mere utterance of a magic word sequence (spell; usually in pidgeon Latin) is supposed to do the trick. Why should it? Is the spell in some universal language that even inanimate objects understand? No, the use of a spell just abstracts the magic from its operation and sends us around a merry loop without ever getting to the nitty-gritty: A spell works because of magic and magic works because of the spell.

Of course there have been other authors that have tackled this problem. I seem to recollect that L.E.Modesitt wrote on a similar theme back in the sixties and there have been numerous novels set in a post apocalyptic future where magic is just advanced technology with some mysticism thrown in.

Spells should be confined to mnemonic triggers that help to focus the wizard’s mind on the actual manipulation of the world.

Rule 4 Magic shouldn't be easily available to everyone

If magic could be performed by anyone then it would be a natural consequence that someone somewhere would use it to control society or at least make it a marketable commodity ( at a substantial price). To avoid this unwanted consequence I have decided that, in the books, the ability to perform magic should be a genetic trait. There is one exception that you will find in the books; magic, in the sole sense of objective control of intangible electromagnetic energies is the result of a bizarre accident.

Of course magic could become available to the 'layman' through the use of magical artefacts. In my book I limit this sort of magic to small effects... Aladdins magic lamp is, IMHO, overkill.

Now that the ground rules have been established the other pages in this section go further;
avoid Magical Theory and Practice if you couldn't care less how magic works and don't like abstract theory or maths.
avoid Crystals if you don't like pretty pictures.
avoid Characters Creatures Creations and the Gallery if you'd rather imagine your own.
avoid Magical Antropology at all costs.