Consistent Magic Systems in Fantasy

[marycatelli]

From the program description:

"In many fantasies, particularly in very popular YA fantasy series, magic seems…well…magical. Things happen for no reason beyond the quick application of a magic wand. Is it possible to make magic systems consistent? Who are some authors who’ve managed to achieve this?"

The first question was left out of the description:  do you want to make your magical system consistent?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of it?

The obvious disadvantage is that it makes it so  much less magical.  Magic is unexplained causality.  Drinking willow-bark tea for your headache used to be magic.  Nowadays, magic tends to be "stuff that people used to think would work, but which science has debunked, so that if they work at all, it's sorcery -- trafficking with evil spirits."  But part of the flair, the wonders, the marvels, is its unpredictability.

The obvious advantage lies in plotting.  You can make it clear what your characters can and can not do so that your readers neither assume that the fight will be a snap, nor refuse to believe that your character can actually win.  Rhetoric can pull this off, but consistency helps too.

I blame Ursula K. LeGuin.  Tolkien made his magical characters supporting ones, and not even human at that, and Robert E. Howard set Conan and his ilk against the sorcerers in his sword and sorcery.  But LeGuin put the magic in the hands of the main character, and not safely encapsulated in a ring, or an enchanted sword, which could have its own unfathomable depths.

System is quite useful, but on the whole, I find a broad strokes approach to be best.  If the reader knows the sorts of things your wizard can do, and knows vaguely the price he has to pay -- the steeper the more powerful the wizardry is, the character can be contained within the bounds of plot


part of bittercon.

Comments

[mythusmage.livejournal.com]

To answer the first question, yes. Why? Consistency, that way the reader can know what to expect, and what not to expect. Readers, especially young readers expect consistency in their fiction. Not all the time, but often enough to make it worth your while to at least attempt a bit of world building. And young readers are especially open to consistency in their reading, for inconsistency is no fun and makes the story frustrating.

[marycatelli]

Ah, but we also expect surprises. . . E. M. Forster observed the the advantage of rounded characters is that they can surprising us convincingly. . . after all, if a work is perfectly consistent, we can figure it out from the first chapter and wouldn't bother reading.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Certain kinds of consistency are a good thing, in my book (oh no, not a pun) for example, if something is previously established as possible is forgotten about, I get annoyed. I don't necessarily want to know all he rules, but I want to feel like the rules are there, waiting to be discovered.

On the other hand, I'm not so fond of universes, where the mechanics of magic are spelled out and its practitioners are effectively applied scientists playing with different laws of physics than those here. Part of it is that it always seems like they already know all there is to know about magic, and part of it was that if I wanted to learn the laws of a universe, I'd pick my own.

[marycatelli]

It's not even very realistic as science.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it fills me with a great urge to draw on my experience as a working scientist to write magic that is like real-world science, particularly in a field undergoing a paradigm shift.

[marycatelli]

Oh yeah. When I read books where people make great discoveries, they frequently drop it as soon as the plot device is over and act like it was known from time immemorial -- even before the discovery. Sure there are usually hints, but that doesn't equal the massive changes that discoveries make.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Science can be extremely interesting and frighteningly complex, and we don't know all there is to know. This kind of magic feels less magical than real world science.

[marycatelli]

thin, schematic -- you can't even trust the world-building then, because it makes the world seem thin

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

This.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

There's the Randall Garrett Lord D'Arcy stories, which are detective stories in a world with working Magic. So you expect consistency. They're in a world built to allow classic puzzle mysteries. Except that, a lot of the time, the Magic is used to set up the mystery, and it is solved by other means.

So, in The Napoli Express, we have the set-up for a story akin to Murder on the Orient Express, with a unexplainable death arising from the past history of the character, except that Lord D'Arcy happens to be in the guise of a Catholic priest, and applies the same sort of solution as Father Brown would, based on a knowledge of human nature. In another story, the magic sets up a puzzle in logic, by proving that the missing man went through every door once, and once only.

It helps a lot that the Magic there is consistent, because it provides forensic evidence, but because of the way it is used, there's not a problem in digging up some unique method, apparently out of nowhere. But if there's an already-described technique which could solve the crime, there's a problem.

Stuff like that works. Besides, the CSI franchise uses magic all the time.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh God. My best friend is becoming a forensic osteologist, and Bones makes her cry.

[marycatelli]

As a general rule, anything you see on TV or read in the newspaper about anything you know about will contain ghastly errors.

And yet people act as if they are reliable if they don't know the subject matter.

[marycatelli]

They're great fun. But definitely mysteries that happen to use fantasy techniques.

[j-cheney.livejournal.com]

I watched a movie recently where the lack of consistency created a plot hole that let the whole second half of the movie slide. Despite otherwise being a nice film, I kept thinking...why doesn't the demon just set the book on fire, like he did in the beginning of the movie? My husband didn't even notice that....

I suspect that there are a lot of people out there who don't care about consistency at all. I read cross genre a lot, and have found that in the 'magic' end of Romance, inconsistencies abound. (I won't name names, but there are some million sellers out there who don't seem to worry about that.) There's simply not the same level of expectation of 'consistency' that there is for Fantasy writers.

Just an aside...

[marycatelli]

Yeah -- you don't have actually be consistent, but you have to look consistent.

Ideally, your readers don't even realize it until after they put the book away.

[j-cheney.livejournal.com]

That's the reason I think movies so often gloss over plot holes. Most people don't figure them out until they're out of the theater...if they think about it at all....

[marycatelli]

Whatever works!

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

First of all, I think the programming committee shouldn't have used the word "consistent". I require consistency in all aspects of the story (characters, setting, backstory, timeline); anything less is just plain Bad Writing. (They also should have put Brandon Sanderson on this panel; does he really need a two-hour lunch?)

I like systematic magic; my WSOD requires rules and limits on the impossible (and this is why I can't read any science fiction involving nanotech). I hate books where the climax relies on magic doing something completely unsupported by the rest of the text (like Okorafor's Who Fears Death and Kay's Tigana).

And it is possible to explain all the rules and still surprise the reader, in the same way a mystery writer can give the reader all the clues beforehand. It's very difficult, but that's what makes it worth my money. Or the author can take the slightly easier route and have the surprises come from the characters instead of the magic.

[marycatelli]

Consitency and surprises are great fun when they are found together.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Some form of rules makes it harder to slip into giving magic a deus ex machina sort of role. I certainly don't require blow by blow descriptions of magical theory, but not having the sense that there is any theory behind it undermines the credibility of the plot. (If magic can fix anything/make anything happen, why are we worrying about such&such? or why do problems still exist?)

[mount-oregano.livejournal.com]

In medieval Arthurian fantasy (I mean real medieval, what they were writing 900 years ago in Europe), the troubadours had to find a way to write Merlin out of the story -- he got locked away in a cave, if I recall right. Merlin was so powerful he could do anything, except for getting out of that. Other sorcerers still appeared in the stories, but they were not as powerful, sometimes even incompetent, so problems still existed, and Merlin wasn't there to call to solve them.

[marycatelli]

Ah, yes, the chivalric romances.

Merlin was -- unpredicatable. And even before Nimue locked him up, he often didn't appear.

[marycatelli]

Yeah, and it's one of the most convincing way to avoid a deus ex machina.

[mythusmage.livejournal.com]

I recall a novel by the Late Gary Gygax in which our hero (a mage-priest, and Gary in disguise :) ), had to find an object hidden by the antagonist. At first he tried casting using the Law of Sympathy, only to fail. Then he tried a casting using the Law of Antipathy, and found the item. No real details, but you got some idea of how magic worked in the story's world.

[marycatelli]

Law of Sympathy is, in addition, how a lot of superstition works. Which helps convince, since it's natural sounding