So, having read Cart and Cwidder, it seemed logical (nay, inevitable) that I would read Drowned Ammett, which I did. And I enjoyed it.
The two books are set in the same world, in overlapping times. In this world, there is no workaday magic, and the first half of the book (or so) has no magic at all. The main characters don’t appear to believe in (or think about) magic, so it comes as a surprise to them that magic does come into the plot, and eventually becomes central to it. And it made me think about all the variations on worlds-with-magic.
This one seems very common: magic is a myth, until Our Hero discovers that he or she has magical abilities. Then it turns out that there are several people who work magic, probably in secret, some of them probably genetically related to Our Hero.
Then there’s the world where magic is acknowledged to exist, but very few people have magical abilities. Magic may be legal but is often illegal, or legal only if used in the direct employ of the government. Our Hero discovers his or her magical abilities, and needs to decide whether to follow magic as a career.
There are worlds where magic is common, and most if not all people have some magical ability. Generally, these abilities are mild, but some are more powerful than others. Or magic is not a matter of talent but of training, and many people simply don’t have the training to do more than small household magic.
Then there are stories where Our Hero is transported from a world without magic into a world with magic. Or where magic consists entirely of such dislocations, without magic internal to any world.
All these have been done—not to death, because there are still lots of good stories in those worlds, but they’ve all been done enough that there aren’t a lot of surprises left in them. Or am I wrong?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I read this odd little book one time, called Master of Five Magics, I think, which I recall as being of the magic-is-ubiquitous-but-hard world-type.
Rather a bland book, in terms of style, character, plot, and most things that make a book entertaining, but it was intellectually interesting to see how much thought the guy had put into Magic As A Science and how magic worked in his world. Indeed, that was the story’s raison d’etre, which may have been why it was so dry and boring, otherwise.
But it seems like that’s another way to go: the Magical Procedural. I can abstractly think of other examples of books where the actual mechanics of magic is important, as opposed to the function of magic, but I can’t think of a good example off-hand…
Oh, sure, I can. A good example would be how the magic in the Vlad Taltos books work, for instance. Brust is internally consistent and logical about it.
I can think of at least one other example, with a story involving the mechanics of how a person’s essence becomes linked to their possessions, and consequently their possessions can be used to affect them, and that sort of thing. My memory is telling me that there were rules and jargon associated with the telling of it, and that the writing was engaging when I read it, but I’m not remembering specifics beyond all that.
A propos of nothing, that’s something I’m struggling with in the novel I’m writing – I’ve hitherto shown some magical effects, produced by actors offstage, that people have simply found inexplicable. Now, there are some characters who are in the process of acquiring magic, themselves, and I’m struggling with how to make it both “believable” and “magical.” It’s a tricky line to tread, particularly in that the premise is that the setting is essentially our own, with no substantive changes of reality, except that Aliens Have Arrived and also Magic Is Possible.
Anyway, I’m hoping to surprise, at least a little. But honestly, I’m not trying to surprise with the world (which is our own), or the magic, which is after all a genre trope, so much as with the characters, the dialog and the plot.
peace
Matt