For reasons I’m not sure I will ever fully understand, the topic of magic and rules comes up with slightly alarming frequency in SFF circles. So much so, in fact, that it is very tempting to use ominous capital letters when referring to the two bits of said topic: Magic and Rules. Does magic have to have rules? Would everyone just run about drunk with power if the rules did not constrain their magics in some way? What are rules, and what are parameters? If limits are not imposed upon wizards, will they ever impose them upon themselves? When does magic become science, and how much of this entire topic can I throw at the feet of Clarke’s third law?
That law, for those in need of a refresher, states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Fair enough. But must we try to reverse-engineer this?
Let me back up: I know there are a lot of books with intense magic systems because I hear about them. I read about them. I encounter online arguments about them and I see authors’ laws and notions about them. But I don’t, for the most part, read those books. I bounce off magical rule sets like drunk bees bounce off windows. But I’m not here to drag the rule-havers, long may they reign in their specific territory of fantasy. If you like the rules, more power to you, go with god(s), etc. I’m sure we can find something else to talk about should our paths ever cross.
I am here instead to sing the praises of rebellious, lawless, delightfully un-rulebound magic—not just the kind people do, but also the kind that simply is. I tried to find an example from Catherynne Valente’s Fairyland books and was overwhelmed with them: the wyverary (half wyvern, half library); Gleam the lamp; the smartly dressed Green Wind; the whole thing with the moon in the third book: Valente writes like she’s never heard of “rules,” and I have never wanted anything in one of her novels explained to me any further than she explains it. Strange, arguably magical things happen in Helen Oyeyemi books, and whenever they—or she—run up against a rule, whether of science or nature or anything else, it goes ignored. A lot of my favorite books, I can’t remember how the magic works. And I mean that as a compliment. In The Incandescent, magic exists, and some people are just better at various kinds of it than others. (Some of it involves invoking demons, and if you mess up that kind, well, magic definitely has a price.) Magic in The Magicians comes from pain. That’s fine. That’s a source, not a rule (one does have to learn fancy hand motions in order to do magic, but that’s a process). It also always kind of feels like a wry punchline to me. Every life has some pain. Therefore we’ve all got some magic.
Magic relies on things, has processes, requires learning: yes, yes, yes. If magic is an art, well, art takes study. I could spend hours learning to draw and I would still not be an outstanding artist. Why would this not hold true for magic? What of the incredible alchemy of art and skill and practice and learning? If magic is a natural force, well, one also has to learn to understand those. I am not suggesting every wizard, witch, sorcerer, or other practitioner suddenly have access to powers unbounded. It only tracks, in my kind of brain, that in a world with magic, some people would have it come easily, and some would have to work a lot harder. Some would decide that the work wasn’t worth it, and learn to make elaborate candles or really good focaccia instead.
I admit, though, there is a little part of my brain that understands the rules and parameters and specific magical-math folks. A little bit. At least in principle. I understand the appeal of directions you can follow, steps you can take, a path laid out for success. Quantifiable actions. Stages and tasks and if-x-then-y. I play a lot of Zelda. I feel like magic systems are like when you decide to upgrade your armor: You will need a number of lizalfos tails and a number of flowers and probably some pretty gems you dug up in the mountains. It’s all fun and monster-killing and steady progression until you realize the game is never going to provide those elusive electric lizalfos tails. And then it just becomes homework.
There’s also a little part of my brain that understands wanting magic to work like things we know. Maybe it takes a certain alchemy of light and water and invisible elements to create a flower; maybe it takes that to create a spell. But I don’t want to read a textbook for something I cannot actually learn. There is a point, for me, at which the fictional education becomes too much. Magic feels to me like something that should, on some level, be unknowable. Maybe dangerous. I’ve read more than one book in which magic elicits a sort of backlash. Unpredictable, possibly dangerous, and uncontrollable. You would have to be really sure that you needed to do your magic if it might come back to bite you in the metaphorical (or literal) ass like that.
I like not knowing. I am currently sixty-odd pages into Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage and I have no idea what kind of book I’m dealing with. It’s sort of like if Piranesi and City of the Uncommon Thief are doing a really complicated dance together, beckoning for the reader to join them, but said reader has no idea how the steps go. There are people with trout heads and a beehive that prances around like a pony. Magic. No one’s doing magic, exactly, at least not yet, but this world is magic in itself. There is magic in its seams. I do not need to know why the trout person has a trout face. I might find out, or I might not. But logic is not required.
Magic! Illogical, glorious magic! Give me more. Shape it with names, summon it with car-antenna wands, sing to it with bells, make deals with demonic figures, do incredible works through magic rocks. Let magic run wild and only a few people know how to chase it. Make it as common as air and a pain-in-the-ass to wield. Limitations are great. Limitations are fun to work with, fun to play with, delicious to smash. I’m not suggesting we need a whole lot of nuclear-warhead level mages in every story doing whatever they want, because that would be boring. But that’s not down to the rules or the magic system; that’s down to the story and the characters. Anyway, maybe magic doesn’t want to be used like that. Maybe it’s sentient. Maybe it hates you. Maybe it’s petty. Maybe it likes systems! Maybe sometimes magic systems are just science in new outfits. Maybe magic met chemistry in college and they got along really well.
I am not the first and will not be the last to make this plea: Let magic be magical. Let it not “make sense.” If you don’t believe me, will you listen to N.K. Jemisin?
Because this is magic we’re talking about. It’s supposed to go places science can’t, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own. In most cultures of the world, magic is intimately connected with beliefs regarding life and death — things no one understands, and few expect to. Magic is the motile force of God, or gods. It’s the breath of the earth, the non-meat by-product of existence, that thing that happens when a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it. Magic is the mysteries, into which not everyone is so lucky, or unlucky, as to be initiated. It can be affected by belief, the whims of the unseen, harsh language. And it is not. Supposed. To make. Sense. In fact, I think it’s coolest when it doesn’t.
It’s coolest when it doesn’t. This is from Jemisin’s 2012 blog post, “But, but, but — WHY does magic have to make sense?”
This is also why I love it when writers get their fantasy all mixed up with their science fiction. Space is big and wild and if we’re going to explore far distant (made-up) parts of it, who’s to say what lurks between those moons and stars and planets? Who’s to say there are limits on what fiction can invent out there in the black? A book—any book—needs to have a sense of internal logic (unless it is purposefully and cleverly not doing that, but that’s a whole different thing). But that doesn’t mean we need to know why there are talking trees. Or what songs the stars are singing to the spaceships that drift by on their way to new (and possibly magical) worlds.
All of Patricia McKillip’s books.
One of the things I liked about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is that the English magicians thought they were practicing a system with rules (“English magic”), but they really were flying blind in a mystery that was way beyond their ken, as was demonstrated forcefully at the end.
I came down here to say that!
As always, you are that rare, rereshing voice of not just common sense but sanity (and thank you for using “SFF” instead of the tiresomely precious “speculative fiction.” All I care about is a good, well-told story. I don’t care about laws, rules and world building. Life is fleeting and I have walks to take, music to listen to and my garden to enjoy.
As always, thank you.
Scalzi’s Redshirts starts with pseudo science that can only be explained by magic. It has absolutely no rules. And it gets even more nonsensical from there. Anything more would be a spoiler. But it’s a wild trip and a fun read.
This is something else that John W. Campbell Jr. can take responsibility (or blame) for. When he began Unknown magazine in 1939, his guidelines stipulated that fantasy fiction in the magazine had to have its “magic” as thought-out and consistent as the “science” in the stories in Astounding. The archetype would be the Harold Shea stories of de Camp & Pratt, one of which is bluntly titled “The Mathematics of Magic.”
I think what he may have felt was most important was “consistency” being perhaps more important than actual “rules.” That is, he may have wanted to avoid stories where the hero(es) can get out of any scrape by suddenly casting some spell or exerting some power they just happen to acquire for whatever plot complication they’re facing.
Brandon Sanderson has a really good essay on what he calls “Sanderson’s First Law”: An author’s ability to solve problems with magic is directly proportionate to how well the reader understands said magic.
So on the one hand you have “hard magic” systems like Sanderson’s own Allomancy, or like the Eragon books, or most superhero stories. In these stories, the reader generally has a clear understanding of what the magic can do, what its rules and limitations are, and which characters can do what with magic. And as a result of that, it doesn’t (usually) feel like a deus ex machina when characters use their magic to solve problems. We aren’t surprised when Spiderman dodges a bullet or ties up a bad guy with webs, because we already knew that those were things Spiderman could do.
And then on the flip side, we have “soft magic” systems like you were talking about, such as Lord of the Rings or Song Of Ice And Fire. In these stories, there may be a lot of magical things happening, and there may even be characters that can use magic, but the reader never really learns how the magic works or what rules it follows. (Note that there may be characters who understand the magic more clearly, but they do not share their understanding in detail with the reader). This retains that sense of wonder and mystery you were talking about, that sense of a world that is greater than our ability to grasp and where unexpected things can still happen. But in exchange the author largely gives up his ability to solve problems with magic. In Lord of the Rings, for example, note that almost none of the battles are won by a direct display of magical power from Gandalf. Battles are won by the valor and kindness of ordinary men and women, not by the mystical abilities of wizards.
Oh, this is so interesting, thank you! I tend to see certain authors get pointed at when this topic comes up (something i specifically did not want to do here) but of course there’s an older and more institutionalized history, too.
The Oz books in particular feel very whimsical and convey a sense that the author is just making stuff up as he goes along. And they were so popular that they shaped a generation’s idea of what fantasy had to be like: light, whimsical, and profoundly unserious. I suspect Campbell’s demand for rigor was at least partly in reaction to that. As in any art form, there’s a tendency to rebound from one extreme to another.
I like the distinction between RPG magic and fairy-tale magic.
RPG’s (and later video games) have mathematical rules for magic so you can run it as a game with a combination of stats and a random element. There are books full of carefully thought out rules. This worked its way back into literature via ‘hard magic’ systems, where the author has basically made an RPG system for their books, which is often explained in the text (or appendices).
Fairy tale magic doesn’t have rulebooks and stats, but rather a feel to it. A lot of the intuitive sense of how things work is based in a whole culture, or multiple cultures, full of legends and fairy tales and folklore. There are boundaries to how the magic works, but the edges are fuzzy, and the details are not explained.
I don’t mind carefully thought out mathematically based magic systems, but I tend to bounce right off of books that insist on explaining how they work, rather than having it be behind the scenes. I think it triggers my technical reading brain rather than my fiction reading brain, and pulls me out of the story, as I do actually quite like reading RPG manuals and my job involves quite a lot of math and technical documentation. I have the same issue with technobabbly hard SF books – it feels like reading scientific papers, just not very good ones
Two words, ma’am: deus ex machina. Oh? So now rules matter? ;-)
Not to hijack the point, but …
I think one of the most interesting uses of Clark’s Law is Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
I think a rules-based system works very well for some kinds of stories. If the characters are figuring out the rules, that is fun! (I am a science teacher, so I think figuring out how things work is a good time.) Also, if the characters and author figure out clever ways for rules to combine or to get around what seem like strict limitations or use the rules in interesting ways, that is also fun.
I also really like a looser, no-strict-rules, vibes based approach for other stories. Sometimes the story demands mysterious and unknowable elements. Sometimes it needs some whimsy. Or maybe the characters and society don’t have a strictly scientific understanding of the world. In cases like these, I think it hurts the story more than it helps to tell the audience about the rules of the world (even if the author knows them).
However, these systems still need to have limitations and/or costs. This goes for little things as well as big things. If instantaneous communication anywhere in the world is possible, I need to understand why it isn’t used all the time and that letter took so long to reach the army commander. If it is possible to replicate any object perfectly, I need to know why the main characters don’t have enough to eat.
I think the big writing rule for me is that magic should cause at least as many problems as it solves. If the characters can wave a wand and all their troubles disappear, that isn’t much of a story. But if they COULD wave a wand and solve their problems at the cost of their one true love, that’s a story. The heavier the tone of the story, the higher the costs can and should be.
I find it fascinating that the basis for “grimoire” or “gramary” is “grammar”, which traces to both “rules” and “magic/learning/erudition”, from the Greek for “letter” (‘gramma’) and “craft” (‘techne’), hence “grammatike”. So there is a sense in which magic IS rules and/or rules themselves are magic. Of course, they are not widely known, so rules wrapped in mystery is perhaps the best conception.
Unless we move to “wild” magic, in which case I will defer to both Diana Wynne Jones and Stephen R. Donaldson.
(commenting is glitching for me)
Fundamentally, I think if you have a person responding to events with strong feelings, if that person could readily and easily have altered those events without any costs *but didn’t* then we need to know why or the strong feelings are a bit suspect.
(Incidentally, after testing, I can apparently make short comments, but long comments cause an endless return of the “I’m not a robot” checkbox after clicking “Post Comment” – please feel free to delete this)
I do like me a rules-based magic story. It’s fun when the rules are simpler than initially thought— it’s a kind of mystery story. Conversely I also like when an author reveals unexpected uses and consequences of rules that were established early on.
But I agree with this article: there can be something special about the opposite approach when it’s done really well. I don’t think every writer can pull it off. Someone already mentioned McKillip. le Guin, and Morganstern’s Night Circus also spring to mind. These authors somehow evoke some of the wonder/fear/surprise I might have if I actually did encounter magic. In that way they’ve made magic that feels more real.
My motto for this is to think about magic, not as a thing you do, but as a thing that is.
Yes! I love this!
Magic absolutely has to follow rules. It’s just that the reader isn’t required to understand them.
They can still tell when something shouldn’t work. If something goes outside of their working knowledge of how it works, you better make it clear as to why there is an exception.
This isn’t about rules, so much as it is good basic writing. You wouldn’t write a character who is dealthy afraid of heights the whole book, then have them casually go cliff diving into a lake with friends. It’s incongrous. The reader doesn’t need to know why theyre scared of heights to see that they are and that something is very strange if they suddenly act counter to that.
It’s the same with magic. Having well stated rules and formula is a flavor of magic. So is a whimsical flick of the hand. Regardless of how well it’s explained, there do have to be rules. Whether every reader understands them, or whether only the author does.
I feel like if there were literally no rules for magic, it’d be hard for the characters to learn it too.
_The Face in the Frost_ has rules up to a point. Some things maybe make intuitive sense, and some things make _no_ sense, but just _are_.
Granny Weatherwax’s Rule: If you’re going to break the rules, break ’em good and hard!
Thank you! This is exactly how I feel. As a reader, I will accept any magic the author creates so long as there are compelling characters and it makes sense within the story.
Perhaps it’s useful to distinguish between laws that societies construct around the use of magic, and how magic behaves – magic activities that are readily perceivable (e.g.a trout-headed person, apples falling down and not up), and magic laws that are not readily perceivable (e.g. gravity)
This was some of the coolness of those Gideon the Ninth books, but when you mix Magic with SciFi I need a little more help for it to be said “THIS IS MAGIC” so I can accept the non understandable. The religious “magic” in Battlestar Galactica for example just didn’t fit for me in this highly science based setting.
I love the big shrug to logic in the, “ITS MAGIC” explanation, but it does need some boundaries for me to feel it has narrative weight. Why did this happen in this moment and no other time in the past or future?