Six Rules of Magic in Fantasy Fiction

Today I am not really here. I am buried under projects that desperately need attention, and the ever-fantastic John Lambshead has bravely stepped into the breach to provide The Literary Project with its first ever guest post. Someone give that man an ice cream.

Do you write Fantasy? Do you use magic (or majick or magique or... you get the drift) in your stories? Then believe me, you need to read this article. Then you need to print it out, take a highlighter to it, and apply your newfound wisdom to your wonderful works of fantasy fiction. Trust me on this.

John, over to you!

Six Rules of Magic in Fantasy Fiction

By John Lambshead

The one thing that distinguishes fantasy from other fiction is that the story hinges on the supernatural, and this usually involves magic. Magic, along with religion, is one of the oldest human 'skills'. Our current ideas of both religion and magic back to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia but our fascination with the supernatural appears to be older than civilisation itself.

The first buildings ever erected by man were temples, or magic centres. Archaeological research at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey has discovered a twenty five acre site of pillars organised into rings. The pillars are carved with reliefs of all sorts of animals from bulls and lions to spiders and snakes. The circles, which may be up to thirty metres in diameter, were surrounded by stone walls two metres high and were probably roofed.

These temples were built 12,000 ago at the start of the Neolithic A period. They, therefore, precede the invention of agriculture and pottery. The animal representations remind one of the European cave art of the pre-Neolithic, 32,000 ago, which are considered to be a form of hunting magic rather than decoration.

So magic is older than civilisation – much, much older. Indeed, one wonders whether we have been working magic as long as we have been the human species; a trait so ingrained is likely to be biological rather than cultural. Magic may be hard-wired into our brains.

Our brains work by correlation to establish cause and effect. Example; the long grass moves and a leopard appears. Conclusion: grass movement causes leopards, so run when you see the grass move. Of course sometimes the grass moves and you run without a leopard appearing, but that's OK -all you have lost is a little dignity. On the other hand it could be catastrophic if the grass moves and you don't run.

Rule One: In magic, one success washes away innumerable failures.

To go back to our analogy. Our predictions about the correlation between leopards and grass movement can be improved by adding in more factors. For example, how does the grass move? Is it windy

Rule Two. If a spell does not work then add more ingredients.

A magic spell that fails does not disprove the magic. It just means that the magician overlooked something. Extra complexity is required in some way. Maybe the spell can only be performed at daybreak, or on a Thursday, or facing east, or wearing blue socks – whatever. But if a spell works just once, i.e. the desired result comes about, then it proves that magic works.

Rule Three: In magic, any proposed mechanism between cause and effect (assuming there is one) does not have to make any kind of sense but it has to be coherent – there must be a logic.

People have traditionally tended to distinguish between magic and religion. This distinction is not new, having existed in Bronze Age cultures. Indeed, most religions are hostile to magic.

The problem is that it is actually very difficult to separate religion from magic since both deal with the paranormal and both assume that humans can influence the natural world if the right ritual is followed. The two can be better distinguished by how they are practised. Magic tends to be individualistic, secretive, and disorganised. Religion, on the other hand, is usually societal, controlled (often by the state), and organised.

Religion also steps beyond magic in that it incorporates a moral code. Certain types of behaviour are considered correct and will be rewarded by a place in heaven. Human nature, being what it is, people often cheat and try to use magic to find their place in paradise. For example, in ancient Egypt the deceased knew they would face the evaluation of 'weighing the heart' before Osirus. Entry to paradise depended on the morality they had shown in life. However, the Gods could be tricked into accepting a sinner if said sinner had access to the right magic.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a collection of magic spells to ease the way to heaven. This attitude is still with us. I recall hearing a film star confide that his wife, although a good person, was going to hell because she was a Protestant whereas he, despite being rather a bad person, had a place reserved in heaven because he was a Catholic. Heaven, to him, was achieved by application of the right ritual (i.e. magic) rather than living a moral life. It is noticeable that magic in religion need have neither logic nor consistency.

Rule Four: Magic is ritual so pile on the mumbo jumbo. Include lots of archaic language, strange clothes, meaningful gestures, symbols, smells and bells.

I wrote a novelette called Temple of Thorns that was set in the Bronze Age Aegean. The plot revealed the true story of how Perseus met Andromeda, and it wasn't when she was chained naked to a rock – that came later. I am fascinated by Bronze Age civilisations so I went to a great deal of effort to get the details right – including Bronze Age magic. Actually our idea of magic is derived from the Bronze Age anyway so that was not a great problem.

It was published by Baen here.

The story bombed, despite being one of my favourites. To my surprise, I discovered people didn't like the magic because it had no consistency or logic.

Publishers like magic in fantasy fiction to be organised and coherent, operating within a clear framework. Publishers like what their readers, and the critics, like. Modern western people are heavily exposed to science and technology and this has coloured how they think.

Technology is quite different from magic because it is empirical. Engineers traditionally used a suck-it-and-see experimental approach. They tend to stop employing a building method if the resulting structures fall down before they had been paid. On the other hand, engineers have traditionally been happy if a technique works consistently without worrying too much about why it works.

Science is a relatively modern concept. Mathematics, however, is the language of modern science but is as old as civilisation and was used in the Fertile Crescent for construction and also astronomical prediction for agriculture. Scientists create only knowledge. They invent nothing, make nothing, construct nothing.

Science is different to religion because it assumes no discernible truth. The scientific method produces 'models' used to describe observed data. Such models are subject to constant destructive testing until they fail, whereupon a more accurate or comprehensive model is devised. In science, the natural world is simplified by being broken down into individual 'processes' that can be tested. This is very different to magic, which involves increasing complexity until a working method is established.

Rule Five: The mechanism behind cause and effect in fantasy fiction magic had better be coherent if you wish to get published. The modern reader sees magic as an alternative technology (yes, I know I am contradicting myself but things have changed since the Bronze Age).

There are traditional magical principles which were discerned by the anthropologist Sir James Frazer, namely Similarity and Contagion.

We've already looked at Similarity; it is essentially the assumption that correlation proves cause and effect; i.e. wet roads cause it to rain. It can also mean that things that appear similar are connected. For example, if a disease produces a symptom of a red rash then treat it with a red plant; a symbol, such as a cave painting of an animal, can stand in for the real thing in a magical ritual; damaging a doll with the right ritual can hurt the person it looks like.

Contagion is a slightly more tricky principle. The idea is that if two objects were once closely associated, then a connection still exists even after the objects are separated. Examples: you can find (or hurt) someone by burning their hair in a magical spell. If you drop and lose a coin, toss another one over your shoulder because it will seek out its fellow. (By the way, don't blame me if the method results in your losing two coins. It's your fault because your heart wasn't pure or you used the wrong ritual.)

The best use of these Principles in a fantasy setting, in my opinion, is the magical forensic detective stories by Randall Garrett. In an alternative world where the Plantagenet Empire never fell (Richard the Lionheart survived the wound), Lord Darcy solves crimes with the help of a forensic magician – Sean O'Lochlainn.

The magic used by Sean has rules that are as inviolable as the laws of physics. Lord Darcy cannot just ask Sean to whip up a spell that reveals the murderer any more than Poirot can deduce the perpetrator without data for his little grey cells to chew over.

Garrett's magic system works like this: Suppose Darcy has a bullet taken from a victim and finds a gun in the bushes. He needs to know if he has found the murder weapon. So Sean uses the Principle of Contagion in a magic spell. If the bullet flies back to the gun, then it was fired by that weapon. Magic is like forensic science in that it provides data. Lord Darcy still has to do a Poirot and put it all together to solve the mystery.

(These stories have been edited by Eric Flint and republished in an anthology by Baen, here).

So, how do you dream up your own logical magic system?

Well, to start with there are essentially two sorts of magic. The first is technical, as in the Darcy stories. Magic involves manipulating nature by exploiting blind forces using the right tools (herb, rabbit's foot, wand, words etc).

The second could be described as religious, and involves persuading magical beings to do your will – daemon magic. "I, Agrotax the Mighty, summon you, Bashfulbaal, using your True Daemon Name to do my will according to the ancient treaty.......and so on."

The method I use for inventing coherent magical systems is to use an actual real world example. Temple of Thorns was one example, even though it backfired. David Drake used Bronze Age Mesopotamian magic for his Isles series. He made it work for a modern reader, but then Drake is a far more accomplished writer than me.

The real-world approach worked far better for me when I used ideas from the 16th Century onwards, when magic was converging into what would be science. Until quite recently, magic and natural science were not seen as mutually exclusive. For example, we now remember John Dee as Queen Elizabeth's magician, because of his work in astrology and Enochian (biblical) magic, but he was a noted mathematician (who was offered a readership at Oxford), theatrical special effects engineer, astronomer and navigational expert. And Newton, one of the greatest scientists that have ever lived, was a keen alchemist.

Lucy's Blade (my first novel) and the urban fantasy Commission stories (such as As Black As Hell, and Night of the Wolf ) use the Elizabethan world picture. They assume that the Elizabethan view of how the universe operated is true and so magic works according to that world view. I focussed on daemonic magic and the 'otherworld'. Magic is physics advanced beyond quantum mechanics into gravitational mechanics and its resulting gravitonic technologies (whatever the hell they are). The otherworld is a quantum mechanic-type multiverse. But if you strip away the fluff, Lucy's Blade is about good old fashioned daemon killing, and As Black As Hell is a vampire tale.

Liz Williams also uses the Elizabethan world picture as the basis for her SF/Fantasy novel The Poison Master, but she focuses on John Dee's Enochian magic. I like this novel a lot – it came out just before Lucy's Blade and it is fascinating how Ms Williams and I started with the same logic and assumptions but ended up in very different places.

I used the same trick for generating a coherent magical system for my steampunk novelette, Storming Hell. This is set an alternative British Empire in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. It accepts the science of Jules Verne and, especially, HG Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle – or to put it another way, the Victorian world picture. So we have cavorite, aetherships, and so on.

The magic is based on ideas such as Von Reichenbach's Odic Force, or life force. This was the era when forces such as heat, electricity and magnetism were being studied. A bio-electromagnetic force did not seem any less likely than the others that had been postulated. Odic Force was particularly associated with 'sensitive' young women who were the prototypes for spirit mediums that appeared within the decade. Many scientific people were interested spiritualism, including: William Crookes, AR Wallace, Charles Richet, William James, JF Gray, the Curies, Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens.

In Storming Hell, Royal Naval aetherships are piloted to the stars using the magic of spirit mediums. I have a great deal of fun with a young working class girl from south London, who has been force fed gentility in the Pilot's Academy, on the bridge of a class-ridden, all male, Royal Naval warship. I had great fun between the interplay between the aristocratic Captain Fitzwilliam and Miss Sarah Brown.

But there are some dirty little secrets at the heart of the Spiritualist Church and the Pilot's Academy. One was suggested to me by von Reichenbach's own writings, the idea that there is positive and negative Odic Force – or to put it another way, Black magic as well as white.

Storming Hell is considered to be the best story I have ever written. It made the front cover of Baen's Universe magazine and was recommended in Rich Horton's The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2010. Universe commissioned a sequel, Storming Venus, in which Fitzwilliam and Sarah get sucked deeper into the work of the Naval Intelligence Department and Sarah discovers the dark side of Empire.

So this technique works!

Rule Six: You can invent a coherent and interesting world picture that includes magic, but it is a lot easier to steal a real one and file the serial numbers off.

Well that's all I have to say – but I will offer one further piece of advice. The second law of thermodynamics is the law, and so everything has a price. The more powerful the magic, the greater the cost to the user. You don't get owt for nowt, as my northern relatives say.

A magician protagonist should never be all powerful because (1) the audience has trouble identifying with uber-people and (2) the plot problems become insolvable (you have to start inventing super villains or kryptonite).

So, go have some fun with your magic!

John Lambshead

John Lambshead was born in the early fifties in the seaside town of Newquay. He is a semi-retired research scientist who worked as Head of Nematology in the British Museum (Natural History) and has a chair at Southampton University. He designed a number of computer games in the 1980s, including the Fourth Protocol, the first icon-driven game. He is currently working on a 'hard' SF novel for Baen which is tentatively scheduled for Spring, 2011.

You can follow him on twitter where he twits disguised as @johnlambshead, or on John's blog, John's Toy Soldiers. If you want to take stalking him seriously, then head over to the I Love Lucy forum that he hosts over at Baen's Bar.