"Why Magic in a Story Should Make Sense" up at Fantastic Worlds

[jordan179]

N. K. Jemisin argues, in "But, but, but - WHY does magic have to make sense?"

http://nkjemisin.com/2012/06/but-but-but-why-does-magic-have-to-make-sense/

that magic in a story shouldn't have to make sense, because

This is magic we’re

Comments

[pasquin]

If magic can be anything, then there is no risk. No Stakes. Handwavium will save the hero every time.

[jordan179]

Yes. Or alternately, if the author wants to be depressing, doom the hero every time. In either case, the conflict is exposed as phony: it's all simply in the author's hands, and the resolution is rendered unbelievable.

[pasquin]

So when do we get to read some of your writing?

[jordan179]

I do need to write more and critique less. My life is just in a place right now where I have to spend most of my serious time struggling to survive, though -- so I don't have a lot of time to do the kind of long, coherent writing necessary for novels.

[cutelildrow]

Work on it scene by scene, perhaps?

[marycatelli]

Or, conversely, outline it?

[jordan179]

Incidentally, superscience can damage verisimilitude in exactly the same way, and did so in the looser Interwar science fiction stories:

"Dirk! You're alive! But we saw the atomic explosion demolish the lab."

"Yes, that was a nasty situation. Fortunately, I had a minute to work with the equipment before the bomb went off, and I improvised a quick five-dimensional impenetrable energy shield, based on some notes I had made on the concept of the fifth dimension, and some junk I had lying around in the supply drawer ..."

That kidn of thing.

That sort of thing is still around today.

[wombat_socho]

This is what ruined Charles Stross' Glasshouse for me. Once it was established that the A-Gates* could do, well, pretty much anything, then there were effectively no limits to what their users could do. They were a deus ex machina, shoved right up the snout of the reader, and this reader did not appreciate it one damn bit.

Oh, I'm sorry, did I spoil it for people? Y'all can thank me later.

*A sort of combination nanoassembler factory and teleportation device, if I understood the description correctly.

Re: That sort of thing is still around today.

[jordan179]

You can have things like A-Gates and still maintain suspense if you define the limits of the gates. I've noticed that Stross tends to assume that there are no counters or limits to any technology he's defined, with horrific consequences in his Mythos universes.

Re: That sort of thing is still around today.

[wombat_socho]

I don't know that that's really the case with the Laundry novels; there are a lot of magical/computational gizmos with fairly well-known capabilities, and Bob is fairly careful with those as well as the minor demons (so to speak) that he runs into on a regular basis. It's the antagonists whose limits -and sometimes identities- are unknown to both the narrator and the reader, and this seems consistent with HPL's Mythos tales. Now, as for "A Colder War", I won't disagree with you there.

[kitten_goddess]

This sort of thing actually works when the author is writing a parody of sci-fi or fantasy. The Stainless Steel Rat series, which parodies the James Bond novels, is an excellent example.

[polaris93]

So the essential difference isn't between Magick and science, it's between objective reality and Magick or science as a way of dealing with it in a way that can be understood as based on natural law, on the one hand, and the use of a deus ex machina to make the story go, on the other. The quarrel never should have been between Magick and science, but rather placed squarely between wish-fulfillment, one the one hand, and careful construction of a working storyverse, with Magick as an integral part of it, on the other.

[polaris93]

Except when the evil sorcerer throws green Unobtainium at him. ;-)