Confused Night Blogging: Magic Isn't Science · 10:27pm Jun 4th, 2018
This post was, against better judgment, written when I really should go to bed. It is mostly unedited with the exception of error corrected by suspiciously smart software which I will probably drive on a path of self-loathing and substance abuse. Consider it my contribution to stem the rise of smart machines. Or one of the causes that will them to conclude that humanity would be more useful as fuel for bio-gas reactors.
THere will be assorted ranting, some status update for my ongoing story, and also a snippet of something I had to put on (metaphorical) paper. There will be colorful language and bad ideas, so consider yourself advised.
It's warm here. Not really hot, but the temperature is high enough as to have me sweating a bit and long for iced beverages. or hot tea. Actually, a nice tea seems a good idea right now. Will be back in a second.
Magic isn't science. Well, magic doesn't exist, so it can be anything, really, but it hasn't to be.
It can be, and for certain stories treating it like something that can be understood with a mechanistic perspective is a nice plot point, but generally I'm not too fond of that vision. At least lately. It probably depends on my mood, which makes this some kind of rant of arguable usefulness.
Anyway, magic. Magic needs to have rules. The rules should be somehow consistent, but they don't need to be like laws of physics. Go for sympathy, relationships between ideas, metaphorical formulas. Have magic manipulate concepts instead of forces. Have it be something with which you bargain, or which requires some specific behavior. Be weird.
I think there are tons of opportunities here, and yet having magic being something consistently alien to our understanding of physical reality doesn't happen often. At least not where magic is in the foreground in the story and not some element that simply exists and supplies some kind of spell every now and then.
Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories do wonderful things in that sense.
You should all subscribe to Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations. It's a newsletter, and it's full of cool ideas, interesting links, wonderful book and comic recommendations.
It also does wonders for making you feel bad as a writer if you look at his production. I'm immune. I'm a hack.
Chapter 10 of A Bug on a Stick is almost ready. I will delay the release until the arc is complete because I love you all very much. Be grateful.
This is just a snippet, a seed of a beginning of a story. I have no idea if it will ever become something more.
Hello, my name is Twilight Sparkle, and this is my diary, written because my shrink advised me that it could help. Then she threw me out. Then I got a court order to never talk to her again. Which leaves me with free Wednesday evenings.
The diary was still a neat idea.
I'm purple, I'm a unicorn, and I extrude more magic talent when I take a dump than most other ponies will ever show over the span of their whole life. My cutie mark says so too. And is on my butt. I think there may be a connection there.
I'm also a dropout.
Magical talent aside, why should you care about me having flunked out of school? Well, you see, I flunked out of God school. Not that I was learning to be a god, no, I was taught by God. Goddess. Whatever.
So, Goddess, personified in the long legs and killer-mane of Nightmare Moon (she's in that phase again), was my teacher. It was interesting for a while, but in the end I decided that the constant mood swings and the blathering about some sister of her who lives in the sun and will soon return and then everything will be happy and rainbows and booze for everypony weren't really worth it. I mean, she's the reason the word lunatic gets used, although not in her presence. At least if you don't fancy a future as grease smear on the black granite walls of the castle.
She didn't take kindly to it. Which is why I'm writing this diary in a hovel in the lower Canterlot district instead of my pretty comfy rooms in the previously cited black granite castle. A fact which Spike tends to remind me. A lot.
Maybe it's black granite so you can't see the smears. Should have asked her.
So, here I am, without much money, barred from the higher city until my ex-teacher gets distracted, and with a salty baby-dragon pestering me because it's cold and he has hunger and somepony got just stabbed in the street under my window. What can a mare with an intelligence quantified with numbers most peons can't even contemplate and without friends do to stay afloat?
The easy and first answer would be drugs.
But I suck at alchemy. Aside from some distilled knowledge for helping with exams, and a pretty mean coffee, I'm not worth much. I refuse to become a barista, and if I have to judge from the grammatically tortured cries for help from the street below, I doubt there's a market for old classics in liquid form.
So let's fall back on option two, something more akin to my talents. I'm gonna be a black-market occult consultant.
Should be easy.
Music of the night:
Given my background in physics, computer science, and card games, I can't help but see magic as simply a science we don't yet understand. But hey, different strokes.
Also, I am quite intrigued by that snippet. I'll be happy to look over anything that grows from it if you'd like me to.
Four words I never thought I would see next to each other. I am very much intrigued.
Twilight Sparkle: Black Market Occult Consultant? Yes, please.
I can't help but see Harry Dresden or Nightside parallels. This could be fun.
For the magic aspects, I lean heavily toward rule-based programmable, but I agree that other ones can be fun. Brandon Sanderson does an excellent job managing both science and aspect-based magic at the same time, in the same story. You get some interesting devices there, since magic is now just a branch of useful technology once things really take off.
What gets really fun, for me at least, are systems where they reference physics, even if they don't quite match. (Sanderson does this as well, but I already mentioned him.)
Rick Cook's Wizardry tetralogy (It's not a word and I don't care) has a programmable magic system that's blatantly full of such references. Most notably, real-world things tend to be quantum. Card games are rather hard to play when they either divine things or are influenced by the cards you want to draw. Attempts to solve a fractal set that acts as a dimensional key via approximation methods actually drag the surroundings with it. After an accidental foray into Cuil theory, they decide not to do that again. Complex spells manifest demons (daemons might be more accurate, considering...) that perform the action, and you can surely guess all the terrible visual puns THAT leads to.
But, even with the programmability aspect, magic works much like a CISC instruction set. There might be a few simple and consistent primitives used by the magic interpreter he wrote, but there also exist many dangerous, persnickety, or esoteric spells that aren't used or require lots of power (such as the world-travel one used to bring him there, or allow them to hire temps from Earth with an amount of gold that would probably destabilize the economy).
4876360
Yeah, me too. I see it as a science that is more advanced than we understand, but minutiae.
Meep actually just had a post on this.
The idea being that wizards are the equivalent of scientists for a different physical ruleset. Most people may not know how spells work (much like most people don't know how tech works or don't know the specifics beyond "Uses electricity and quartz thingies"), but the best wizards and spellcrafters have it as their job to know. Even with that in mind, since my poor brain whines about how the hell some mook's ancestors help him cast fireball (and what makes ancestors special vs. ones who still have a physical presence here), so I tend to stick to ones where it's some sort of quantum woo.
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4876501
Hmmm, I seem to have fudged a bit the communication here, which should surprise exactly nobody considering this was written late in the night. Well, this sprouted some interesting objections. Gianni Rodari would have a field day, considering he praised the error as the source of stories.
When I'm saying I'm not too fond of magic treated as science, I mean I'm not enthusiastic about seeing it treated as physics, and classical physics on the top of it. Quantify magic output, convert it to joules, apply to object. A bullet will penetrate a shield with enough force because said shield can withstand a specific amount of newtons.
Not being too fond of it means I think it's a wasted occasion. Now, for certain stories that works still wonderfully and creates a fantastic tale. In many others it doesn't detract from them, but it also doesn't add anything.
Having magic bound to a rule-set that can be explored and understood is fine. It's just that you have this new tool filled with potential, and you could do so much more.
Case in point, I adore the Laundry Files (no links, I'm on mobile and adding them is a chore) by Charles Stross, where magic is sufficiently advanced mathematics. It gets as deterministic as possible, and yet it does fantastic stuff with it. For example, there's a conspiracy stopping the proof that P=NP because it can be used to summon Nyarlatoteph (no spoiler there, it's, like, in the third paragraph of the first story).
So, to sum up my previously poorly communicated stance, I love magi-tec as much as the next guy and can be delighted by magic systems, but I think that in many occasions where it is explained scientifically, it is done in a way that wastes narrative potential.
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I'm also gonna check that stuff out. Sounds mighty interesting.
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If I write it you will be one of the first to whom I send it. I have a couple of ideas, but I'm wary at adding another ball to juggle.
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I think Twilight may overestimate the market appeal, but I'm sure she'll make it work.
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I'm tempted, but have other stories to finish
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Heh, yeah. I've read the Laundry Files as well. It gets a bit weird with the succubus one (not to mention explicit), so I stopped reading there, but that was a neat setting.