Effects of Magic
David Friedman
society in _Salamander_--the kingdom where it's set is called "Esland"--
should be. It's obviously a question that applies to lots of fantasies
other than mine. Examples, some of which we've discussed earlier:
How is the political structure affected by the existence of truth
tellers? Do they increase royal power--you can't get away with lying to
the King--or reduce it, since he can't get away with lying to other
people? How much does it depend on whether truth tellers are rare and
expensive, or common?
Similarly for magical healing. If it's readily available to people at
the very top of the society, and very useful, but only occasionally
available to the average, and perhaps of lower quality, how does that
affect the society? I gather the historical evidence suggests that it's
sometime around the 18th century before the medical care available to
the elite actually does much good, but at that point there is a
significant difference between elite medical care and what other people
can get.
If healers are rare but productive--i.e. one healer can take care of
everything serious in a population of thousands--does that give you
significant pressure towards urbanization, with people wanting to
cluster so as to be within reach of a healer if anything happens?
What about contraception? My healers have, in effect, pretty high
resolution X-ray vision and some ability to manipulate what they see. My
guess is that that would be sufficient for the magical equivalent of
vasectomies and tube tying, but I'm not sure it would make possible
temporary contraception. If it did, then there might be a substantial
difference in sexual behavior by social class.
One version of this that occurred to me concerns the healers themselves.
traditionally, in my society, healers were women. Women's magic and
women who did magic were thought of as in a different and lower status
category than men's magic and men who did magic. The women were called
"witches" (I would prefer some less negatively loaded term, but haven't
thought of a good one), men "mages." Witches, especially healers, were
seen as useful, but as less exalted than mages. As one character puts
it, having the College hire a woman to teach the students healing will
be seen by a lot of people as the equivalent of an art school also
teaching house painting.
That's currently changing, since the scientific breakthrough of about
forty years ago and later developments make it clear that men's magic
and women's magic are fundamentally the same, merely with a different
distribution of talents between men and women. But the old attitudes
persist.
One possibility that occurred to me was to tie this in with
contraception/sexual mores. Suppose it is widely believed--perhaps
correctly--that a skilled healer can provide contraception for herself,
but not, or rarely, for other people. Further suppose a sexually
conservative society, where non-marital sex is disapproved of. People
might then believe, correctly or otherwise, that healers were sexually
promiscuous--on the theory that they could afford to be, and anyone not
worried about pregnancy would be. That could feed into the general
attitudes.
I'm not using that idea at present, and probably won't in this book, but
it did strike me as interesting. It links somewhat to the idea I've seen
that medieval witches were thought of as involved with abortion and
birth control--whether true I don't know, but I think an idea some
readers may believe in.
Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of magic (and
the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a society?
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, paperback in bookstores now
Charles...@gmail.com
wrote:
> Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of magic (and
> the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a society?
In a way, I think the nature or origin of magic is the most important
thing here.
If magic comes from a supernatural or godlike origin then the “truth”
of a truth-teller would be different than if magic were some sort of
natural phenomenon not unlike electromagnetic forces. For instance if
magic is a natural phenomenon then one could conceivably fool a truth-
teller. Because if reality and by extension magic is not based on
supernatural forces, then there is no such thing as “truth.” You then
must fall back on how we tell “truth” normally which is the absence of
the attempt to lie. If a person really believes what they are telling
is the truth, but they are mistaken, what does the truth-teller
detect? If magic does not have a supernatural origin and thus must
follow natural laws (whatever those laws might be) then you can not
tell “truth” with magic, you can only tell if the person is trying to
lie. In that case it would become possible through training,
ignorance, or magic to hide the physiological evidence of the attempt
to lie. (A contest of skill and will between the subject and
observer.)
In the case of healing magic, it again depends on if the origin of
magic is natural or supernatural. If the origin of magic is
supernatural then you could conceivably have the ability to return
life to the dead. If you have that ultimate level of power, then the
effect on the world is a matter of what physical reagents are needed
for the various levels of healing, how much time it takes, if it
damages the person providing the healing, and finally the number of
available healers. If magic is instead natural, then you can place
limitations on the amount of healing that can be performed with the
ultimate ceiling being that once you are dead, you’re dead. Again it
comes down to the above mentioned factors which you can set to
simulate any level of medical science you wish, from just slightly
better than medieval level to in advance of modern medicine. You’d
need to get away from the D&D concept of magical healing (1d8hp per
level!) as being an instantaneous thing and have magic instead be only
an adequate replacement for modern medical science and technology.
The answer to the questions you pose, is that magic effects society as
much as you let it. If you base magic on some sort of undiscovered
natural laws that obey a set of pseudo-physical laws like conservation
of energy or conservation of mass then all you need to do is set the
level of difficulty and time involved to simulate some level of
technology and go from there.
Ilmari Karonen
>
> What about contraception? My healers have, in effect, pretty high
> resolution X-ray vision and some ability to manipulate what they see. My
> guess is that that would be sufficient for the magical equivalent of
> vasectomies and tube tying, but I'm not sure it would make possible
> temporary contraception. If it did, then there might be a substantial
> difference in sexual behavior by social class.
Going off on a tangent, if, as you suggest, your healers' abilities
include "surgery without a scalpel", it occurs to me that this could
probably just as well (and probably more easily) be used to harm
someone as to heal them. Just how close does the healer need to be to
work their magic, and can it be done without the subject sensing
anything in particular? If so, or even if people only _believe_ it to
be so, that's _bound_ to create suspicions against healers.
--
Ilmari Karonen
To reply by e-mail, please replace ".invalid" with ".net" in address.
Kushiel
> The answer to the questions you pose, is that magic effects society as
> much as you let it. If you base magic on some sort of undiscovered
> natural laws that obey a set of pseudo-physical laws like conservation
> of energy or conservation of mass then all you need to do is set the
> level of difficulty and time involved to simulate some level of
> technology and go from there.
Agreed. It makes sense to me to figure out how much you want magic to
affect society and work backwards from there. Are there reasons to
approach the issue from the other way around?
John Eno
David Goldfarb
Kushiel <invisibl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Agreed. It makes sense to me to figure out how much you want magic to
>affect society and work backwards from there. Are there reasons to
>approach the issue from the other way around?
Sure. You might have come up with a magic system that you think has
interesting properties, and want to explore it...as is in fact the
case here.
--
David Goldfarb |"Think of me as a brief electromagnetic anomaly
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | who told you some true things for your own good."
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- Babylon 5, "Day of the Dead"
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of magic (and
> the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a society?
>
Well, first, I'd ask why you're asking this question about a world in a
book you've already written. You need to look at the society and say
"what kind of magic is not going to blow the doors off of what I've
built... or else I have to find ways to keep the lid on."
In many cases, you can see the difference by thinking about what effect
equivalent technologies had. Flight changes military tactics.
Transportation capabilities change commerce. Healing changes almost
everything -- even if it's limited only to the rich. It depends, also,
on how complete the healing is, the range of the transportation, the
capacity of the transportation. Can it be used as an attack? How?
Equivalent to handguns, machine guns, seige guns, thermonuclear weapons?
On Zarathan, my own fantasy world, magic has made the standard of
living in the advanced areas superior to our own, with some odd lacks.
Magic can do all the day-to-day stuff we use electric gadgets for, and
others besides.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
David Friedman
Ilmari Karonen <use...@vyznev.invalid> wrote:
Mages in general tend to be dangerous in that sense. Healers are
probably less dangerous than, say, a fire mage--it doesn't take much
fire to do lethal damage if you can put it anywhere in the body you
want. Figure, roughly speaking, that a strong and well trained fire mage
has about the effective range of a crossbow, and a higher rate of fire.
But strong fire mages are probably something like one in ten thousand of
the population, maybe fewer.
Healers are normally working at very short range. I'm sure a healer
could easily murder a patient--but then, so could an ordinary doctor
today.
David Friedman
<0901290e-4105-4dff...@z66g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
Charles...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Aug 15, 2:27 pm, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> wrote:
> > Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of magic (and
> > the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a society?
>
> In a way, I think the nature or origin of magic is the most important
> thing here.
>
> If magic comes from a supernatural or godlike origin then the łtruth˛
> of a truth-teller would be different than if magic were some sort of
> natural phenomenon not unlike electromagnetic forces.
My magic is definitely of the latter sort--the process of converting it
from a craft to a science, which started about forty years before the
book starts, is a central element of the background.
> For instance if
> magic is a natural phenomenon then one could conceivably fool a truth-
> teller.
One can fool a truth teller in either of two ways. He detects subjective
truth, so if you believe what you are saying he will see it as true.
And, of course, if you are clever, you can say true things designed to
have false implications. I have a scene where that is happening.
...
...
> The answer to the questions you pose, is that magic effects society as
> much as you let it.
...
I don't think it's that simple. Given any set of assumptions about how
the magic works and what it can do, it's still a non-trivial problem to
figure out what the social effects will be.
For an analogous case in our society, consider birth control, in
particular the pill. Given what it does, it was far from obvious what
the long run implications of having it would be. Indeed, it still isn't
entirely clear. One of the arguments in favor of contraception and legal
abortion was that they would sharply reduce the fraction of children
born out of wedlock. In fact they were associated--whether causally or
not isn't entirely clear--with a dramatic increase.
David Friedman
<f464d62f-5296-4306...@c58g2000hsc.googlegroups.com>,
Kushiel <invisibl...@gmail.com> wrote:
The obvious reason is that you have come up with a set of ideas for
magic that you think are themselves interesting and convincing.
Ilmari Karonen
> In article <slrngabu76....@sbz-30.cs.Helsinki.FI>,
> Ilmari Karonen <use...@vyznev.invalid> wrote:
>>
>> Going off on a tangent, if, as you suggest, your healers' abilities
>> include "surgery without a scalpel", it occurs to me that this could
>> probably just as well (and probably more easily) be used to harm
>> someone as to heal them. Just how close does the healer need to be to
>> work their magic, and can it be done without the subject sensing
>> anything in particular? If so, or even if people only _believe_ it to
>> be so, that's _bound_ to create suspicions against healers.
>
> Mages in general tend to be dangerous in that sense. Healers are
> probably less dangerous than, say, a fire mage--it doesn't take much
> fire to do lethal damage if you can put it anywhere in the body you
> want. Figure, roughly speaking, that a strong and well trained fire mage
> has about the effective range of a crossbow, and a higher rate of fire.
> But strong fire mages are probably something like one in ten thousand of
> the population, maybe fewer.
Yes, but you know if you've been shot with a crossbow, and I suspect
you'd probably know if you were hit with a fireball too. But if you
got mysteriously ill a couple of days after arguing with that girl
who's rumored to have healing talents, you just might get suspicious.
Mind you, I'm not making up this scenario all out of my own head --
just drawing parallels with the real-life medieval witch hunts.
> Healers are normally working at very short range. I'm sure a healer
> could easily murder a patient--but then, so could an ordinary doctor
> today.
Short range helps, especially if the healer literally has to lay hands
on the patient or something. Can't go blaming the local witch for
your illness if you know she'd have to have touched you to cause
anything (assuming she hasn't). Of course, you might _not_ know that,
or at least not fully believe it. Especially if it's known (or
rumored) that at least some talented healers can do _some_ minor
things from a distance.
David Friedman
Ilmari Karonen <use...@vyznev.invalid> wrote:
> On 15.08.2008, David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
> > In article <slrngabu76....@sbz-30.cs.Helsinki.FI>,
> > Ilmari Karonen <use...@vyznev.invalid> wrote:
> >>
> >> Going off on a tangent, if, as you suggest, your healers' abilities
> >> include "surgery without a scalpel", it occurs to me that this could
> >> probably just as well (and probably more easily) be used to harm
> >> someone as to heal them. Just how close does the healer need to be to
> >> work their magic, and can it be done without the subject sensing
> >> anything in particular? If so, or even if people only _believe_ it to
> >> be so, that's _bound_ to create suspicions against healers.
> >
> > Mages in general tend to be dangerous in that sense. Healers are
> > probably less dangerous than, say, a fire mage--it doesn't take much
> > fire to do lethal damage if you can put it anywhere in the body you
> > want. Figure, roughly speaking, that a strong and well trained fire mage
> > has about the effective range of a crossbow, and a higher rate of fire.
> > But strong fire mages are probably something like one in ten thousand of
> > the population, maybe fewer.
>
> Yes, but you know if you've been shot with a crossbow, and I suspect
> you'd probably know if you were hit with a fireball too.
No fireball. Fire appears somewhere--say in your brain.
> But if you
> got mysteriously ill a couple of days after arguing with that girl
> who's rumored to have healing talents, you just might get suspicious.
My guess is that diseases are hard for healers to deal with, and
probably impossible for healers to create, since what's happening is on
a micro level. I would expect them to be good at broken bones, cuts, and
the like. But it's complicated, because healing isn't a talent, it's
something that can be done in a variety of ways with a variety of
talents.
> Mind you, I'm not making up this scenario all out of my own head --
> just drawing parallels with the real-life medieval witch hunts.
What real life medieval witch hunts?
Zeborah
> On Aug 15, 2:27 pm, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> wrote:
> > Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of magic (and
> > the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a society?
<snip>
> The answer to the questions you pose, is that magic effects society as
> much as you let it.
Depends on the author. Alternatively, magic affects society as much as
society lets it.
Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
rasfc FAQ: http://www.lshelby.com/rasfcFAQ.html
Zeborah
> Mages in general tend to be dangerous in that sense. Healers are
> probably less dangerous than, say, a fire mage--it doesn't take much
> fire to do lethal damage if you can put it anywhere in the body you
> want.
...I presume this is fire that doesn't require oxygen? Otherwise the
only place you can put it is in the lungs. Which, granted, is not going
to dramatically increase the victim's lifespan.
Dan Goodman
> In article <slrngacb66....@sbz-30.cs.Helsinki.FI>,
> Ilmari Karonen <use...@vyznev.invalid> wrote:
>
> > On 15.08.2008, David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> > wrote:
> > > In article <slrngabu76....@sbz-30.cs.Helsinki.FI>,
> > > Ilmari Karonen <use...@vyznev.invalid> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> Going off on a tangent, if, as you suggest, your healers'
> > abilities >> include "surgery without a scalpel", it occurs to me
> > that this could >> probably just as well (and probably more easily)
> > be used to harm >> someone as to heal them. Just how close does
> > the healer need to be to >> work their magic, and can it be done
> > without the subject sensing >> anything in particular? If so, or
> > even if people only believe it to >> be so, that's bound to create
> > suspicions against healers.
> > >
> > > Mages in general tend to be dangerous in that sense. Healers are
> > > probably less dangerous than, say, a fire mage--it doesn't take
> > > much fire to do lethal damage if you can put it anywhere in the
> > > body you want. Figure, roughly speaking, that a strong and well
> > > trained fire mage has about the effective range of a crossbow,
> > > and a higher rate of fire. But strong fire mages are probably
> > > something like one in ten thousand of the population, maybe fewer.
> >
> > Yes, but you know if you've been shot with a crossbow, and I suspect
> > you'd probably know if you were hit with a fireball too.
>
> No fireball. Fire appears somewhere--say in your brain.
>
> > But if you
> > got mysteriously ill a couple of days after arguing with that girl
> > who's rumored to have healing talents, you just might get
> > suspicious.
>
> My guess is that diseases are hard for healers to deal with, and
> probably impossible for healers to create, since what's happening is
> on a micro level. I would expect them to be good at broken bones,
> cuts, and the like. But it's complicated, because healing isn't a
> talent, it's something that can be done in a variety of ways with a
> variety of talents.
>
> > Mind you, I'm not making up this scenario all out of my own head --
> > just drawing parallels with the real-life medieval witch hunts.
>
> What real life medieval witch hunts?
The ones wich happened after the Middle Ages were over -- in the
enlightened Renaissance era.
--
--
Dan Goodman
"I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers."
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Expire
Journal http://dsgood.livejournal.com
Futures http://clerkfuturist.wordpress.com
Mirror Journal http://dsgood.insanejournal.com
Mirror 2 http://dsgood.wordpress.com
Links http://del.icio.us/dsgood
Erol K. Bayburt
<dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>One version of this that occurred to me concerns the healers themselves.
>traditionally, in my society, healers were women. Women's magic and
>women who did magic were thought of as in a different and lower status
>category than men's magic and men who did magic. The women were called
>"witches" (I would prefer some less negatively loaded term, but haven't
>thought of a good one), men "mages."
At a tangent, I don't think "witches" is too negatively loaded a term.
Not for a modern reader, anyway. Even if the setting is faux 16th-18th
century, the reader isn't automatically going to take the negative
16th-18th century view of witches, but will take a more neutral view
with the author having a pretty free hand to color them as being
wicked, not-wicked, or a mix.
Or to look at it another way, "witch" having a negative loading of
"evil" depends on "magic" having a negative loading of "evil." Since
you establish magic as not being evil, "witch" in your novel only has
the connotation of "female, and lesser" - which is what you want.
You'd have to take pains to paint witches in your world as being
wicked if that's how you want them seen - and since you don't do that,
it's not a problem.
--
Erol K. Bayburt
Ero...@comcast.net
David Friedman
zeb...@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>
> > Mages in general tend to be dangerous in that sense. Healers are
> > probably less dangerous than, say, a fire mage--it doesn't take much
> > fire to do lethal damage if you can put it anywhere in the body you
> > want.
>
> ...I presume this is fire that doesn't require oxygen? Otherwise the
> only place you can put it is in the lungs. Which, granted, is not going
> to dramatically increase the victim's lifespan.
The elements are earth, air, fire and water.
What's oxygen?
David Friedman
Zeborah
> In article <1ilrtjc.13vq8wb1mmk8vpN%zeb...@gmail.com>,
> zeb...@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:
>
> > David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Mages in general tend to be dangerous in that sense. Healers are
> > > probably less dangerous than, say, a fire mage--it doesn't take much
> > > fire to do lethal damage if you can put it anywhere in the body you
> > > want.
> >
> > ...I presume this is fire that doesn't require oxygen? Otherwise the
> > only place you can put it is in the lungs. Which, granted, is not going
> > to dramatically increase the victim's lifespan.
>
> The elements are earth, air, fire and water.
>
> What's oxygen?
Oh, you're talking about *fire*. My mistake, I thought you meant fire.
Carry on.
Graham Woodland
> <Charles...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Aug 15, 2:27 pm, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
>> wrote:
>>> Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of magic (and
>>> the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a society?
> <snip>
>> The answer to the questions you pose, is that magic effects society as
>> much as you let it.
>
> Depends on the author. Alternatively, magic affects society as much as
> society lets it.
>
I don't think that latter version is entirely true. Society is
hardly the sort of thing that can predict the long-run effect of
some new magical (or other) discovery, and people are not the
sort of things that can *reliably* predict such things either.
See the outdated SFnal vision of your choice!
A society can restrict or absolutely suppress magic (or some
other kind of technology), sometimes -- but to the extent that
the magic is present at all, its consequences are selected from a
definite range of possibilities by the nature of that society.
Those possibilities depend heavily on what the magic actually
does, and how it affects relations between people in various
situations, and some of those possibilities include changing the
society they occur in.
The Tokugawa shogunate could dominate Japanese society and ban
firearms, but it couldn't have firearms *and* keep the samurai
system alive -- as it knew very well. That had definite
implications for Japan's long-term strategic position. I don't
think a mainland nation would necessarily have had that option at
all. And I'd expect similar considerations to apply with magic,
in a world where the author is trying to work out logical
consequences, rather than deploying it as a trope in a world
otherwise mysteriously like our own.
In Daea, where I do try to achieve that sort of consistency, I
run up against a number of issues much like David's, and I've
found them devilish difficult to get around without making the
world excessively and uninvitingly alien.
--
Cheers,
Gray
---
To unmung address, lop off the 'be invalid' command.
Peter Knutsen
[...]
> Or to look at it another way, "witch" having a negative loading of
> "evil" depends on "magic" having a negative loading of "evil." Since
> you establish magic as not being evil, "witch" in your novel only has
> the connotation of "female, and lesser" - which is what you want.
> You'd have to take pains to paint witches in your world as being
> wicked if that's how you want them seen - and since you don't do that,
> it's not a problem.
Presumably is it abundantly clear that David's novel is in the fantasy
genre, and while "magic" may still have a faint evil connonation with
the average person, this is not the case at all with the average fantasy
genre reading person.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
Peter Knutsen
> Well, first, I'd ask why you're asking this question about a world
> in a book you've already written. You need to look at the society and
> say "what kind of magic is not going to blow the doors off of what I've
> built... or else I have to find ways to keep the lid on."
Yes. Magic must be controlled. The low-brow method is to keep magic
rare, so that it is confined to only a very few of the many million
characters that live within the setting. If this is done, there's no
need to place many limitations on what magic can do.
The more intelligent solution is to think about what you don't want
magic to do. To make the laws of metaphysics such that those things that
will have a large impact on the setting cannot be achieved. If this
approach is taken, then the need to make magic rare goes away, and you
can distribute it among the population, so that there's a dozen magic
users in every town, or even a couple in every village.
Apart from what you and David have mentioned, one issue that occurs to
me is certainty of parentage. Uncertainty of parentage has had a
*tremendous* impact on us, as a species, throughout our entire history,
and has influenced both formal laws and informal customs. If magic makes
it possible to know with certainty which man, out of a line-up, is the
father to a tested person, then an amazingly huge amount of things will
change drastically.
In many other ways it is also easy to de-medievalize the setting, by
introducing highly desirable effects that were not available in medieval
times. This can be a good thing, if done intentionally, or a very, very
bad thing if the author (or GM) still has the world being medieval, with
medieval phenomena and structures and thought patterns everywhere.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
Peter Knutsen
> A question I'm still wrestling with is what the effect of magic on the
> society in _Salamander_--the kingdom where it's set is called "Esland"--
> should be. It's obviously a question that applies to lots of fantasies
> other than mine. Examples, some of which we've discussed earlier:
Who can learn to use magic? Is it a binary talent that some people have
(YES) and others don't (NO)? Or is it binary with variations, so that of
the people with talent, most have an ordinary degree of talent but a few
have a super talent and another few have a weak talent? Or is it rather
more like intelligence, being something that everybody has, to a greater
or lesser extent, but where there's a not-extremely-obvious cut-off
point below which it is a waste of ressources to try to teach the person
magic.
You also seem to imply that there are some kinds of shades or hues to
the talent, with some people with talent (typically gender-based, for
some reasons) having an easier time learning some sub-arts of magic, and
other people having an easier time learning some other sub-arts. How
common are "blind spots", and do some blind spots show up much more
frequently than others? Even if blind spots are all roughly equally
common, are some noticed more and talked about more, than others?
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
Peter Knutsen
[...]
> Mind you, I'm not making up this scenario all out of my own head --
> just drawing parallels with the real-life medieval witch hunts.
What medieval witch-hunts?
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
Cally Soukup
> My guess is that diseases are hard for healers to deal with, and
> probably impossible for healers to create, since what's happening is on
> a micro level. I would expect them to be good at broken bones, cuts, and
> the like. But it's complicated, because healing isn't a talent, it's
> something that can be done in a variety of ways with a variety of
> talents.
Who needs a "disease" in the sense of a bacteria or virus? Just damage
the pancreas or the thyroid if you don't want to kill them instantly.
(Aneurism, anybody?) Or there's pulmonary embolism; that ought to be
fairly easy to do. Strokes, too. Lots of possibilities.
--
"I disapprove of what you have to say, but I will defend to the death
your right to say it." -- Beatrice Hall
Cally Soukup sou...@two14.net
Brian M. Scott
<Ero...@comcast.net> wrote in
<news:tclca4tqgia5noj7m...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> Or to look at it another way, "witch" having a negative
> loading of "evil" depends on "magic" having a negative
> loading of "evil."
I don't think that this is true. My impression is that if
there are both good and bad *categories* of magic users in a
world, witches, if present as a category under that name,
are a bit more likely to fall on the bad side, even though
magic itself has no negative loading.
[...]
Brian
David Friedman
Cally Soukup <sou...@two14.net> wrote:
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in article
> <ddfr-72C80C.1...@CA.NEWS.VERIO.NET>:
> > In article <slrngacb66....@sbz-30.cs.Helsinki.FI>,
> > Ilmari Karonen <use...@vyznev.invalid> wrote:
>
> > My guess is that diseases are hard for healers to deal with, and
> > probably impossible for healers to create, since what's happening is on
> > a micro level. I would expect them to be good at broken bones, cuts, and
> > the like. But it's complicated, because healing isn't a talent, it's
> > something that can be done in a variety of ways with a variety of
> > talents.
>
> Who needs a "disease" in the sense of a bacteria or virus? Just damage
> the pancreas or the thyroid if you don't want to kill them instantly.
> (Aneurism, anybody?) Or there's pulmonary embolism; that ought to be
> fairly easy to do. Strokes, too. Lots of possibilities.
True.
But at least some of those could be done by a mage who isn't a healer.
In the sequel to _Salamander_, there's a very accomplished healer--the
mother of one of the protagonists of the previous book--who is giving
lectures on healing in the town outside the College. A majority of the
magisters in the College are unwilling to hire a woman as tutor or
magister, even though modern theory implies that many of their students,
including many of the male students--they only started admitting women a
few years ago--could learn some healing, and they are unlikely to find a
man capable of teaching it. So one of the magisters in the minority
suggests arranging to have a good healer on retainer in the village, in
case the College needs her--with the unspoken idea that she can then
give unofficial classes.
A good deal of what her lectures are about is that healing isn't mainly
knowing how to manipulate things in the body, it's mainly understanding
the body well enough so that you can see what is going on, hence what is
wrong. A simple example of how to do so is, if a hand is injured,
comparing the injured to the uninjured hand and looking for differences
(obviously not counting the mirror symmetry). Healers don't have special
talents for healing, merely one of various talents that can be used to
fix something if you know what is wrong, plus the training to do it.
From that standpoint, a healer might be able to murder in a somewhat
subtler way than a non-healer mage, but the main difference is mage vs
non-mage.
David Friedman
Peter Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
> David Friedman wrote:
> > A question I'm still wrestling with is what the effect of magic on the
> > society in _Salamander_--the kingdom where it's set is called "Esland"--
> > should be. It's obviously a question that applies to lots of fantasies
> > other than mine. Examples, some of which we've discussed earlier:
> [...]
>
> Who can learn to use magic?
People with enough magical talent--about one in a hundred. Pretty much
everyone has some magical talent, but in most it's at the level of a
"green thumb" or equivalent, not something that can be trained and used
to do things that would otherwise be impossible.
...
> Or is it rather
> more like intelligence, being something that everybody has, to a greater
> or lesser extent, but where there's a not-extremely-obvious cut-off
> point below which it is a waste of ressources to try to teach the person
> magic.
Close. The cut-off, which most people are below, is such that only
modern research has shown that most people (and, probably, animals) have
at least some magic, used in non-obvious ways. I suspect that the innate
magic has something to do with how life works, but the evidence for that
only shows up (a little) in the sequel.
> You also seem to imply that there are some kinds of shades or hues to
> the talent, with some people with talent (typically gender-based, for
> some reasons) having an easier time learning some sub-arts of magic, and
> other people having an easier time learning some other sub-arts.
Yes--but rather more extreme than that. Most mages are strongest at one
talent, have a bit of one or more others, and lack the rest.
> How
> common are "blind spots", and do some blind spots show up much more
> frequently than others? Even if blind spots are all roughly equally
> common, are some noticed more and talked about more, than others?
It's the other way around, but more complicated than your discussion
suggests, because some talents can be seen as combinations of others, a
fact only discovered about forty years before the book begins--if you
are familiar with how polarized light works, consider that all
polarizations (including left and right handed circular) can be
represented as combinations of vertical and horizontal, all (including
vertical and horizontal) can be represented as combinations of left
handed and right handed. Or, if you are familiar with quantum mechanics,
or the related mathematics, that one can have multiple complete sets of
basis vectors.
From the standpoint of magical theory before the breakthrough, most
mages are "blind" in most talents, so mages are classified by what they
can do, not by what they cannot do.
David Friedman
Peter Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
> Apart from what you and David have mentioned, one issue that occurs to
> me is certainty of parentage. Uncertainty of parentage has had a
> *tremendous* impact on us, as a species, throughout our entire history,
> and has influenced both formal laws and informal customs. If magic makes
> it possible to know with certainty which man, out of a line-up, is the
> father to a tested person, then an amazingly huge amount of things will
> change drastically.
A claim that we will be able to test over the next century or so, since
we now have paternity testing. In my new (non-fiction) book, just
published, which discusses various technological revolutions and their
possible future implication, I refer to it as the stealth reproductive
technology. We already have it, it has potentially has large effects for
the sorts of reasons you are suggesting, and hardly anyone seems to have
noticed.
> In many other ways it is also easy to de-medievalize the setting, by
> introducing highly desirable effects that were not available in medieval
> times. This can be a good thing, if done intentionally, or a very, very
> bad thing if the author (or GM) still has the world being medieval, with
> medieval phenomena and structures and thought patterns everywhere.
That's part of the question I was raising--except that my society is
more early modern than medieval.
I should add that a further dimension of the question is the possibility
that the same form of magic might have different implications in the
form of different societies--multiple equilibria. In the sequel to
_Salamander_ we actually get, in the same world with the same magic,
three different societies that organize the use of magic in different
ways with different consequences.
David Friedman
Peter Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
Yes. But I'm not sure if "witch" does.
To try to deal with the problem, I have an explanation of the witch/mage
question very early in the book:
---
p. 3, in the middle of an introductory lecture for new students:
"Consider a healer-yes, healers are mages within these walls, whatever
they may be called elsewhere."
p. 8, conversation between two students:
Mari waited until the two were seated at one of the smaller tables that
as yet had no other occupants and let Ellen cut a slice from her sausage
before putting the first question. "Are we training to be witches or
mages? I can't tell."
Ellen considered for a moment. "We are training to use magic. Women who
use magic are commonly called witches. Several of the magisters here
think they ought to be called mages, that what they do is no different
from what men who use magic do."
(with further explanation as the conversation goes on)
Dan Goodman
> In article <48a6a2ed$0$90267$1472...@news.sunsite.dk>,
> Peter Knutsen <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
>
> > David Friedman wrote:
> > > A question I'm still wrestling with is what the effect of magic
> > > on the society in Salamander--the kingdom where it's set is
> > > called "Esland"-- should be. It's obviously a question that
> > > applies to lots of fantasies other than mine. Examples, some of
> > > which we've discussed earlier:
> > [...]
> >
> > Who can learn to use magic?
>
> People with enough magical talent--about one in a hundred. Pretty
> much everyone has some magical talent, but in most it's at the level
> of a "green thumb" or equivalent, not something that can be trained
> and used to do things that would otherwise be impossible.
>
> ...
>
> > Or is it rather
> > more like intelligence, being something that everybody has, to a
> > greater or lesser extent, but where there's a not-extremely-obvious
> > cut-off point below which it is a waste of ressources to try to
> > teach the person magic.
>
> Close. The cut-off, which most people are below, is such that only
> modern research has shown that most people (and, probably, animals)
> have at least some magic, used in non-obvious ways. I suspect that
> the innate magic has something to do with how life works, but the
> evidence for that only shows up (a little) in the sequel.
Are there animals with strong magical talent? Whether or not there
are, I suspect there would be legends about, for example, bears who can
work magic.
--
Dan Goodman
> In article <g86o7d$6k2$1...@wheel-x.two14.net>,
> Cally Soukup <sou...@two14.net> wrote:
>
> > David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in article
> > <ddfr-72C80C.1...@CA.NEWS.VERIO.NET>:
> > > In article <slrngacb66....@sbz-30.cs.Helsinki.FI>,
> > > Ilmari Karonen <use...@vyznev.invalid> wrote:
> >
> > > My guess is that diseases are hard for healers to deal with, and
> > > probably impossible for healers to create, since what's happening
> > > is on a micro level. I would expect them to be good at broken
> > > bones, cuts, and the like. But it's complicated, because healing
> > > isn't a talent, it's something that can be done in a variety of
> > > ways with a variety of talents.
> >
> > Who needs a "disease" in the sense of a bacteria or virus? Just
> > damage the pancreas or the thyroid if you don't want to kill them
> > instantly. (Aneurism, anybody?) Or there's pulmonary embolism;
> > that ought to be fairly easy to do. Strokes, too. Lots of
> > possibilities.
>
> True.
>
> But at least some of those could be done by a mage who isn't a
> healer.
>
> In the sequel to Salamander, there's a very accomplished healer--the
> mother of one of the protagonists of the previous book--who is giving
> lectures on healing in the town outside the College. A majority of
> the magisters in the College are unwilling to hire a woman as tutor
> or magister, even though modern theory implies that many of their
> students, including many of the male students--they only started
> admitting women a few years ago--could learn some healing, and they
> are unlikely to find a man capable of teaching it. So one of the
> magisters in the minority suggests arranging to have a good healer on
> retainer in the village, in case the College needs her--with the
> unspoken idea that she can then give unofficial classes.
>
> A good deal of what her lectures are about is that healing isn't
> mainly knowing how to manipulate things in the body, it's mainly
> understanding the body well enough so that you can see what is going
> on, hence what is wrong. A simple example of how to do so is, if a
> hand is injured, comparing the injured to the uninjured hand and
> looking for differences (obviously not counting the mirror symmetry).
Might there be people who _would_ count the mirror symmetry, and seem
unable to learn not to do so? They would be called on for healing only
in emergencies....
> Healers don't have special talents for healing, merely one of various
> talents that can be used to fix something if you know what is wrong,
> plus the training to do it.
>
> From that standpoint, a healer might be able to murder in a somewhat
> subtler way than a non-healer mage, but the main difference is mage
> vs non-mage.
--
David Friedman
"Dan Goodman" <dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
> > Close. The cut-off, which most people are below, is such that only
> > modern research has shown that most people (and, probably, animals)
> > have at least some magic, used in non-obvious ways. I suspect that
> > the innate magic has something to do with how life works, but the
> > evidence for that only shows up (a little) in the sequel.
>
> Are there animals with strong magical talent? Whether or not there
> are, I suspect there would be legends about, for example, bears who can
> work magic.
Interesting thought, but so far as I know, no.
The closest things are stories about elementals. In the stories, the
elementals are magic creatures associated with one of the four elements.
As the reader eventually learns, there actually are elementals, but only
one for each element, and it in some sense contains all of the magic
associated with that element. And they aren't so much creatures as
forces of nature--or perhaps something in between. Enormously powerful,
enormously dangerous.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
>> Well, first, I'd ask why you're asking this question about a world
>> in a book you've already written. You need to look at the society and
>> say "what kind of magic is not going to blow the doors off of what
>> I've built... or else I have to find ways to keep the lid on."
> [...]
>
> Yes. Magic must be controlled. The low-brow method is to keep magic
> rare, so that it is confined to only a very few of the many million
> characters that live within the setting. If this is done, there's no
> need to place many limitations on what magic can do.
Not true at all. You still need limitations. If I plopped Idinus of
Scimitar, the most powerful mage of Zarathan, into ANY society -- one
with 1% of the population magically active, or one completely mundane --
he'd STILL transform the society around him if he had no limit on his
powers. Hell, he DOES transform the society around him with his powers.
There's a reason he's the God-Emperor of a country whose extent (on a
map, anyway) rivals that of the USA.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
David Harmon
Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote,
>A question I'm still wrestling with is what the effect of magic on the
>society
I've been reading Butcher's _Codex Aliera_ series. There, magic is
based on harnessing the power of "furies", elemental spirits bound to
one of earth, water, air, fire, wood, or metal. E.g. healers are
watercrafters; ultimate swordsmen are metalcrafters. Talent varies
apparently on a bell curve, with a hereditary component. Doing magic
requires effort and produces fatigue.
The society they end up with is the Roman Empire.
Tina Hall
> A question I'm still wrestling with is what the effect of magic
> on the society in _Salamander_--the kingdom where it's set is
> called "Esland"-- should be. It's obviously a question that
> applies to lots of fantasies other than mine. Examples, some of
> which we've discussed earlier:
> How is the political structure affected by the existence of truth
> tellers? Do they increase royal power--you can't get away with
> lying to the King--or reduce it, since he can't get away with
> lying to other people? How much does it depend on whether truth
> tellers are rare and expensive, or common?
I think it depends on the history.
Digressing a bit... The problem I have with Real World with Magic
Added settings is that, if we had magic in the real world, history
would have gone differently. The only way to get away with it is to
show how the magic _caused_ the known history. You can't just tag it
on and claim it had no effect.
With your question, I think the problem is similar, only adressed
from a different side: You have this setting and put magic in it,
and now you think about the implictions it would have in the result,
as if the world didn't exist before the story starts. But a real (SF
real) world has a past.
So, what happened in the past? What kind of magic was there first?
What happened when the first truthtellers found out about their
talent? How did their environment react to them? I think that
depends on culture; some may react with hostility, others may revere
it.
So were they tree-worshipping druids (seeing truthtellers and other
magic users as gifted, or perhaps not), or were they superstitious
people-sacrificing savages (hunting the truthtellers and other
magic-gifted folks as demons, or perhaps not), back before they
evolved kingdoms?
Did the magic users use their gift to rule?
A thought-experiment that may help, picture your mages and
truthtellers among the Mongols, the Celts, the Wikings, the Egypts,
the Azteks, and any other historic culture you can think of. How
would they fare there? (Then pick what suits you best.)
You're someone who's familiar with history, do you also see how
things developed from one to the other? You could use that knowledge
to then extrapolate.
(My own approach won't help you much; for me the answers, what
caused the state I decided on, come on their own while writing.
Surprising me time and again how it all makes sense. :) )
> Similarly for magical healing. If it's readily available to
> people at the very top of the society, and very useful, but only
> occasionally available to the average, and perhaps of lower
> quality, how does that affect the society?
Same as with the truthtellers; how did it develope?
You can basically decide on anything you want, you only need a
history that leads there. (The possibilities are infinite.)
But just asking 'what would it be' does no good, because it could be
anything. And you already have a situation a 'this is how it is',
IMO what you really need to find out is how it got there.
> I gather the historical evidence suggests that it's sometime
> around the 18th century before the medical care available to the
> elite actually does much good, but at that point there is a
> significant difference between elite medical care and what other
> people can get.
If you're refering to the real world, that does no good, because
they didn't have magic to heal, thus no ground to compare (instead
think about what would have happened if they had had magic). If you
want to attach magic as if it weren't magic, you need to find an
explanation for _that_. Why has it no other effect than just mundane
means.
Sure, with magic known, people may be used to it, but then the
culture would develope differently.
> If healers are rare but productive--i.e. one healer can take care
> of everything serious in a population of thousands--does that
> give you significant pressure towards urbanization, with people
> wanting to cluster so as to be within reach of a healer if
> anything happens?
Do you want that? Or do you want them singled out, evaded, because
non-mages don't understand what's going on?
> What about contraception? My healers have, in effect, pretty high
> resolution X-ray vision and some ability to manipulate what they
> see. My guess is that that would be sufficient for the magical
> equivalent of vasectomies and tube tying, but I'm not sure it
> would make possible temporary contraception. If it did, then
> there might be a substantial difference in sexual behavior by
> social class.
Again, what do you want? You can find an answer for any result you
like, but as you already have the story and the current world,
speculating about what it could be might throw the entire setting
(and thus the plot), so it's better to find out how it got where you
put it.
(If you want to speculate about what it could be, that's better done
before you already have a story in a setting. You can now only
wonder about bits that aren't already shown.)
> One version of this that occurred to me concerns the healers
> themselves. traditionally, in my society, healers were women.
> Women's magic and women who did magic were thought of as in a
> different and lower status category than men's magic and men who
> did magic. The women were called "witches" (I would prefer some
> less negatively loaded term, but haven't thought of a good one),
> men "mages."
I don't see any negative load, but if they were seen as lower, why
do you not like it?
> Witches, especially healers, were seen as useful, but as less
> exalted than mages. As one character puts it, having the College
> hire a woman to teach the students healing will be seen by a lot
> of people as the equivalent of an art school also teaching house
> painting.
There you have a result. How it _is_. Yet your questions aim at what
else it could be, and that may be incompatibe with what you already
have.
> That's currently changing, since the scientific breakthrough of
> about forty years ago and later developments make it clear that
> men's magic and women's magic are fundamentally the same, merely
> with a different distribution of talents between men and women.
> But the old attitudes persist.
So the question is really, how did the old attitudes develope?
> One possibility that occurred to me was to tie this in with
> contraception/sexual mores. Suppose it is widely
> believed--perhaps correctly--that a skilled healer can provide
> contraception for herself, but not, or rarely, for other people.
> Further suppose a sexually conservative society, where
> non-marital sex is disapproved of. People might then believe,
> correctly or otherwise, that healers were sexually
> promiscuous--on the theory that they could afford to be, and
> anyone not worried about pregnancy would be. That could feed into
> the general attitudes.
Somehow this doesn't sound like what I've read in your story.
> I'm not using that idea at present, and probably won't in this
> book, but it did strike me as interesting. It links somewhat to
> the idea I've seen that medieval witches were thought of as
> involved with abortion and birth control--whether true I don't
> know, but I think an idea some readers may believe in.
What I've read somewhere is that something about women able to give
birth being perceived as power some men wanted to get rid of being
involved in some superstitions and hunting witches. (Like Fr. the
13th; 13 cycles per year - moon or women period, and Friday coming
from Freya, some goddess.) Or something of the sort.
> Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of magic
> (and the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a society?
The main thing is that magic didn't just jump into the society and
now affects it. Magic was there before they had the current culture,
so the actual question is; how does magic affect history. As you've
got the result, you need to follow it backwards to the root.
If you want some ideas for that, state the culture it was, say 500
to 1000 years ago (for a start, we can go all the way back to their
stoneage if you like, in small steps), and I (no doubt others as
well), will see about ideas about what could have happened to get
where it is now.
--
Tina
WIP: <Twofold>: 11566 words
WISuspension: Seasons & Elements trilogy | Magic Earth series
Posted to Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition.
David Friedman
Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
...
> With your question, I think the problem is similar, only adressed
> from a different side: You have this setting and put magic in it,
> and now you think about the implictions it would have in the result,
> as if the world didn't exist before the story starts. But a real (SF
> real) world has a past.
>
> So, what happened in the past? What kind of magic was there first?
> What happened when the first truthtellers found out about their
> talent? How did their environment react to them? I think that
> depends on culture; some may react with hostility, others may revere
> it.
Since you ask ...
(From _Eirick_, the sequel)
The Doray were the first people to figure out how to train mages;
before that it was all wild talents with no control, mostly doing more
damage than good. That was what turned them from a single city-state to
an empire. Diplomacy works a lot better when you know whether the other
side is telling the truth. Having inconvenient people conveniently drop
dead helps too. They started by inviting other cities in as allies; by
the time they got to their full size, all that was left of the Doray
league was its name. The City ran things; everyone else did what they
were told.²
³They never got to here though, did they? That's why the language is
different on this side of the pass.²
Helgi nodded.
³What's now Esland was their northernmost province. It's hard to keep
secrets for long; by the time they got to us, we had had two generations
and more to train our own mages, with the help of runaways from the
League cities. We had the advantage of the mountains, of course, but the
same thing happened east and west of here. They had gotten too big,
taken more land than they could hold, once they no longer had all the
mages.²
³Which is why the mage king Š²
³Which is why Esland was founded by a mage king. He was one of the Doray
mages who decided he didn't like the orders he was getting from the
City. Between mages he could trust and people in the province who didn't
like being bled white to put a gold roof on the main temple in the City,
or having their daughters made into playthings for the governors that
the Doray sent out, he broke the province out of the league.²
...
> > I gather the historical evidence suggests that it's sometime
> > around the 18th century before the medical care available to the
> > elite actually does much good, but at that point there is a
> > significant difference between elite medical care and what other
> > people can get.
>
> If you're refering to the real world, that does no good, because
> they didn't have magic to heal, thus no ground to compare (instead
> think about what would have happened if they had had magic).
It is relevant because it tells us something about the effect of healing
in historical societies and so gives us a basis for guessing what the
effects would have been of healing in my fictional society.
...
> > One version of this that occurred to me concerns the healers
> > themselves. traditionally, in my society, healers were women.
> > Women's magic and women who did magic were thought of as in a
> > different and lower status category than men's magic and men who
> > did magic. The women were called "witches" (I would prefer some
> > less negatively loaded term, but haven't thought of a good one),
> > men "mages."
>
> I don't see any negative load, but if they were seen as lower, why
> do you not like it?
"Lower status" isn't the same thing as "negative status."
...
> > One possibility that occurred to me was to tie this in with
> > contraception/sexual mores. Suppose it is widely
> > believed--perhaps correctly--that a skilled healer can provide
> > contraception for herself, but not, or rarely, for other people.
> > Further suppose a sexually conservative society, where
> > non-marital sex is disapproved of. People might then believe,
> > correctly or otherwise, that healers were sexually
> > promiscuous--on the theory that they could afford to be, and
> > anyone not worried about pregnancy would be. That could feed into
> > the general attitudes.
>
> Somehow this doesn't sound like what I've read in your story.
It isn't. It's an idea that occurred to me, and that might (or might
not) show up somewhere in the sequel, or later stories set in the same
world.
...
Mary K. Kuhner
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>Peter Knutsen wrote:
>> Yes. Magic must be controlled. The low-brow method is to keep magic
>> rare, so that it is confined to only a very few of the many million
>> characters that live within the setting. If this is done, there's no
>> need to place many limitations on what magic can do.
> Not true at all. You still need limitations. If I plopped Idinus of
>Scimitar, the most powerful mage of Zarathan, into ANY society -- one
>with 1% of the population magically active, or one completely mundane --
>he'd STILL transform the society around him if he had no limit on his
>powers. Hell, he DOES transform the society around him with his powers.
>There's a reason he's the God-Emperor of a country whose extent (on a
>map, anyway) rivals that of the USA.
My experience in gaming is that, for a given level of maximum
character power, it's actually *more* difficult to keep things stable
and in check if magic is relatively rare than if it's relatively
common. Common magic is likely to have countermeasures; in any
case, people will have a good working knowledge of what it can do.
A singular mage in a mostly non-magic setting will be able to
run roughshod over societal institutions--not only will people not
have prepared countermeasures, they won't even be expecting abilities
of that kind and may not recognize the nature of their problem.
(Consider the difficulty of handling a teleporter or telepath
in modern society. It will be difficult even to convince people
that there is a problem.)
The society with rare, powerful magic may initially look like
ours, but it's likely to fall apart fairly quickly once that
magic is strongly exploited, and reform into something quite
different. If I recall correctly, the comic _Miracleman_ went
into this in plausible detail back when I was in college.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Mary K. Kuhner
Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>I don't think that this is true. My impression is that if
>there are both good and bad *categories* of magic users in a
>world, witches, if present as a category under that name,
>are a bit more likely to fall on the bad side, even though
>magic itself has no negative loading.
I'm reading Harry Potter aloud to my family recently (we're
just about done with book 3) and I keep tripping over the
use of "witch" for "female wizard"--about half the time it
is clear that Rowling is in fact visualizing the classical
witch, especially for background characters, and the other
half of the time it's simply "female wizard" with no
connotation of age, folksiness or wickedness.
"Witch" and "wizard" as the two gender terms seems common
now, but when I was younger "witch" and "warlock" was more
common--wizards, while always or nearly always male, were
not the male form of witches but something else. I wonder
if the Wiccan dislike for "warlock" has had anything to do
with this? (The etymology is "oathbreaker" and this is felt
to be perjorative.)
I got around this with "sorcerer"/"sorceress" in my WIS;
the character I call "witch" is in fact rural and disreputable,
not seen as a female equivalent of the sorcerers. (And is,
in fact, a priestess rather than a sorcerer, a technical
distinction important in the setting.)
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Dan Goodman
> In article <g878j6$usb$1...@registered.motzarella.org>,
> Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
> > Peter Knutsen wrote:
>
> >> Yes. Magic must be controlled. The low-brow method is to keep
> magic >> rare, so that it is confined to only a very few of the many
> million >> characters that live within the setting. If this is done,
> there's no >> need to place many limitations on what magic can do.
>
> > Not true at all. You still need limitations. If I plopped Idinus
> > of Scimitar, the most powerful mage of Zarathan, into ANY society
> > -- one with 1% of the population magically active, or one
> > completely mundane -- he'd STILL transform the society around him
> > if he had no limit on his powers. Hell, he DOES transform the
> > society around him with his powers. There's a reason he's the
> > God-Emperor of a country whose extent (on a map, anyway) rivals
> > that of the USA.
>
> My experience in gaming is that, for a given level of maximum
> character power, it's actually more difficult to keep things stable
> and in check if magic is relatively rare than if it's relatively
> common. Common magic is likely to have countermeasures; in any
> case, people will have a good working knowledge of what it can do.
> A singular mage in a mostly non-magic setting will be able to
> run roughshod over societal institutions--not only will people not
> have prepared countermeasures, they won't even be expecting abilities
> of that kind and may not recognize the nature of their problem.
> (Consider the difficulty of handling a teleporter or telepath
> in modern society. It will be difficult even to convince people
> that there is a problem.)
That's with _one_ mage. Add in a few more -- some who want to keep
things the way they are, one or two who enjoy torturing less
knowledgeable mages and are delighted to have a newby show up....
Tina Hall
> David Friedman wrote:
>> Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of
>> magic (and the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a
>> society?
> Well, first, I'd ask why you're asking this question about a
> world in a book you've already written. You need to look at the
> society and say "what kind of magic is not going to blow the
> doors off of what I've built... or else I have to find ways to
> keep the lid on."
Yeah.
> In many cases, you can see the difference by thinking about what
> effect equivalent technologies had. Flight changes military
> tactics. Transportation capabilities change commerce.
Except in the ME, where people with enough skill can get quite far
in an instant (and then quite far again after a heartbeat or so
pause), but there's no around-the-world trade. (Due to magic being
around a long time.[*])
> Healing changes almost everything -- even if it's limited only to
> the rich.
Indeed. It's what caused my evil overlords to come into being. They
can not only heal, but prevent ageing. Put that into a few folks
with a not too kind outlook, and...
> It depends, also, on how complete the healing is, the range
> of the transportation, the capacity of the transportation.
And the attitude of the people towards it, as well as those that
have the ability. It's all nice and well if you've got the power to
move continental plates while keeping the surface still, you could
well use it to create a paradise, but you can also create hell. (And
with plain humans, I doubt you'll not get a bunch with unsound
intentions, especially pre-'civilization'. Are there enough 'good
spirits' to beat them, or will they naturally lose because they're
not willing to accept casualties? I think they're outnumbered, in
any case. <eg>)
> Can it be used as an attack? How? Equivalent to handguns, machine
> guns, seige guns, thermonuclear weapons?
Think early. How _was_ it used? Did the chieftain of some ancient
tribe occasionally manage to create a flame inside a mammoth's
heart, feeding his people, or did he burn his rivals?
> On Zarathan, my own fantasy world, magic has made the standard of
> living in the advanced areas superior to our own, with some odd
> lacks. Magic can do all the day-to-day stuff we use electric
> gadgets for, and others besides.
What lacks?
In the ME, in the main evil overlords' cities, people use magic for
every day-to-day stuff, plus of course healing. (Technology is
forbidden.) But poor people and workers exist, because the rulers
want it that way.
[*] Since long before the time anyone had the skill to move even
just a pot, never mind a living adult. And thus the corners where it
first got used grew to isolated sorta-empires ruled by those grown
to bigger power over the years.
There's uber-powerful overlords on two continents, on one it's a
sort of collective, on the other city-states where each does as they
please with their people, no trade between them (with reason).
Oh, and then there's another continent where magic was available
thousands of years ago, but I'm not too sure what's going on there
yet, and the folks from there just move around to press their ideas
about environment-friendly living onto folks that can't defend
against them. Like everywhere else, because it's too wet for many to
use magic there. (By now some people have the skill, but their
places have sort of lost the race.)
Oh, and moving people is not without risk (or objects - they may
land _in_ people). If you know how to do it, no problem, but trying
around is perhaps not so wise. :)
Tina Hall
> Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor) wrote:
>> Well, first, I'd ask why you're asking this question about a
>> world
>> in a book you've already written. You need to look at the
>> society and say "what kind of magic is not going to blow the
>> doors off of what I've built... or else I have to find ways to
>> keep the lid on."
> [...]
> Yes. Magic must be controlled. The low-brow method is to keep
> magic rare, so that it is confined to only a very few of the many
> million characters that live within the setting. If this is done,
> there's no need to place many limitations on what magic can do.
I don't see that. It's mainly missing (not taking into account) so
many things. Like few magic users will have the others at a
disadvantage. And with many magic users, it's nothing out of the
ordinary.
I don't see how limitations fit into deciding on the numbers of
magic users at all.
It's as if you think only few people should understand explosives,
or everyone will build bombs or something. But look at how many
people actually do in real life, with the knowledge available to
everyone.
> The more intelligent solution is to think about what you don't
> want magic to do. To make the laws of metaphysics such that those
> things that will have a large impact on the setting cannot be
> achieved.
From the other side, you can have large impacts _causing_ the
setting.
You, too, seem to think that magic just turns up all of a sudden.
> If this approach is taken, then the need to make magic
> rare goes away, and you can distribute it among the population,
> so that there's a dozen magic users in every town, or even a
> couple in every village.
What need?
You can have everyone using magic with just about everything being
possible to be done with magic.
In the ME, the only limit is skill, which grows over the years. (So
the normal, new, people have considerably less magic than those that
have been around for millenia.)
Just about the only thing my evil overlords can't do is create a
living clone. Most can make an exact copy and steer it so that no
one (well, few people) can tell the difference (the problem is that
the replicated brain is dead, so basically the clone is just a
corpse), or assume someone's appearance, but to have a living dummy
it needs to be grown like any normal child; in a woman. And then
there are drawbacks in its ability to adjust to new things. Hm.
Something else the evil overlords can't do is plant a thought into
someone without that someone knowing it's not their thought - that
only works for (perhaps with, too) clones (the normally grown ones)
of themselves. Oh, and they don't have enough power to move the
planet, but I don't think that makes much of a difference. Who wants
to move planets anyway? <g>
> Apart from what you and David have mentioned, one issue that
> occurs to me is certainty of parentage. Uncertainty of parentage
> has had a *tremendous* impact on us, as a species, throughout our
> entire history, and has influenced both formal laws and informal
> customs.
That's a good point.
> If magic makes it possible to know with certainty which man, out
> of a line-up, is the father to a tested person, then an amazingly
> huge amount of things will change drastically.
An alternative to testing is the father knowing he fathered the
child. (My S&E species knows that a child was conceived after the
end of the mating. <omitting a lot of details> Perhaps that's why
they wouldn't really be bothered to raise someone else's child.)
> In many other ways it is also easy to de-medievalize the setting,
> by introducing highly desirable effects that were not available
> in medieval times. This can be a good thing, if done
> intentionally, or a very, very bad thing if the author (or GM)
> still has the world being medieval, with medieval phenomena and
> structures and thought patterns everywhere.
Unless they were caused by the magic being present, rather the magic
just stuck on.
Tina Hall
That's why you don't have to put in limitations; it can be part of
the setting.
If we dumped Arentus into any society (or world, only requirement is
that it has his kind of magic, that's a physical attribute of the
dimension/universe), he'd still just grab around half a million
people and make his own city, though. Why bother with more when they
provide all the entertainment he could want? (Well, almost - he'd
probably enjoy the rest of the world trying to get rid of him.
Eternity can get sooo boring.)
Really, why would anyone want to rule a big empire?
Tina Hall
> From that standpoint, a healer might be able to murder in a
> somewhat subtler way than a non-healer mage, but the main
> difference is mage vs non-mage.
So you're looking for something that gave women mages a bad
reputation. Could there have been a female ruler or villain in the
past that did magic things?
Myths and rumours can easily twist that to give women with magic a
bad name, never mind that it wasn't female healers. It could even
have been a rare male healer, details lost in the past. Something
happened that first made male healers a bad idea in the minds of the
people, and then the view of female healers shifted.
Things happen over time...
Or it could be that in wilder times some women (those with magic)
defended themselves in an appropriate way (with magic), when they
were assaulted.
Tina Hall
> Mind you, I'm not making up this scenario all out of my own head
> -- just drawing parallels with the real-life medieval witch
> hunts.
The difference is that they didn't have real magic powers, where on
David's world, magic has been around before that.
John F. Eldredge
As I recall, in Tim Powers' novel _The Drawing of the Dark_, both sides
in a battle had mages, each of whose magic tended to cancel out that of
his opposite number. Only unexpected spells had much likelihood of
actually taking effect. Should one mage tire out first, however, or be
distracted by a sneaky mundane attack, the other mage was likely to carry
the day. In the meanwhile, the mundane battle between the armies was
taking place.
--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
PGP key available from http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
Brian M. Scott
<mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
<news:g880br$3ud$2...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> "Witch" and "wizard" as the two gender terms seems common
> now, but when I was younger "witch" and "warlock" was
> more common--wizards, while always or nearly always male,
> were not the male form of witches but something else.
That's my default as well. I can even to some degree
specify the nature of the difference: wizardry is typically
more intellectual than witchcraft.
> I wonder if the Wiccan dislike for "warlock" has had
> anything to do with this? (The etymology is
> "oathbreaker" and this is felt to be perjorative.)
Though even in Old English that was no longer the primary
sense: according to the OED, the leading sense was already
'the devil', either as rebel or as deceiver. The modern
meaning is probably by extension from this one.
[...]
Brian
Tina Hall
> ...
>> With your question, I think the problem is similar, only
>> adressed from a different side: You have this setting and put
>> magic in it, and now you think about the implictions it would
>> have in the result, as if the world didn't exist before the
>> story starts. But a real (SF real) world has a past.
>>
>> So, what happened in the past? What kind of magic was there
>> first? What happened when the first truthtellers found out about
>> their talent? How did their environment react to them? I think
>> that depends on culture; some may react with hostility, others
>> may revere it.
> Since you ask ...
> (From _Eirick_, the sequel)
Why don't you just tell me rather than quoting stuff from the book?
> The Doray were the first people to figure out how to train
> mages; before that it was all wild talents with no control,
> mostly doing more damage than good. That was what turned them
> from a single city-state to an empire.
There's a missing link: How did it turn it into an empire?
> Diplomacy works a lot better when you know whether the other side
> is telling the truth.
Did both sides have truthellers? How did they find out they could do
that? How does truthtelling work in the first place?
> Having inconvenient people conveniently drop dead helps too. They
> started by inviting other cities in as allies; by the time they
> got to their full size, all that was left of the Doray league was
> its name. The City ran things; everyone else did what they were
> told.0
Why? The folks without magic didn't fight the magic users?
Sounds all a bit thin, lacking an actual explanation.
> ?They never got to here though, did they? That's why the language
> is different on this side of the pass.0
> Helgi nodded.
> ?What's now Esland was their northernmost province. It's hard to
> keep secrets for long; by the time they got to us, we had had two
> generations and more to train our own mages, with the help of
> runaways from the League cities. We had the advantage of the
> mountains, of course, but the same thing happened east and west
> of here. They had gotten too big, taken more land than they could
> hold, once they no longer had all the mages.0
They were already a country, or who is 'we'?
And how did that happen?
Why did no one find out about magic before there was any city-state
at all? How could Doray grow to a city-state with random bad magic
things happening?
> ?Which is why the mage king ?0
> ?Which is why Esland was founded by a mage king. He was one of
> the Doray mages who decided he didn't like the orders he was
> getting from the City. Between mages he could trust and people in
> the province who didn't like being bled white to put a gold roof
> on the main temple in the City,
Temple of what?
> or having their daughters made into playthings for the governors
> that the Doray sent out, he broke the province out of the league.0
Doesn't really form a picture.
>>> I gather the historical evidence suggests that it's sometime
>>> around the 18th century before the medical care available to
>>> the elite actually does much good, but at that point there is a
>>> significant difference between elite medical care and what
>>> other people can get.
>>
>> If you're refering to the real world, that does no good, because
>> they didn't have magic to heal, thus no ground to compare
>> (instead think about what would have happened if they had had
>> magic).
> It is relevant because it tells us something about the effect of
> healing in historical societies and so gives us a basis for
> guessing what the effects would have been of healing in my
> fictional society.
But you're talking about the effects of magic, which you have no
example from history of. You only have examples of misbelief and
superstitions, the nonexistence of magic. History shows what happens
if you don't have magic, no clue on what happens with actual real
magic present.
>>> One version of this that occurred to me concerns the healers
>>> themselves. traditionally, in my society, healers were women.
>>> Women's magic and women who did magic were thought of as in a
>>> different and lower status category than men's magic and men
>>> who did magic. The women were called "witches" (I would prefer
>>> some less negatively loaded term, but haven't thought of a good
>>> one), men "mages."
>>
>> I don't see any negative load, but if they were seen as lower,
>> why do you not like it?
> "Lower status" isn't the same thing as "negative status."
So what?
>>> One possibility that occurred to me was to tie this in with
>>> contraception/sexual mores. Suppose it is widely
>>> believed--perhaps correctly--that a skilled healer can provide
>>> contraception for herself, but not, or rarely, for other
>>> people. Further suppose a sexually conservative society, where
>>> non-marital sex is disapproved of. People might then believe,
>>> correctly or otherwise, that healers were sexually
>>> promiscuous--on the theory that they could afford to be, and
>>> anyone not worried about pregnancy would be. That could feed
>>> into the general attitudes.
>>
>> Somehow this doesn't sound like what I've read in your story.
> It isn't. It's an idea that occurred to me, and that might (or
> might not) show up somewhere in the sequel, or later stories set
> in the same world.
And ring wrong with an earlier book?
Tina Hall
> It's the other way around, but more complicated than your
> discussion suggests, because some talents can be seen as
> combinations of others, a fact only discovered about forty years
> before the book begins--if you are familiar with how polarized
> light works, consider that all polarizations (including left and
> right handed circular) can be represented as combinations of
> vertical and horizontal, all (including vertical and horizontal)
> can be represented as combinations of left handed and right
> handed. Or, if you are familiar with quantum mechanics, or the
> related mathematics, that one can have multiple complete sets of
> basis vectors.
Why so complicated? You might as well just use directions, north,
south, east, west, or NE, NW, SE, SW.
> From the standpoint of magical theory before the breakthrough,
> most mages are "blind" in most talents, so mages are classified
> by what they can do, not by what they cannot do.
Which is what makes sense. I'm not a 'not surgeon', or a 'not
athlete'.
Tina Hall
> One can fool a truth teller in either of two ways. He detects
> subjective truth, so if you believe what you are saying he will
> see it as true. And, of course, if you are clever, you can say
> true things designed to have false implications. I have a scene
> where that is happening.
With truthtellers a known phenomenon and regularly used, people
should be aware of both, and especially look close for the latter,
and ask to rephrase something or for clarification if in doubt.
>> The answer to the questions you pose, is that magic effects
>> society as much as you let it.
> I don't think it's that simple. Given any set of assumptions
> about how the magic works and what it can do, it's still a
> non-trivial problem to figure out what the social effects will
> be.
But that's something to do before you have a story and plot. Now you
already have story and plot, you'll have to trace the cause of what
you do have, not the effect of the magic. The latter would make for
a different setting and remove the ground for your story and plot.
Tina Hall
Good point. Should have thought about that, too.
(In the ME I have the evil overlord's school, which teaches
indiscriminately, and private schools run by parents who insert
their own idea of what should be taught. Some character mentions the
effect of that; what you aren't taught is something you're not
taught how to defend against, too.)
> (Consider the difficulty of handling a teleporter or telepath in
> modern society. It will be difficult even to convince people that
> there is a problem.)
That would start earlier than modern society, though. Here people
made up all kinds of weird stuff to explain things they don't
understand. Consider them in a situation where there really is magic
and weird stuff.
Tina Hall
> "Witch" and "wizard" as the two gender terms seems common
> now, but when I was younger "witch" and "warlock" was more
> common--wizards, while always or nearly always male, were
> not the male form of witches but something else.
I prefer to use 'witch' for both genders.
Oh, and wizard. (Though the only real example is from the S&E, where
it's one tribe's term for another tribe - they have one for each of
the other tribes - and there it makes no difference whether it's a
wizard Lord, wizard Warrior, wizard Breeder, or any of the other
genders. Just as it makes no difference what gender an icicle or
sandhugger is - terms for two of the other tribes.)
> I got around this with "sorcerer"/"sorceress" in my WIS;
> the character I call "witch" is in fact rural and disreputable,
> not seen as a female equivalent of the sorcerers. (And is,
> in fact, a priestess rather than a sorcerer, a technical
> distinction important in the setting.)
I try to evade -ess endings, but that's just me and my allergy to
German -in endings. (Whoever heard of a pilotess, or
computeruseress. Ugh.)
David Friedman
Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>
> > One can fool a truth teller in either of two ways. He detects
> > subjective truth, so if you believe what you are saying he will
> > see it as true. And, of course, if you are clever, you can say
> > true things designed to have false implications. I have a scene
> > where that is happening.
>
> With truthtellers a known phenomenon and regularly used, people
> should be aware of both, and especially look close for the latter,
> and ask to rephrase something or for clarification if in doubt.
Probably depends how suspicious they are. In this particular case--Dur
being questioned by some of Iolen's people, accompanied by a mage who is
implied to be a truthteller--they have no reason for suspicion. The
truthteller is just an extra precaution--and the more rephrasing and
clarifying they do, the longer it will be before they can get to
questioning someone else.
David Friedman
Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
> > Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
>
> > ...
>
> >> With your question, I think the problem is similar, only
> >> adressed from a different side: You have this setting and put
> >> magic in it, and now you think about the implictions it would
> >> have in the result, as if the world didn't exist before the
> >> story starts. But a real (SF real) world has a past.
> >>
> >> So, what happened in the past? What kind of magic was there
> >> first? What happened when the first truthtellers found out about
> >> their talent? How did their environment react to them? I think
> >> that depends on culture; some may react with hostility, others
> >> may revere it.
>
> > Since you ask ...
>
> > (From _Eirick_, the sequel)
>
> Why don't you just tell me rather than quoting stuff from the book?
1. Why rewrite it?
2. To demonstrate that I have thought about these questions in advance.
>
> > The Doray were the first people to figure out how to train
> > mages; before that it was all wild talents with no control,
> > mostly doing more damage than good. That was what turned them
> > from a single city-state to an empire.
>
> There's a missing link: How did it turn it into an empire?
See the next bit.
> > Diplomacy works a lot better when you know whether the other side
> > is telling the truth.
>
> Did both sides have truthellers?
No. Since, as I said, at that point the Doray were the only people who
had figured out how to train mages. Hence they had an advantage--which
they parlayed into an empire.
David Friedman
Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>
> > It's the other way around, but more complicated than your
> > discussion suggests, because some talents can be seen as
> > combinations of others, a fact only discovered about forty years
> > before the book begins--if you are familiar with how polarized
> > light works, consider that all polarizations (including left and
> > right handed circular) can be represented as combinations of
> > vertical and horizontal, all (including vertical and horizontal)
> > can be represented as combinations of left handed and right
> > handed. Or, if you are familiar with quantum mechanics, or the
> > related mathematics, that one can have multiple complete sets of
> > basis vectors.
>
> Why so complicated? You might as well just use directions, north,
> south, east, west, or NE, NW, SE, SW.
That's what Coelus does do in his first lecture, as you may remember.
But the polarized light example is less obvious, and more like what's
going on with the magic.
James A. Donald
> How is the political structure affected by the
> existence of truth tellers?
Many of us are already pretty good at telling if someone
is telling the truth. It is hard to lie well. Of course
some people, for example politicians, are very good at
lying, but most people not so good - and some of us are
very good at smelling lies.
To lie successfully, most people have to believe their
own lies, and even this does not work that well, since
believing one's own lies results in internally
inconsistent beliefs, which shows up whenever someone
tries to make an argument, or explain why he believes
what he supposedly believes.
> Similarly for magical healing. If it's readily
> available to people at the very top of the society,
> and very useful, but only occasionally available to
> the average, and perhaps of lower quality, how does
> that affect the society?
Modern healing is magical by past standards, and many
forms of modern healing are too expensive to give to
everyone who needs them, even everyone who might die
without them - resulting in a crisis that is unfolding
right now. It used to be that a King could not afford
treatment significantly better than a peasant. All he
got was better diagnosis.
Indeed, as recently as 1960-1970, this was not really a
problem. Most people could afford medicine, and those
that could not were not much worse off.
--
----------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.
http://www.jim.com/ James A. Donald
James A. Donald
> Agreed. It makes sense to me to figure out how much you want magic to
> affect society and work backwards from there. Are there reasons to
> approach the issue from the other way around?
I want magic to ensure the kind of society that makes for good
stories.
One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic, and
statistics are boring.
James A. Donald
> One can fool a truth teller in either of two ways. He
> detects subjective truth, so if you believe what you
> are saying he will see it as true. And, of course, if
> you are clever, you can say true things designed to
> have false implications.
People try that all the time in real life, and it does
not work. You can hear that the guy is weaseling. Works
better on paper than face to face, but even on paper I
can detect it, though not as well. Most people cannot
detect it at all on paper, but they can detect it pretty
well face to face.
Graham Woodland
> On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:07:00 -0700 (PDT), Kushiel
>> Agreed. It makes sense to me to figure out how much you want magic to
>> affect society and work backwards from there. Are there reasons to
>> approach the issue from the other way around?
>
> I want magic to ensure the kind of society that makes for good
> stories.
>
> One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic, and
> statistics are boring.
> --
But a large number of the hero's friends, family, and neighbours
dying, and their land being laid waste, and their gods being
disassembled with large hammers, is one tragedy for one hero;
indeed it is one of the classic avenging-hero setups.
--
Cheers,
Gray
---
To unmung address, lop off the 'be invalid' command.
James A. Donald
> A claim that we will be able to test over the next
> century or so, since we now have paternity testing. In
> my new (non-fiction) book, just published, which
> discusses various technological revolutions and their
> possible future implication, I refer to it as the
> stealth reproductive technology. We already have it,
> it has potentially has large effects for the sorts of
> reasons you are suggesting, and hardly anyone seems to
> have noticed.
The pill was around for a while before it turned society
upside down.
Right now, testing of relatedness is being made
difficult. While women can get a dipstick that they can
wet with urine to tell if they are pregnant, I cannot
yet stroll into the chemist with two hairs, and ask how
is one hair related to the other hair.
When you can, the @#$% will hit the fan.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> Sea Wasp <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>> On Zarathan, my own fantasy world, magic has made the standard of
>> living in the advanced areas superior to our own, with some odd
>> lacks. Magic can do all the day-to-day stuff we use electric
>> gadgets for, and others besides.
>
> What lacks?
Mostly the sorts of things we get from having an IMMENSE
population/economy. They don't have the equivalent, for instance, of the
entertainment economy -- Playstations, Internet, etc. They COULD build
such things, but there has yet to be sufficient demand to make
industries out of them. The population of the largest countries is
around 20-30 million.
This is due to the fact that while on the overall map it appears that
the major countries cover immense areas around the size of the USA,, in
actuality what they CONTROL are sort of webworks -- radii of between
20-50 miles around each city and areas about 10 miles on each side of
the Great Roads. The rest of the area is ... not controlled well.
Multiple intelligent magical species, magical monsters and plants,
periodic wars and magical effects, etc., make it so that the majority of
the continent remains relatively little controlled and explored in the
"I explored it, I know what's there, it will still be pretty much like
that in 50 or 100 years" sense.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://seawasp.livejournal.com
Tina Hall
> Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
>> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>>> One can fool a truth teller in either of two ways. He detects
>>> subjective truth, so if you believe what you are saying he will
>>> see it as true. And, of course, if you are clever, you can say
>>> true things designed to have false implications. I have a scene
>>> where that is happening.
>>
>> With truthtellers a known phenomenon and regularly used, people
>> should be aware of both, and especially look close for the
>> latter, and ask to rephrase something or for clarification if in
>> doubt.
> Probably depends how suspicious they are.
Why? Would only suspicious people leave their car unlocked with the
key in the ignition lock (says my dictionary) in a big city?
We're talking about a known phenomenon, not something that only
turned up this morning, with no experience with it.
> In this particular case--Dur being questioned by some of Iolen's
> people, accompanied by a mage who is implied to be a truthteller-
> -they have no reason for suspicion. The truthteller is just an
> extra precaution--and the more rephrasing and clarifying they do,
> the longer it will be before they can get to questioning someone
> else.
If they're not concerned with getting the truth, why question him in
the first place?
Really, this doesn't add up.
You have your characters do what you want them to do to meet plot
ends, not for reasons of their own. That gap shows.
Tina Hall
> Tina Hall wrote:
>> Sea Wasp <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>>> On Zarathan, my own fantasy world, magic has made the standard
>>> of living in the advanced areas superior to our own, with some
>>> odd lacks. Magic can do all the day-to-day stuff we use
>>> electric gadgets for, and others besides.
>>
>> What lacks?
> Mostly the sorts of things we get from having an IMMENSE
> population/economy. They don't have the equivalent, for instance,
> of the entertainment economy -- Playstations, Internet, etc. They
> COULD build such things, but there has yet to be sufficient
> demand to make industries out of them. The population of the
> largest countries is around 20-30 million.
I don't see how the number of people makes a difference. Also, I
wouldn't call the lack of playstations and internet 'odd'. :)
I think that depends on the culture. You say they could build it,
but there's no demand, that's culture, not numbers. A small
population that could build it would do so if anyone had an
interest, IMO.
In the S&E, one tribe has something like an Underground (Subway)
system (magic powered), plus HUGE archives that are accessible in a
way similar to internet (probably possible from homes if they wanted
to - the story hasn't touched that, only visitors having a look at
the one below the town hall of the capital). They also have rather
big miniature landscapes (on a scale of an average tree perhaps
being around 1cm tall) of the tribes and unclaimed areas (which I
guess could count as part of the archives).
And the entire tribe numbers around one million people. They just
very much like taking records of (slightly exaggerated) every leaf
dropping from a tree, and constructing things with magic. So that's
what a lot of people do, for the most part those whose children are
grown (roughly the equivalent to 'retirement').
> This is due to the fact that while on the overall map it appears
> that the major countries cover immense areas around the size of
> the USA,, in actuality what they CONTROL are sort of webworks --
> radii of between 20-50 miles around each city and areas about 10
> miles on each side of the Great Roads. The rest of the area is
> ... not controlled well. Multiple intelligent magical species,
> magical monsters and plants, periodic wars and magical effects,
> etc., make it so that the majority of the continent remains
> relatively little controlled and explored in the "I explored it,
> I know what's there, it will still be pretty much like that in 50
> or 100 years" sense.
Telling me about a world that looks interesting without giving me a
story I'd like set in it isn't exactly nice.
Tina Hall
> Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
>> David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:
>>> Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
>>>> With your question, I think the problem is similar, only
>>>> adressed from a different side: You have this setting and put
>>>> magic in it, and now you think about the implictions it would
>>>> have in the result, as if the world didn't exist before the
>>>> story starts. But a real (SF real) world has a past.
>>>>
>>>> So, what happened in the past? What kind of magic was there
>>>> first? What happened when the first truthtellers found out
>>>> about their talent? How did their environment react to them? I
>>>> think that depends on culture; some may react with hostility,
>>>> others may revere it.
>>
>>> Since you ask ...
>>
>>> (From _Eirick_, the sequel)
>>
>> Why don't you just tell me rather than quoting stuff from the
>> book?
> 1. Why rewrite it?
Because that should be shorter and concentrate on the facts. (Except
it's missing the things that would be left out, which is why I don't
want to read more dialogue explaining things. I'd be happier with
just your words, not your words pretended to be character words.)
> 2. To demonstrate that I have thought about these questions in
> advance.
It doesn't look as if it's been thought through, though.
>>> The Doray were the first people to figure out how to train
>>> mages; before that it was all wild talents with no control,
>>> mostly doing more damage than good. That was what turned them
>>> from a single city-state to an empire.
>>
>> There's a missing link: How did it turn it into an empire?
> See the next bit.
Didn't change anything.
>>> Diplomacy works a lot better when you know whether the other
>>> side is telling the truth.
>>
>> Did both sides have truthellers?
> No. Since, as I said, at that point the Doray were the only
> people who had figured out how to train mages. Hence they had an
> advantage--which they parlayed into an empire.
I don't think it would be that easy. There's still the missing link,
how did it work in the first place? How did it turn it into an
empire?
If you had just told me it might have worked. As part of the story
it doesn't work at all.
I'll append a bit of 'history in dialogue' that I like. It's of
course a bit longer (sorry, let's assume I used up two of this
month's quote-your-own-text vouchers - hey, I think I've got some
left over from last month ;) ).
Feel free to pick at it. (And yes, I've noticed the typo of 'life a
life', will fix that next time I'm rereading it. Plus I am still not
certain about lay/laid/lied/? Well, the past tense of someone lying
down.)
The point, originally, was just to say (early on; it's the 6th scene
in the first book) that "No, this guy with lotsa magic isn't going
to beat the evil overlord.", plus sneak in some history of how
things got to be as they are. It also shows how little the ordinary
citizens know.
(Backround: people are afraid of large bodies of water, it
interferes with the use of magic, and they know that the Shan
'shelters' the city; does something to ward off the effect.
'Wilderness' is all unsheltered areas.)
-------->
"That is our chance!" Dayta burst out after Kelsan finished
reporting the events of the morning. "The bastard never comes out of
his hole, but now he does, and we know where and when!"
"If it were that easy, someone would have not only tried, but
succeeded as well." Ranes replied, shaking his head. "No doubt
enthusiasts have tried before, and were never heard of again. Call
me egoistic, but I'd be rather upset if something happened to you."
Dayta pulled a face at him. "You must have slept through your charm
lessons. This isn't working."
Ranes scowled. "Just because I can take possession of your free will
doesn't mean I would ever do it. Not even to prevent you from doing
something foolish."
"Why can't you just catch Arentus, then?"
Ranes fell back onto the bed he sat on, laughing. It was Dayta's
turn to scowl. Kelsan sighed.
After a while his brother calmed down again. "Maybe you should go
there, just to have a look." Ranes said, by all appearences talking
to the ceiling. "See for yourself the strength of that guy. Once you
actually know what you're up against, you might come up with some
real plans. This isn't your only chance, you know. He comes out for
all potential pupils, as well as other reasons. It wouldn't be
difficult to simply go down into the bunker and walk straight up to
him, either."
Dayta rose from her chair and sat down next to Ranes, looking down
at him. "You're strong, and if not willful then at least very
stubborn."
"And I'm still just a sandgrain compared to a mountain. And I'm not
exaggerating."
"That bad?"
"How do you think does he keep the entire city plus the farms stable
during the earthquakes? Or do you think they're just a myth, just
because you haven't experienced the earth moving? My grandparents
have, that one was too big for even him to quieten completely. Of
course some say he deliberately let that one partially go wild, but
that would only mean he's even stronger."
"Are you sure that was the same Shan?" Dayta asked. "From what
people say, he should barely be old enough to be your father. If he
started very early."
"Yes. If any of those people you talked to had actually seen him,
they'd have told you that he is a lot older than he looks. I
wouldn't be surprised to find out he founded the damn city right on
this spot just so he could scare people with the earthquakes, and
found it he did. Back then perhaps using the quakes as threat
against misbehaviour, claiming he could cause them."
"Why would people follow him to settle here in the first place,
then? The ocean is certainly not a very attractive neighbour."
Ranes sat up with a puzzled expression. "Just how much history did
they teach you at that private school?"
"You mean history as in what that bastard has his teachers spread?"
Dayta returned.
Ranes waved that off. "There are enough hidden, certifiably very old
records if you want to search for them, as well as the same history
known in the other cities. Or do you suppose they all agreed on the
exact same lie and stuck to it over thousands of years? Even the
Shans that don't get on, when there's no danger of their citizens
encountering each other because no one would travel through the
wilderness?"
Anyone but Ranes. Kelsan smiled.
Dayta scowled, not liking to admit defeat, but curiosity won over.
"So what happened then, according to those agreeable histories?"
Ranes smiled at the play on words. "Floods are what happened, and
wars, though the histories are unclear on which came first and
perhaps the floods were just one way of warfare-"
"People raising water with magic?" Dayta asked, incredulous.
Ranes nodded. "That's one version. What all versions say is that it
was a crazy time, those wanting to unite the tribes against those
wanting to be left alone, enraged folks against their chieftains. It
was mad and draining. In the end, everyone just wanted to go home
and life a life in peace, but no homes were left, and nowhere felt
safe, until the Shans errected their protective areas in return for
people living by the rules they decided on. Those areas developed
into the city states we now know and hate."
"And what caused it all?"
Ranes shrugged and lay back down. "There are more versions than the
night provides time to tell even only half of them. What's more
interesting is that the rules changed over the years. They used to
be a lot more people-friendly. If you look at the whole picture, it
all looks planned from the beginning. As if a bunch of magicians sat
down and stuck their heads together several thousand years ago,
coming up with a scheme that would give each their little patch to
rule as they pleased, with a little patience, and of course
knowledge on how to stop ageing. I have no doubt that those we now
know as the Shans, Magi Shans in some tongues, played a big part in
causing the mayhem that made everyone feel unsafe in the wilderness.
They must have been pretty powerful even back then, compared to
normal people."
"And that's what they teach at Arentus' school? That the bastard
planned it all from the start?"
Ranes chuckled. "No, they make the Shans look like saviours from
madness, of course. You always have to take into account who tells
the tale, not just what they tell you." He poked her. "Thieving used
to be forbidden, with dire consequences when caught. Not immediately
deadly, but deadly nonetheless, by bloodloss or infection, if you
didn't know someone with a talent for healing. And those were few
and spread far. Not like now, where even Underside has a bunch of
good healers that exchange their skill for a few meagre Flats or
even no fee. Not few of them went to Arentus' school, too, you
know."
"You almost sound as if you like that bastard." she accused him.
"I just don't like that it all has to be magic, when there's no
reason to not make things easier for those without." Ranes said,
rising up to his elbows and looking at Kelsan.
Kelsan shrugged. "If that means having to deal with your 'copies',
I'd rather just leave things as they are." he replied with a smile.
"Traitor." Ranes grinned. "Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to spend
some more time, in private, convincing this pretty girl here to not
do something foolish when Arentus comes out of his hole."
"No problem." Kelsan said, rising. "I wanted to get some more fresh
air, anyway." And see whether he couldn't find some trail to Boni's
whereabouts.
<--------
David Friedman
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> David Friedman
> > One can fool a truth teller in either of two ways. He
> > detects subjective truth, so if you believe what you
> > are saying he will see it as true. And, of course, if
> > you are clever, you can say true things designed to
> > have false implications.
>
> People try that all the time in real life, and it does
> not work. You can hear that the guy is weaseling. Works
> better on paper than face to face, but even on paper I
> can detect it, though not as well. Most people cannot
> detect it at all on paper, but they can detect it pretty
> well face to face.
That may be true for most liars, but there are people who, whether
through native ability or training, are very good at lying while
appearing to tell the truth.
I actually have one line in _Salamander_ which can be read as implying
that one of my characters can do a pretty good job of non-magical truth
telling. As it turns out, by the sequel she is herself a truth teller.
David Friedman
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> > Similarly for magical healing. If it's readily
> > available to people at the very top of the society,
> > and very useful, but only occasionally available to
> > the average, and perhaps of lower quality, how does
> > that affect the society?
>
> Modern healing is magical by past standards, and many
> forms of modern healing are too expensive to give to
> everyone who needs them, even everyone who might die
> without them - resulting in a crisis that is unfolding
> right now. It used to be that a King could not afford
> treatment significantly better than a peasant. All he
> got was better diagnosis.
My impression is that, while there are forms of modern healing that are
too expensive to give to everyone who needs them, they are a good deal
less significant than the forms that are relatively cheap. I could be
wrong, but my impression is that access to all the medical care money
can buy only increases life expectancy a little over access to the level
of medical care available to the median American.
On the second point--the situation in the past--I think you are also
mistaken. At least, I had an interesting conversation some years back
with a historian whose specialty was mortality. She had taken advantage
of the fact that births and deaths of the English nobility are well
recorded going well back (and, presumably, other data as well) to try to
estimate how early elite medical care actually did some significant
good. Her conclusion, as best I recall, was that it was somewhere around
the 18th century.
David Friedman
Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
> > In this particular case--Dur being questioned by some of Iolen's
> > people, accompanied by a mage who is implied to be a truthteller-
> > -they have no reason for suspicion. The truthteller is just an
> > extra precaution--and the more rephrasing and clarifying they do,
> > the longer it will be before they can get to questioning someone
> > else.
>
> If they're not concerned with getting the truth, why question him in
> the first place?
They want the truth. They just have no reason to expect him to lie. But
since it's always possible that he will lie for some unknown reason,
they take the extra precaution of having a truth teller along.
You are arguing as if there were no intermediate states between complete
ignorance and certainty. A quick questioning without a truth teller is
more likely to provide information than no questioning at all. Add in a
truth teller and the odds improve a bit. Add in a truth teller and spend
lots more time making sure he isn't being fooled, and the odds improve a
bit more--but at a cost.
Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)
> Sea Wasp <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>> Tina Hall wrote:
>>> Sea Wasp <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>
>>>> On Zarathan, my own fantasy world, magic has made the standard
>>>> of living in the advanced areas superior to our own, with some
>>>> odd lacks. Magic can do all the day-to-day stuff we use
>>>> electric gadgets for, and others besides.
>>> What lacks?
>
>> Mostly the sorts of things we get from having an IMMENSE
>> population/economy. They don't have the equivalent, for instance,
>> of the entertainment economy -- Playstations, Internet, etc. They
>> COULD build such things, but there has yet to be sufficient
>> demand to make industries out of them. The population of the
>> largest countries is around 20-30 million.
>
> I don't see how the number of people makes a difference. Also, I
> wouldn't call the lack of playstations and internet 'odd'. :)
The difference comes from how many people it takes to support an
economy of scale. If the magic allows you to do similar things, in many
ways it comes with the same requirements.
Things like Playstations or any other mass entertainment, high-tech (or
high magic) devices can't become economically feasible unless there's
(A) a very large middle class with a lot of leisure time, or a large
leisure class, (B) they have a lot of disposable money (or other
resources), and (C)you have the magical/industrial manufacturing
capacity to reproduce, distribute, and support the demands of the class
in this area WITHOUT impacting the more essential functions of society.
(On Zarathan it's a bit more complicated than that -- partly because
magic tends to be a very personal thing, and making "mass production" of
something other than relatively simple and straightforward devices is
very hard, nigh impossible in some cases, to arrange.)
>> This is due to the fact that while on the overall map it appears
>> that the major countries cover immense areas around the size of
>> the USA,, in actuality what they CONTROL are sort of webworks --
>> radii of between 20-50 miles around each city and areas about 10
>> miles on each side of the Great Roads. The rest of the area is
>> ... not controlled well. Multiple intelligent magical species,
>> magical monsters and plants, periodic wars and magical effects,
>> etc., make it so that the majority of the continent remains
>> relatively little controlled and explored in the "I explored it,
>> I know what's there, it will still be pretty much like that in 50
>> or 100 years" sense.
>
> Telling me about a world that looks interesting without giving me a
> story I'd like set in it isn't exactly nice.
>
I have plenty of stories set in that world (which connects directly to
Digital Knight -- it's mentioned once, actually), but I have to interest
someone in PAYING for them. The ones I *have* to write (as in, if I
don't write them, I can't get to the Grand Finale and kick Virigar's
ass, something I dearly want to see done) are the Balanced Sword and the
Spirit Warriors sequences.
Tina Hall
>>> In this particular case--Dur being questioned by some of
>>> Iolen's people, accompanied by a mage who is implied to be a
>>> truthteller- -they have no reason for suspicion. The
>>> truthteller is just an extra precaution--and the more
>>> rephrasing and clarifying they do, the longer it will be before
>>> they can get to questioning someone else.
>>
>> If they're not concerned with getting the truth, why question
>> him in the first place?
> They want the truth. They just have no reason to expect him to
> lie. But since it's always possible that he will lie for some
> unknown reason, they take the extra precaution of having a truth
> teller along.
That doesn't add up.
> You are arguing as if there were no intermediate states between
> complete ignorance and certainty.
No, I'm saying that it doesn't add up.
If you want it to add up the text would have to include the
reasoning for why they are so careless. (Rather than characters just
meeting the plot ends you want them to meet, whether it makes sense
or not.)
> A quick questioning without a truth teller is more likely to
> provide information than no questioning at all. Add in a truth
> teller and the odds improve a bit. Add in a truth teller and spend
> lots more time making sure he isn't being fooled, and the odds
> improve a bit more--but at a cost.
If you have no intention of doing it right, there's no reason to do
it at all in this case. If you don't care about accuracy you might
as well make up something, and not bother with questioning anyone.
And again, this is a known phenomenon, just like knowing that some
people would steal your car if you leave it unlocked with the key
inside. Some would even then, that's why there are additional safety
measures.
Tina Hall
> Tina Hall wrote:
>> Sea Wasp <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>>> Tina Hall wrote:
>>>> Sea Wasp <sea...@sgeinc.invalid.com> wrote:
>>
>>>>> On Zarathan, my own fantasy world, magic has made the
>>>>> standard of living in the advanced areas superior to our own,
>>>>> with some odd lacks. Magic can do all the day-to-day stuff we
>>>>> use electric gadgets for, and others besides.
>>>> What lacks?
>>
>>> Mostly the sorts of things we get from having an IMMENSE
>>> population/economy. They don't have the equivalent, for
>>> instance, of the entertainment economy -- Playstations,
>>> Internet, etc. They COULD build such things, but there has yet
>>> to be sufficient demand to make industries out of them. The
>>> population of the largest countries is around 20-30 million.
>>
>> I don't see how the number of people makes a difference. Also, I
>> wouldn't call the lack of playstations and internet 'odd'. :)
> The difference comes from how many people it takes to support an
> economy of scale.
Where do you get the 'economy of scale'?
> If the magic allows you to do similar things, in many ways it
> comes with the same requirements.
I don't see how that has to be that way. I see that you _want_ it to
be that way for your setting, but it's not the must you state it has
to be.
And it's no explanation for the setting to be that way. That is
because that's what you decided it is. It could be different, if you
wanted something different. (Especially as someone who plans the
whole thing, but even I can decide how things are, and have it make
sense. The real question here is how it makes sense, why they would
need more people.)
> Things like Playstations or any other mass entertainment,
> high-tech (or high magic) devices can't become economically
> feasible unless there's (A) a very large middle class with a lot
> of leisure time, or a large leisure class, (B) they have a lot of
> disposable money (or other resources), and (C)you have the
> magical/industrial manufacturing capacity to reproduce,
> distribute, and support the demands of the class in this area
> WITHOUT impacting the more essential functions of society.
You're back to making up wild claims that's just what you want it to
be rather than anything that is, just like in the other thread.
Again I see no reason to continue talking with you about that.
> (On Zarathan it's a bit more complicated than that -- partly
> because magic tends to be a very personal thing, and making "mass
> production" of something other than relatively simple and
> straightforward devices is very hard, nigh impossible in some
> cases, to arrange.)
So the reason is in the setting. (Not some universal truth that
directs the possibilities of any setting.)
James A. Donald
> the major countries cover immense areas around the size of the USA,, in
> actuality what they CONTROL are sort of webworks -- radii of between
> 20-50 miles around each city and areas about 10 miles on each side of
> the Great Roads. The rest of the area is ... not controlled well.
> Multiple intelligent magical species, magical monsters and plants,
> periodic wars and magical effects, etc., make it so that the majority of
> the continent remains relatively little controlled and explored in the
> "I explored it, I know what's there, it will still be pretty much like
> that in 50 or 100 years" sense.
Now that is a good universe for stories: All frontier, and you can
walk from the capital to the frontier in reasonable time.
James A. Donald
> > Modern healing is magical by past standards, and many
> > forms of modern healing are too expensive to give to
> > everyone who needs them, even everyone who might die
> > without them - resulting in a crisis that is unfolding
> > right now.
David Friedman
> My impression is that, while there are forms of modern healing that are
> too expensive to give to everyone who needs them, they are a good deal
> less significant than the forms that are relatively cheap. I could be
> wrong, but my impression is that access to all the medical care money
> can buy only increases life expectancy a little over access to the level
> of medical care available to the median American.
The median American can afford some pretty expensive care if his life
or eyesight or mobility is at stake, as it often is, sooner or later.
For a government to provide that kind of care to everyone turns out to
be organizationally difficult, yet to deny that care to someone also
turns out to be politically difficult.
David Friedman
Tina...@kruemel.org (Tina Hall) wrote:
> If you want it to add up the text would have to include the
> reasoning for why they are so careless. (Rather than characters just
> meeting the plot ends you want them to meet, whether it makes sense
> or not.)
I do.
1. Dur is the old jeweler who has lived in the town for years; there is
no reason to think he is in cahoots with Coelus. The probability he will
lie to them isn't zero, but it's low. The probability that he will lie
cleverly enough to fool a truth teller, even on one round, is even lower.
2. It's clear that Iolen only has one truth teller available, and since
they are going around questioning everyone he's obviously going to be
pretty busy.
Kushiel
> I want magic to ensure the kind of society that makes for good
> stories.
That's actually the reason that starting with a system of magic
doesn't make sense to me.
John Eno
Charles...@gmail.com
> <CharlesRCap...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Aug 15, 2:27 pm, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> > wrote:
> > > Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of magic (and
> > > the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a society?
> <snip>
> > The answer to the questions you pose, is that magic effects society as
> > much as you let it.
>
> society lets it.
I don't know if I agree with that Zeborah, if you have a single
society that is completely isolated and completely oppressive, you can
only slow the changes. If you assume that magic is something that can
be done by a single person without any kind of infrastructure, then
that genie is going to get out of the bottle and it's going to be hard
to put back in. In a way magic that is not divine in origin is much
like science and technology (only without the large infrastructure
requirements) if something can be done it is only a matter of time
before it is done. And once it's done, it cannot be undone. A writer
either needs to take this into account or place limitations on what
magic can and cannot do.
Of course a writer can write whatever they want, internally consistent
or not. But they should ignore human nature at their own peril.
Charles...@gmail.com
Just make all magic, Divine Magic and then let the gods keep society
in order. The gods don’t have to make sense, but if you want to make
magic a sort of pseudo-science, then you need a structure and rules
lest you fall into gaping plot holes.
Bill Swears
>
> Of course a writer can write whatever they want, internally consistent
> or not. But they should ignore human nature at their own peril.
technologies are ways of accomplishing things, rather than machines
clanking in a specific way. Human needs remain constant, and therefore,
magic simply introduces new ways of accomplishing universal things.
That isn't to suggest that technologies don't impact our cultural
development, but that you can't predict that having magic do things is
going to necessarily cause a society to grow in any certain way.
Bill
Kushiel
> Just make all magic, Divine Magic and then let the gods keep society
> in order.
This doesn't answer the question of "What effects has the presence of
magic had on the development of this society?" though. It simply
transmutes it to "What effects has the verifiable existence of deities
had on the development of this society?" They're both important
questions to answer, of course, but inserting deities into a magic
system doesn't answer what effects it's had on the world.
> The gods don’t have to make sense, but if you want to make
> magic a sort of pseudo-science, then you need a structure and rules
> lest you fall into gaping plot holes.
Agreed. This is why it seems to me that the story should drive how
magic works rather than the other way around. I can't say I've ever
been satisfied by reading any fiction that had a great system of magic
and nothing else going for it.
John Eno
Brian M. Scott
<invisibl...@gmail.com> wrote in
<news:fdcf07c7-e950-4667...@34g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Aug 18, 1:25 pm, CharlesRCap...@gmail.com wrote:
[...]
>> The gods don’t have to make sense, but if you want to
>> make magic a sort of pseudo-science, then you need a
>> structure and rules lest you fall into gaping plot
>> holes.
> Agreed. This is why it seems to me that the story should
> drive how magic works rather than the other way around.
You seem to be assuming that if you start with a specific
magical system as a given, it will necessarily get in the
way of telling a good story. This seems rather unlikely,
given the enormous amount of background worldbuilding that
some writers do. Some writers will do better making it up
as they go, while others will be very uncomfortable if they
haven't worked out at least the basics ahead of time.
Moreover, as David G. pointed out, a major point of the
story might be to explore the consequences of a particular
system of magic.
> I can't say I've ever been satisfied by reading any
> fiction that had a great system of magic and nothing else
> going for it.
That's just poor execution, no matter where the author
actually started.
If one can successfully start with constructed languages
(J.R.R. Tolkien, M.A.R. Barker), one can surely start with a
system of magic!
Brian
Zeborah
> On Aug 15, 11:08 pm, zebo...@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:
> > <CharlesRCap...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Aug 15, 2:27 pm, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com>
> > > wrote:
> > > > Other thoughts on the general issue of how the existence of magic (and
> > > > the nature of the magic, of course) would affect a society?
> > <snip>
> > > The answer to the questions you pose, is that magic effects society as
> > > much as you let it.
> >
> > Depends on the author. Alternatively, magic affects society as much as
> > society lets it.
>
> I don't know if I agree with that Zeborah, if you have a single
> society that is completely isolated and completely oppressive, you can
> only slow the changes.
You and Graham seem to be taking "society" to mean "government" or some
other part of society external to the magic users; I'm using it to
include everyone including infants, the homeless, and magic users. If
you have really powerful magic but absolutely no-one wants to use it,
then it's not going to affect society. Yes, this is extremely unlikely,
but my point is that it's not magic that determines how society changes,
it's the reaction of the people that make up that society. One society
might react in one way while another society might react in the opposite
way.
>If you assume that magic is something that can
> be done by a single person without any kind of infrastructure, then
> that genie is going to get out of the bottle and it's going to be hard
> to put back in. In a way magic that is not divine in origin is much
> like science and technology (only without the large infrastructure
> requirements) if something can be done it is only a matter of time
> before it is done. And once it's done, it cannot be undone. A writer
> either needs to take this into account or place limitations on what
> magic can and cannot do.
>
> Of course a writer can write whatever they want, internally consistent
> or not. But they should ignore human nature at their own peril.
That's rather my point. Never underestimate the ability of society to
resist change, and/or to react in apparently illogical ways to threats.
Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
rasfc FAQ: http://www.lshelby.com/rasfcFAQ.html
David Friedman
"Brian M. Scott" <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:23:07 -0700 (PDT), Kushiel
> <invisibl...@gmail.com> wrote in
> <news:fdcf07c7-e950-4667...@34g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>
> in rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
> > On Aug 18, 1:25 pm, CharlesRCap...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> >> The gods don¢t have to make sense, but if you want to
> >> make magic a sort of pseudo-science, then you need a
> >> structure and rules lest you fall into gaping plot
> >> holes.
>
> > Agreed. This is why it seems to me that the story should
> > drive how magic works rather than the other way around.
>
> You seem to be assuming that if you start with a specific
> magical system as a given, it will necessarily get in the
> way of telling a good story. This seems rather unlikely,
> given the enormous amount of background worldbuilding that
> some writers do. Some writers will do better making it up
> as they go, while others will be very uncomfortable if they
> haven't worked out at least the basics ahead of time.
In my case, I think it goes both directions. As the story develops, the
magical system influences the plot, and the requirements of the plot
influence the magical system.
David Friedman
zeb...@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:
Your "society lets it" treats society as if it were a single choosing
individual. It isn't. There are lots of situations in which the outcome
of actions by lots of people doesn't correspond to what most of them,
even what any of them, want. So while I agree that the effect of magic
on a society depends, among other things, on the desires and beliefs of
the people in the society, it isn't as simple as "society" choosing what
outcomes it is or is not willing to permit.
...
Kushiel
> You seem to be assuming that if you start with a specific
> magical system as a given, it will necessarily get in the
> way of telling a good story.
Nope. I'm assuming that if a writer spends so much time working out
their magic system that the other story elements get overshadowed, you
end up with crappy fiction. How your magic works isn't as important as
what people do with it and how it affects them.
> Moreover, as David G. pointed out, a major point of the
> story might be to explore the consequences of a particular
> system of magic.
Yeah, I remain unconvinced that this is likely going to result in
interesting fiction, unless you keep the magic in the background and
foreground those consequences in the form of individuals.
> > I can't say I've ever been satisfied by reading any
> > fiction that had a great system of magic and nothing else
> > going for it.
>
> That's just poor execution, no matter where the author
> actually started.
Oh, totally. I think excessive worldbuilding at the expense of
character is a pretty chronic problem in the field of fantasy and
scifi, though, which is why I'm bringing it up here. Mr. Friedman's
post below mine seems to indicate that he's got this problem nailed
down, though, so I should probably go back to lurking before I make an
ass out of myself again.
John Eno
James A. Donald
> > > stories.
> > That's actually the reason that starting with a system of magic
> > doesn't make sense to me.
> Just make all magic, Divine Magic and then let the gods keep society
> in order.
Does not work.
If there is someone keeping society in order, this leaves little scope
for heroes to be heroic, and villains to villainous.
Brian M. Scott
<invisibl...@gmail.com> wrote in
<news:a43d4d8a-5c4e-459a...@j22g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Aug 18, 5:56 pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@csuohio.edu>
> wrote:
>> You seem to be assuming that if you start with a specific
>> magical system as a given, it will necessarily get in the
>> way of telling a good story.
> Nope. I'm assuming that if a writer spends so much time
> working out their magic system that the other story
> elements get overshadowed, you end up with crappy
> fiction.
That's almost a truism. But you've appeared to be making a
much stronger claim, namely, that it's better to let the
system of magic emerge from the story than to start with a
system of magic. What you seem to be missing is that one
can start with a system of magic without letting it
overshadow the other story elements, just as one can start
with plot, characters, a line of dialogue, a theme, some
combination, or none of the above.
> How your magic works isn't as important as what people do
> with it and how it affects them.
I don't think that anyone has yet argued otherwise.
>> Moreover, as David G. pointed out, a major point of the
>> story might be to explore the consequences of a particular
>> system of magic.
> Yeah, I remain unconvinced that this is likely going to
> result in interesting fiction, unless you keep the magic
> in the background and foreground those consequences in
> the form of individuals.
For starters this clearly depends on the reader: just as
there are readers of science fiction who enjoy neat science
fictional ideas even when they're the focus of the story, so
there are readers of fantasy who can enjoy a neat bit of
fantasy worldbuilding even when it's the focus of the story.
And for those of us who, like you, are more interested in
the characters, you've merely said that inventing a neat
system of magic probably won't result in interesting fiction
unless you make the fiction interesting -- which is true,
but not very interesting!
>>> I can't say I've ever been satisfied by reading any
>>> fiction that had a great system of magic and nothing else
>>> going for it.
>> That's just poor execution, no matter where the author
>> actually started.
> Oh, totally. I think excessive worldbuilding at the
> expense of character is a pretty chronic problem in the
> field of fantasy and scifi, though, which is why I'm
> bringing it up here. [...]
Cardboard characters were a chronic problem in the early
days of science fiction, and they're a bit of a problem in
EFP, but I don't think that excessive worldbuilding was or
is the cause. And I can't offhand think of anything that
I've read recently that I thought suffered from excessive
worldbuilding; plenty of other problems, but not that one.
Brian
Mary K. Kuhner
><invisibl...@gmail.com> wrote in
><news:fdcf07c7-e950-4667...@34g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>
>in rec.arts.sf.composition:
>> Agreed. This is why it seems to me that the story should
>> drive how magic works rather than the other way around.
>You seem to be assuming that if you start with a specific
>magical system as a given, it will necessarily get in the
>way of telling a good story. This seems rather unlikely,
>given the enormous amount of background worldbuilding that
>some writers do. Some writers will do better making it up
>as they go, while others will be very uncomfortable if they
>haven't worked out at least the basics ahead of time.
My own experience is that if I start with story and develop
magic to fit it, I end up with a setting that only works for
that one story. It tends to feel a bit overdetermined for use
in later stories. As I like to write more than one story in
a given setting I'm better off avoiding this tactic.
I doubt this is true for everybody, but I do think I've seen
overdetermined magic systems which drained the reusability out
of their setting: a novel called _Illuminations_ (author
mislaid) comes to mind.
>Moreover, as David G. pointed out, a major point of the
>story might be to explore the consequences of a particular
>system of magic.
>> I can't say I've ever been satisfied by reading any
>> fiction that had a great system of magic and nothing else
>> going for it.
>That's just poor execution, no matter where the author
>actually started.
There's also a problem that we're looking, in the case of
published stories, at the end product. You may assume that
if the result has interesting magic but boring plot and
characters that's because the magic was done first; but
it's not necessarily true. Experience suggests that it's
really hard to diagnose the way something was written from
its final product. (CS Lewis wrote about this in several of
his essays: people would always guess about his writing
process, and they were usually wrong.)
Lurking very deep in the ontology of my WIS is the roleplaying
game question "How do multi-classed spellcasters work?"
I think that if my first-readers had seen this, they would
have complained loud and long; but among the many complaints
I got, none of them hinged on too-obtrusive worldbuilding,
so I speculate that I managed to bury this deeply enough that
it doesn't distract from the story.
It was handy, though, to start with a fairly solid idea of
what magic can do. I have another story, started around the
same time, that's stalled due to my not knowing enough about its
magic: I can't let the story drive what magic can do, because I
desperately need constraints on what magic can do in order
to let me figure out what the story is. I think I have to
go back and worldbuild. (Unfortunately it is clearly not
the same world as the previous WIS, so I can't reuse that.)
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Zeborah
> In article <1ilwt81.11zeyms18eph2mN%zeb...@gmail.com>,
> zeb...@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:
>
> > <Charles...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Aug 15, 11:08 pm, zebo...@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:
> > > > <CharlesRCap...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > > The answer to the questions you pose, is that magic effects society as
> > > > > much as you let it.
> > > >
> > > > Depends on the author. Alternatively, magic affects society as much as
> > > > society lets it.
> > >
> > > I don't know if I agree with that Zeborah, if you have a single
> > > society that is completely isolated and completely oppressive, you can
> > > only slow the changes.
> >
> > You and Graham seem to be taking "society" to mean "government" or some
> > other part of society external to the magic users; I'm using it to
> > include everyone including infants, the homeless, and magic users. If
> > you have really powerful magic but absolutely no-one wants to use it,
> > then it's not going to affect society. Yes, this is extremely unlikely,
> > but my point is that it's not magic that determines how society changes,
> > it's the reaction of the people that make up that society. One society
> > might react in one way while another society might react in the opposite
> > way.
>
> Your "society lets it" treats society as if it were a single choosing
> individual.
No, it really really doesn't.
You know how the sum of millions of people's decisions (to simplify)
determines prices? Likewise the sum of millions of people's decisions
determines the effect magic has on society.
"society" = "a whole bunch of people"
"lets" = "makes one or more decisions which, taken together, don't
prevent an event"
Ergo, "society lets magic affect it" = "a whole bunch of people make a
whole bunch of decisions which, taken together, don't prevent magic from
affecting society"
Dan Goodman
> I'm assuming that if a writer spends so much time working out
> their magic system that the other story elements get overshadowed, you
> end up with crappy fiction.
And you're assuming that a large amount of time devoted to
_consciously_ working out the magic system _will_ result in other story
elements being overshadowed.
I don't think the amount of time Tolkien devoted to languages resulted
in other story elements -- including other background details -- being
so overshadowed that LOTR was complete crap.
Conversely: Ursula K. Le Guin makes up her backgrounds on the fly.
But for me, they can overshadow other story elements.
--
--
Dan Goodman
"I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers."
Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Expire
Journal http://dsgood.livejournal.com
Futures http://clerkfuturist.wordpress.com
Mirror Journal http://dsgood.insanejournal.com
Mirror 2 http://dsgood.wordpress.com
Links http://del.icio.us/dsgood
David Friedman
zeb...@gmail.com (Zeborah) wrote:
Fair enough. Then I was misreading your "society lets it."
Daniel R. Reitman
James, Tina. Tina, James.
Dan, ad nauseam
Brian M. Scott
<drei...@spiritone.com> wrote in
<news:r9jka453fv6m0l9je...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> James, Tina. Tina, James.
Isn't one traditionally supposed to do that the other way
round?
Brian
Daniel R. Reitman
Tina, Tina. James, James.
Dan, ad nauseam
Brian M. Scott
<drei...@spiritone.com> wrote in
<news:ilnka4ppgb9ieec8v...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
>>> James, Tina. Tina, James.
> Tina, Tina. James, James.
<g>
But I'm now afflicted with the earworm 'James James Morrison
Morrison Weatherby George Dupree'.
Brian
Kushiel
> But you've appeared to be making a
> much stronger claim, namely, that it's better to let the
> system of magic emerge from the story than to start with a
> system of magic.
Fair enough. I apologize for the inarticulateness on my part, then.
I didn't really have a point to make (aside from an implied one about
my reading tastes, I suppose). I asked a question in the hope of
expanding my repertoire of technique, and not really being satisfied
with the answers I got, I tried asking that question again in
different, and more aggressive, form.
John Eno
Charles...@gmail.com
> If you have really powerful magic but
> absolutely no-one wants to use it,
> then it's not going to affect society.
That seems to be something of a parallel with nuclear weapons.
Absolutely no-one (with the possible exception of insane people with
death wishes) wants Mutually Assured Destruction, but you can hardly
say that just because no-one wanted to blow up the world that the
possibility that someone might didn't affect society.
Tina Hall
>> Just make all magic, Divine Magic and then let the gods keep
>> society in order.
> This doesn't answer the question of "What effects has the
> presence of magic had on the development of this society?"
> though. It simply transmutes it to "What effects has the
> verifiable existence of deities had on the development of this
> society?" They're both important questions to answer, of course,
> but inserting deities into a magic system doesn't answer what
> effects it's had on the world.
Agreed.
>> The gods don?t have to make sense, but if you want to make
>> magic a sort of pseudo-science, then you need a structure and
>> rules lest you fall into gaping plot holes.
> Agreed.
Disagreed.
At least as far as saying it should be all decided in advance,
rather than just a few parameters and the rest evolves in the story.
Maybe it wouldn't work for someone who plans, but for me, these
things sort themselves out. The structure and rules emerge while
writing. I don't care about plot, I care about consistency, and for
the most part my backbrain takes care of that. For the events that
it doesn't, it points out problems that I then solve.
> This is why it seems to me that the story should drive
> how magic works rather than the other way around.
That sounds as if you could replace 'story' with 'plot' there.
While for me, the characters drive the story (screw plot). That may
be highly influenced by the magic, or just have the magic as
guideline, setting a few of many parameters of the characters.
In the end, the people live their lifes, or in the case of stories,
have adventures of one sort or another. If that doesn't show
(whether planned in advance or written as it comes, I'm talking
about the end-product), you got big gaping holes _there_. The
actions should be consistent with a living person, rather than just
arbitrary points met to follow a certain set road.
> I can't say I've ever been satisfied by reading any fiction that
> had a great system of magic and nothing else going for it.
That sounds as if you say that if there's a great system of magic,
there's nothing else. With books where that is the case, I'd agree
that they're not good (just like with books that have only 'plot'),
but I don't agree that that's the only possibility.
--
Tina
WIP: <Twofold>: 11566 words
WISuspension: Seasons & Elements trilogy | Magic Earth series
Posted to Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition.
Tina Hall
> My own experience is that if I start with story and develop
> magic to fit it, I end up with a setting that only works for
> that one story. It tends to feel a bit overdetermined for use
> in later stories. As I like to write more than one story in
> a given setting I'm better off avoiding this tactic.
Not really saying anything to the subject, that paragraph only
sparked an image that looked interesting; create a setting to write
more than one story in it.
Then I remembered that I tried that. And it went elsewhere.
I could probably put an independent story into the ME setting, but I
don't know why, and the more I think about it, the more I feel the
link (that would be) missing to the bigger story.
And the further I think about it, I feel that I create worlds around
characters.
I'm a bit puzzled by the 'overdetermind' in your paragraph there,
too. First I read it (and what followed) as meaning 'a bit too much
work for just one story'. Now I'm not so sure. But if it's that, I
don't really understand the attitude.
> I doubt this is true for everybody, but I do think I've seen
> overdetermined magic systems which drained the reusability out
> of their setting: a novel called _Illuminations_ (author
> mislaid) comes to mind.
Not familiar with that.
Another factor is the story itself, though. If it's something
global, and with a happy end, what other story could be set there?
All I can think of is something of a much smaller scale,
inconsequential to the bigger story.
> It was handy, though, to start with a fairly solid idea of
> what magic can do. I have another story, started around the
> same time, that's stalled due to my not knowing enough about its
> magic: I can't let the story drive what magic can do, because I
> desperately need constraints on what magic can do in order
> to let me figure out what the story is. I think I have to
> go back and worldbuild. (Unfortunately it is clearly not
> the same world as the previous WIS, so I can't reuse that.)
Picking bits from it doesn't work?
Tina Hall
>> You seem to be assuming that if you start with a specific
>> magical system as a given, it will necessarily get in the
>> way of telling a good story. (
> Nope. I'm assuming that if a writer spends so much time working
> out their magic system that the other story elements get
> overshadowed, you end up with crappy fiction.
_If_ the other elements get overshadowed, yes. Where do you draw the
line, though?
The only example I can think of doesn't even touch your points, it
just has an awkward introduction of the magic system, a writing
problem (what words are chosen when, how). In the example, there are
seemingly endless lectures on the theory of magic at the beginning
of the story, without giving any hint what the story is about, and
not really much story happening. And then when the actual story got
going, it doesn't really give any reason for why it all had to be
explained at length, only the bits that contradict what then happens
in the story stand out.
(And that doesn't touch the actual writing style of the lectures, as
I think that's mostly just preference, taste.)
> How your magic works isn't as important as what people do with it
> and how it affects them.
Depends. The magic can be a part of it as common as air and the
ground the people walk on. In that case what they do with it and how
it affects them is no more important than the air and the ground,
but how it works is still important. If only for it not being
present in the real world, unlike ground and air (in other words,
it's something unkown until explained).
>> Moreover, as David G. pointed out, a major point of the
>> story might be to explore the consequences of a particular
>> system of magic.
> Yeah, I remain unconvinced that this is likely going to result in
> interesting fiction, unless you keep the magic in the background
> and foreground those consequences in the form of individuals.
Sounds like my S&E. :)
But because of the ever-present magic in many if not all aspects of
the indiviuals, the magic is not really in the backround. It's what
drives everything and everyone, and whatever plot some people might
see (I don't like plot, don't want PLOT, because in my eyes that
gets in the way of the story, the people, all the interesting things
- like a list of events to tick off no matter whether they make
sense or follow from what came before).
But the first book is called 'Controlled by Magic', and the second
'Controlling the Magic'. (The third should have something in the
middle.)
> Oh, totally. I think excessive worldbuilding at the expense of
> character is a pretty chronic problem in the field of fantasy and
> scifi, though, which is why I'm bringing it up here.
Hey, someone else complaining about what's published! :)
I blame plot, though. It makes people do stupid things that have no
reason. Alternately, other people's ideas of understandable
behaviour differs greatly from mine.
> Mr. Friedman's post below mine
Eh, how is anyone to know which post that's supposed to be? :)
> seems to indicate that he's got this problem nailed down, though,
> so I should probably go back to lurking before I make an ass out
> of myself again.
Depends on what you mean by 'nailed down'; recognizes it, fixed it,
claims to have done it right, or something else? (There's been a
recent thread that leaves me to think he only thinks he's done any
of that, but hasn't really.)
Kushiel
> _If_ the other elements get overshadowed, yes. Where do you draw the
> line, though?
Well, as I'm sure I've made clear in this thread, I'm prejudiced.
Largely, the reason I was asking about shaping societies by magic
(rather than the other way around) was to try to get to grips with
that prejudice in a useful way.
For me, learning about the working of a system of magic usually
overshadows the rest of a piece of fiction when I have to learn how it
works in order to understand the rest of the story. I shouldn't need
to see the math, as it were. In the same way that I don't need to
learn the physics of how a gun fires a bullet in order to understand a
noir story or learn the endocrinology of the human body in order to
understand a romance, I generally don't want to have to need a
detailed explanation of how magic works to undestand a fantasy story.
Just to be absolutely clear this time, since I wasn't in the past, I
recognize that this is
a) My subjective opinion rather than any kind of objective truth, and
b) An opinion I'm trying to be less dogmatic about.
> > How your magic works isn't as important as what people do with it
> > and how it affects them.
>
> Depends. The magic can be a part of it as common as air and the
> ground the people walk on. In that case what they do with it and how
> it affects them is no more important than the air and the ground,
> but how it works is still important.
We may have differing definitions of "how it works," then. For me, "He
concentrated and a flame bloomed in the fire pit" is plenty of
explanation as to how magic works, as long as it works that way
consistently. Most likely, it doesn't matter if the magic is based on
elemental manipulation or sympathetic resonance or the will of the
gods.
What characters do with that power, on the other hand, is what makes
the fiction interesting.
> > Mr. Friedman's post below mine
>
> Eh, how is anyone to know which post that's supposed to be? :)
Gah, sorry. This one:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/6hv76j
> Depends on what you mean by 'nailed down'; recognizes it, fixed it,
> claims to have done it right, or something else? (There's been a
> recent thread that leaves me to think he only thinks he's done any
> of that, but hasn't really.)
Not having read his work (beyond skimming the first two chapters he's
got online), all I can do is take him at his word that my concern
isn't one that's an issue for him.
John Eno
Tina Hall
>> _If_ the other elements get overshadowed, yes. Where do you draw
>> the ( line, though?
> Well, as I'm sure I've made clear in this thread, I'm prejudiced.
> Largely, the reason I was asking about shaping societies by magic
> (rather than the other way around) was to try to get to grips
> with that prejudice in a useful way.
Prejudiced against what exactly? (I'm not sure that's entirely
clear.)
> For me, learning about the working of a system of magic usually
> overshadows the rest of a piece of fiction when I have to learn
> how it works in order to understand the rest of the story.
Sure that's not the writing?
Thinking about what magic I've seen in stories, I can't think of
anything that had to be 'learned' to understand the rest of the
story. And I don't think that's just me absorbing the data. :)
What I remember is magic basically just being a tool, like cars,
where I don't have to understand how the motor works to understand a
character being carted around in a taxi.
The closest I can think of is the S&E, where you might need to
understand the magic to understand some character behaviour (else
you could mistake it for normal not quite sensible behaviour - magic
gives the stuff I'd object to a reason).
> I shouldn't need to see the math, as it were.
Ok, if it turns into a physics lesson, I would likely drop it, too.
On the other hand, I like magic, and like such details. If anything
there's too little on the mechanics in what I've read. (I don't like
the traditional way, with spells and/or ingredients and gestures,
though. I see no reason for it to be that way, so there would have
to be an acceptable explanation.)
But again, I think it depends on how it's presented. Well, done,
snuck into the backround, you might not even notice. :) (Not
necessarily you personally.)
> In the same way that I don't need to learn the physics of how a
> gun fires a bullet in order to understand a noir story or learn
> the endocrinology of the human body in order to understand a
> romance, I generally don't want to have to need a detailed
> explanation of how magic works to undestand a fantasy story.
I partly agree, though guns and romances are something from real
life, and on the other hand, particularly romances in stories is
something that tends to lack an explanation, why a character would
fall for some irritating spoiled brat that has nothing likable about
her (so my default guess is 'big tits'). And when they get into
action, I don't see why her body should react the way it does to
nothing that is in any way a turn on. So there, too, I'd expect an
explanation, and lacking it, I don't care what happens to such
stupid characters.
> Just to be absolutely clear this time, since I wasn't in the
> past, I recognize that this is
> a) My subjective opinion rather than any kind of objective truth,
> and b) An opinion I'm trying to be less dogmatic about.
If you don't like explanations on magic, that's your taste, nothing
wrong with it. (I don't like technobabble.)
I don't understand the tie to shaping societies (or the other way
round), and the idea that with a complex magic system, there isn't
anything else. No other option for you.
>>> How your magic works isn't as important as what people do with
>>> it and how it affects them.
>>
>> Depends. The magic can be a part of it as common as air and the
>> ( ground the people walk on. In that case what they do with it
>> and how ( it affects them is no more important than the air and
>> the ground, ( but how it works is still important.
> We may have differing definitions of "how it works," then. For
> me, "He concentrated and a flame bloomed in the fire pit" is
> plenty of explanation as to how magic works, as long as it works
> that way consistently.
Would be good enough for me, too.
It's that way even for the most part of the ME. All the explanation
that turns up a few times (in six books) is that magic is bound in
matter, stable in solids, difficult to get at in liquids
(inconsequential in gas), and that it's not present on our (the
real) world.
<warning, explanation, might like to skip it> My backround idea that
it's a sub-atomic <something>, and it being sub-atomic being
responsible for thoughts in a mind being able to manipulate matter a
kilometer, for example, away, doesn't actually turn up in the story.
</explanation>
In the fourth book, I think, the talent that enables some folks to
watch our world is explained. Which should show that the how isn't
necessary prior to that, but I got curious and the story provided an
answer.
And some consequences of the relation between magic and matter
aren't immediately obvious (something seems weird, but the cause
being magic isn't mentioned yet).
For the most part, things are just brought in, probed, heated,
cleaned, and such. Markers are simply placed, to communicate, watch,
and/or trace. Some people (those who can) move from one place to
another (with magic I mean, taking only an instant), and details on
that only turn up in the sixth book when some people are taught
that. Without any formulas or maths or such.
I think the weirdest I've got (of actual magic use with some details
added in) is in the S&E, where they substract Winter magic from Fire
magic to get Spring magic. (Normally it's just mixing different
tribes' magic according to the system I made up, and Spring mixed
with Winter makes Fire. There's no need to memorize the
combinations, you'd just have to trust that I didn't make it up as
needed. The table was one of the few things I had before I wrote the
first word.)
> Most likely, it doesn't matter if the magic is based on elemental
> manipulation or sympathetic resonance or the will of the gods.
Unless that's part of the events. Is that what you object to, that
you wouldn't like a story where a group of adventurers tries to find
out why suddenly one elemental doesn't work anymore?
> What characters do with that power, on the other hand, is what
> makes the fiction interesting.
I think I agree.
>>> Mr. Friedman's post below mine
>>
>> Eh, how is anyone to know which post that's supposed to be? :)
> Gah, sorry. This one:
> http://preview.tinyurl.com/6hv76j
No good, that's internet. (Would have to reboot and start windoze,
then pay per minute. Never mind whatever problems would turn up
after months of not booting windoze.)
The date might help searching for it here. Better a quote, I have no
idea what you are refering to so might not even recognize the post
as the one you mean.
David Friedman
"Dan Goodman" <dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
(quoting me)
> > Close. The cut-off, which most people are below, is such that only
> > modern research has shown that most people (and, probably, animals)
> > have at least some magic, used in non-obvious ways. I suspect that
> > the innate magic has something to do with how life works, but the
> > evidence for that only shows up (a little) in the sequel.
> Are there animals with strong magical talent? Whether or not there
> are, I suspect there would be legends about, for example, bears who can
> work magic.
(For some reason, I'm getting reappearance of a bunch of old posts,
including this one. But it occurs to me that there was a response I
should have made and didn't.)
Note that the existence of magic in animals is a recent discovery, so
wouldn't yet have generated legends. The implication of the other
comments by the speaker is that it's hard to get the general public to
accept the latest results of scientific research.
Of course, such legends could have originated independently of the
actual fact.