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Before writing my two novels (Chords and Jester), I spent a fair bit of time thinking about the nature of magic in the world of my stories. Given that I wanted to have a culture at a "high medieval" or "near-Renaissance" level, it was particularly important to think about the relationship between magic and various forms of technology, since that kind of society would typically be at the cusp of the same kind of scientific and technological revolution that occurred in our own world at that stage of our history and it would be necessary to carefully consider how magic would affect science, and vice versa.
First, let's consider magic itself. In the fantasy "literature", authors have chosen a great many different philosophies of how magic works. At the weaker extreme, you'll see "magic as a superpower", with wizards and the like using magic in much the same way that olden-time comic-book superheroes used their superpowers: at a whim, and with few consequences or costs. At the other extreme, which is stronger and more interesting from a literary perspective, magic follows very clear rules and has significant constraints, including the notion that magic requires a source of energy (whether external to the magic user or provided by the magic user's own body) and is thus difficult and limited by the available energy.
As in science fiction, magic therefore ranges in application from simple and seemingly unlimited, as in the "blasters" and related weapons that never run out of energy in most Hollywood science fiction, to complex, difficult-to-use, and fairly realistic, as in much modern written science fiction. That's an interesting parallel, because in my books, well-designed magical systems become almost a form of science or technology. Magic may still be mystical and wondrous, but it follows rules and can't accomplish miracles, and even merely astonishing effects require heroic efforts. Arthur Clark's observation that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" seems particularly relevant in this context.
I opted for the "magic as technology" end of the spectrum: I imposed clear rules, and particularly the rule that magic entailed obvious costs (particularly in terms of energy requirements). In short, the more powerful the spell being attempted, the greater the effort required. As a result, difficult and complex spells take a long time to cast and are more exhausting; in contrast, simple spells such as conjuring a light take relatively little concentration to initiate and relatively little energy to sustain. This parallels the distinction between ritual magic, which typically involves a long ceremony and elaborate preparations and is more likely to be required for producing major effects, and quickie magic, which doesn't. The latter is the kind of thing you'd expect for defensive spells that produce relatively simple effects (e.g., blocking a thrown knife), which would be useless if they took hours rather than seconds to cast.
This has significant implications for the use of magic in the world of my two novels. At the time of the two stories, wizards are rare and mostly undercover, so you won't see them (for example) running about the battlefield. But if they were used in battle, the really powerful military magics would require considerable preparation. In the battlefield use of archery and siege engines as a technological form of weaponry, the archers and the engineers responsible for field artillery would have to be defended by infantry or other means. These people are typically incompetent at hand to hand combat, because they never have to engage in this form of combat, and you must therefore keep them at a safe distance from those who are good at hand to hand combat. So it would be for your battlefield wizards. Steven Brust does a good job of working through the implications of this kind of situation in his novels.
A friend who's an expert swordsman notes that long-distance weapons such as guns (and in the present context, magic) are great so long as you can keep someone far enough away that you have time to use them. But once a combatant skilled with a sword or spear closes to within striking distance, such weapons become nearly useless. That's why rifles are typically equipped with bayonets and why infantry usually carry large knives or the equivalent as their backup weapon: rifles make poor clubs, but decent spears, and if someone is too close to hit with your spear, you can always drop it and grab your knife.
In contrast, quickie magic is the kind of thing you want to be able to use in a "walking down a dark alley late at night" situation, just in case you meet a mugger. Moderately powerful defensive magic would take time to invoke, so to use it in a crisis, you would almost certainly need to create the spell beforehand and store it "at your fingertips", whether in a special ring or held in your mind, like an arrow in its quiver. (The original Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game used both these models.) This assumes that spells are moderately but not inordinately difficult to create, that some advance preparation is necessary, and that you can store the spells if necessary. In this philosophy of magic, we can assume that simple spells require little or no preparation for a trained magic user. For example, spells based on motion (kinetic energy) would almost certainly be simple—indeed, they're probably one of the first things you would learn as an apprentice wizard, since pushing things around with your mind is a good exercise in concentration. Indeed, learning such spells is a staple of fantasy and even of science fiction. Think, for example, of the Jedi knights in Star Wars and Luke's early training. Such spells take seconds or less to prepare and cast, not minutes or hours.
There are many other potentially self-consistent systems of magic, and they're all equally good logical constructs—with the emphasis on "logical", since we obviously have no real magic against which to compare them. As an author, the trick is to choose a self-consistent (logical) system that suits your story purposes and follow the rules thereafter. Even deus ex machina magical solutions are acceptable if you've laid the groundwork carefully, and can convince the reader that the solution is inevitable because you have followed your own rules for powerful magics.
Returning to my story world and the relationship between magic and technology, let's examine the effect of such a philosophy of magic on the development of technology. In my story world, the civilization that existed several hundred years before the Exodus to the new world used magic almost like a technology: it was relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous, and could be used for many purposes that would have been accomplished by technology in our own world. Humans being lazy, we don't spend a lot of time inventing technologies to solve problems that can be easily solved using an existing solution—magic in this case. For example, why bother inventing gunpowder and rifles when any student of magic can easily accelerate a pebble to the same velocity as a bullet?
Guns and bullets seem inevitable from our modern perspective, but we should remember that gunpowder is a complicated and highly unlikely invention. It requires generations of ongoing alchemetical or chemical research; the Chinese didn't invent gunpowder until ca. 800 A.D., despite at least a millennium of relatively stable civilization and many scientific advances. It could be argued that Europeans would never have invented guns without importing the technology from Asia.
On the other hand, the magic required to create an original 200-page novel from scratch would be prohibitively difficult—though you could steal an existing book easily enough by magically levitating it out the bookstore window. This means you would still need writers and associated necessities (e.g., an educational system) and printers to publish their works.
When the people of my story world fled their old continent as a result of the magical catastrophe that I may describe in some future book, they deliberately left behind most of their magic and magic users, since these people were feared and hated—after all, they were the people who caused the catastrophe. Instead, people would take with them technologies required for survival, such as blacksmithing, farming, food preservation, education of workers (reading and writing), and suchlike.
Let's take farming and literacy as examples of how technology might make more sense than magic in the story world. In the context of farming, it might be easy to magically make a single plant grow more rapidly or to cure a disease or insect infestation of a single plant, but multiply that effort by hundreds or thousands of plants per field, and it's clear that under the rules of magic that I've proposed, running agriculture by means of magic would be infeasible. (Growing or healing large areas of crops by means of divine intervention from an agricultural god would be a different story, of course, but there are no such gods in the story world.) Similarly, if you need a high level of literacy to ensure that knowledge of trades and other survival skills could be passed on more efficiently than by means of purely oral transmission, it would be necessary to preserve writing and printing technologies. A book on agriculture and a second book on how to build a printing press would clearly be valuable ways to make use of scarce cargo space on the ships bearing the refugees.
Are any of the things I've described in this essay the most likely or the best solutions? Maybe not. The more important point from a literary perspective is that they're logically consistent and therefore defensible extrapolations from my starting assumptions. That makes them a useful framework on which to build a book.
First, let's consider magic itself. In the fantasy "literature", authors have chosen a great many different philosophies of how magic works. At the weaker extreme, you'll see "magic as a superpower", with wizards and the like using magic in much the same way that olden-time comic-book superheroes used their superpowers: at a whim, and with few consequences or costs. At the other extreme, which is stronger and more interesting from a literary perspective, magic follows very clear rules and has significant constraints, including the notion that magic requires a source of energy (whether external to the magic user or provided by the magic user's own body) and is thus difficult and limited by the available energy.
As in science fiction, magic therefore ranges in application from simple and seemingly unlimited, as in the "blasters" and related weapons that never run out of energy in most Hollywood science fiction, to complex, difficult-to-use, and fairly realistic, as in much modern written science fiction. That's an interesting parallel, because in my books, well-designed magical systems become almost a form of science or technology. Magic may still be mystical and wondrous, but it follows rules and can't accomplish miracles, and even merely astonishing effects require heroic efforts. Arthur Clark's observation that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" seems particularly relevant in this context.
I opted for the "magic as technology" end of the spectrum: I imposed clear rules, and particularly the rule that magic entailed obvious costs (particularly in terms of energy requirements). In short, the more powerful the spell being attempted, the greater the effort required. As a result, difficult and complex spells take a long time to cast and are more exhausting; in contrast, simple spells such as conjuring a light take relatively little concentration to initiate and relatively little energy to sustain. This parallels the distinction between ritual magic, which typically involves a long ceremony and elaborate preparations and is more likely to be required for producing major effects, and quickie magic, which doesn't. The latter is the kind of thing you'd expect for defensive spells that produce relatively simple effects (e.g., blocking a thrown knife), which would be useless if they took hours rather than seconds to cast.
This has significant implications for the use of magic in the world of my two novels. At the time of the two stories, wizards are rare and mostly undercover, so you won't see them (for example) running about the battlefield. But if they were used in battle, the really powerful military magics would require considerable preparation. In the battlefield use of archery and siege engines as a technological form of weaponry, the archers and the engineers responsible for field artillery would have to be defended by infantry or other means. These people are typically incompetent at hand to hand combat, because they never have to engage in this form of combat, and you must therefore keep them at a safe distance from those who are good at hand to hand combat. So it would be for your battlefield wizards. Steven Brust does a good job of working through the implications of this kind of situation in his novels.
A friend who's an expert swordsman notes that long-distance weapons such as guns (and in the present context, magic) are great so long as you can keep someone far enough away that you have time to use them. But once a combatant skilled with a sword or spear closes to within striking distance, such weapons become nearly useless. That's why rifles are typically equipped with bayonets and why infantry usually carry large knives or the equivalent as their backup weapon: rifles make poor clubs, but decent spears, and if someone is too close to hit with your spear, you can always drop it and grab your knife.
In contrast, quickie magic is the kind of thing you want to be able to use in a "walking down a dark alley late at night" situation, just in case you meet a mugger. Moderately powerful defensive magic would take time to invoke, so to use it in a crisis, you would almost certainly need to create the spell beforehand and store it "at your fingertips", whether in a special ring or held in your mind, like an arrow in its quiver. (The original Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game used both these models.) This assumes that spells are moderately but not inordinately difficult to create, that some advance preparation is necessary, and that you can store the spells if necessary. In this philosophy of magic, we can assume that simple spells require little or no preparation for a trained magic user. For example, spells based on motion (kinetic energy) would almost certainly be simple—indeed, they're probably one of the first things you would learn as an apprentice wizard, since pushing things around with your mind is a good exercise in concentration. Indeed, learning such spells is a staple of fantasy and even of science fiction. Think, for example, of the Jedi knights in Star Wars and Luke's early training. Such spells take seconds or less to prepare and cast, not minutes or hours.
There are many other potentially self-consistent systems of magic, and they're all equally good logical constructs—with the emphasis on "logical", since we obviously have no real magic against which to compare them. As an author, the trick is to choose a self-consistent (logical) system that suits your story purposes and follow the rules thereafter. Even deus ex machina magical solutions are acceptable if you've laid the groundwork carefully, and can convince the reader that the solution is inevitable because you have followed your own rules for powerful magics.
Returning to my story world and the relationship between magic and technology, let's examine the effect of such a philosophy of magic on the development of technology. In my story world, the civilization that existed several hundred years before the Exodus to the new world used magic almost like a technology: it was relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous, and could be used for many purposes that would have been accomplished by technology in our own world. Humans being lazy, we don't spend a lot of time inventing technologies to solve problems that can be easily solved using an existing solution—magic in this case. For example, why bother inventing gunpowder and rifles when any student of magic can easily accelerate a pebble to the same velocity as a bullet?
Guns and bullets seem inevitable from our modern perspective, but we should remember that gunpowder is a complicated and highly unlikely invention. It requires generations of ongoing alchemetical or chemical research; the Chinese didn't invent gunpowder until ca. 800 A.D., despite at least a millennium of relatively stable civilization and many scientific advances. It could be argued that Europeans would never have invented guns without importing the technology from Asia.
On the other hand, the magic required to create an original 200-page novel from scratch would be prohibitively difficult—though you could steal an existing book easily enough by magically levitating it out the bookstore window. This means you would still need writers and associated necessities (e.g., an educational system) and printers to publish their works.
When the people of my story world fled their old continent as a result of the magical catastrophe that I may describe in some future book, they deliberately left behind most of their magic and magic users, since these people were feared and hated—after all, they were the people who caused the catastrophe. Instead, people would take with them technologies required for survival, such as blacksmithing, farming, food preservation, education of workers (reading and writing), and suchlike.
Let's take farming and literacy as examples of how technology might make more sense than magic in the story world. In the context of farming, it might be easy to magically make a single plant grow more rapidly or to cure a disease or insect infestation of a single plant, but multiply that effort by hundreds or thousands of plants per field, and it's clear that under the rules of magic that I've proposed, running agriculture by means of magic would be infeasible. (Growing or healing large areas of crops by means of divine intervention from an agricultural god would be a different story, of course, but there are no such gods in the story world.) Similarly, if you need a high level of literacy to ensure that knowledge of trades and other survival skills could be passed on more efficiently than by means of purely oral transmission, it would be necessary to preserve writing and printing technologies. A book on agriculture and a second book on how to build a printing press would clearly be valuable ways to make use of scarce cargo space on the ships bearing the refugees.
Are any of the things I've described in this essay the most likely or the best solutions? Maybe not. The more important point from a literary perspective is that they're logically consistent and therefore defensible extrapolations from my starting assumptions. That makes them a useful framework on which to build a book.