Do you remember the kind of September
Hello again! I hope you had a lovely August!
So the Hugo Awards happened! And Imperial Radch won Best Series, which delights me no end. Voters could have chosen from any of the finalists, all of which were amazing. It was a privilege to be listed with them, and a tremendous privilege to win.
It was also a great list of winners all round, which wasn’t a surprise because that finalist list was pretty fabulous! If you haven’t already, check out the fiction finalists. You won’t be disappointed.
I’ve been thinking about one of Clarke’s Laws. You know the one, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And its corollary, “Any sufficiently comprehended magic is indistinguishable from technology.”
Some folks get a bit frustrated with that corollary, because it seems to say that all magic is just mundane, and where is the mystical, unknown bit that makes magic magic? The insistence, by some, that your fantasy story needs a Magic System, whereby magic indeed becomes a technology that the reader needs to understand in order to know the stakes of the story—that doesn’t help.
Now, I’m not here to argue against magic systems. They can be super cool and they can be used to ask questions about the world that can make for really great fantasy. No, it’s not magic systems as such that I have a problem with. It’s a too narrow, too superficial understanding of Clarke’s Law.
The problem—the place where sometimes people go wrong (IMO), is in that “sufficiently advanced” part. What does that even mean? Sufficiently? Sufficiently for what? Well, sufficiently for the technology to be perceived as magic.
Right, and who’s doing the perceiving?
Right there! That’s the whole heart of Clarke’s Law. Not “all magic is really mundanely explainable” but “if you’re standing in the right place, things look this way.” You can still subscribe to the idea that sufficiently comprehensible magic is in fact a kind of technology, and have numinous, mysterious magic. Because “mysterious” and “numinous” and whatever other adjectives you like are not inherent in the magic (or tech) itself, but in the perspective of the viewer. And viewers all have their own perspectives. So Clarke’s Law absolutely does not mean that all magic in any story must (or even can) be systematized in that story.
I also would like to point out that even here in the real world, technology is, yes, comprehensible and systematizable, but it doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to. Yes, we can do the math and demonstrate on paper why every time I flip the light switch, the lights turn on. I can prove that it works. I can demonstrate that it works! It’s so reliable that pretty much every building has lightswitches in it. But sometimes you flip the switch and…no light. Maybe it’s a power outage! What caused it? We may or may not ever know. Maybe there’s a fault in the switch, or a problem with the wiring, or a breaker blew. And we can go down to the basement and flip the breaker back on but…what caused it to blow in the first place? I mean, obviously the reason is something logical and explainable, but will you ever know what it was? Maybe. Maybe not.
This sounds really trivial, but my point is, even in systems that we understand really, really well there are points where our understanding fails. Where the obviously, provably effective tech just doesn’t do what it should, or produces some result we didn’t anticipate. None of this invalidates our understanding of electricity or circuits, but it’s worth remembering that there are a whole lot of factors affecting events.
A perfect understanding of electricity does not imply a perfect control over what happens every time you switch the lights on, or a perfect view of every factor that might be involved. And very few of us—not even super-experts in physics—have anything like a perfect view of what’s going on in my house every time I flip a lightswitch.
This is actually something science fiction does, as well—we imagine a technology and assume that it will work as intended every single time. But very little of our tech does that. I mean, it works well a lot of the time, often enough to mostly rely on it, but there are any number of cars that don’t run when they’re needed, medical treatments that aren’t effective in some subset of folks who need them, lights that don’t turn on when you want—nothing works perfectly every time, no matter what your theory says. Yes, the reasons they don’t work are ultimately explainable but there’s no guarantee any of us has access to those explanations.
Anyway, I feel like “magic systems” as a response to Clarke’s Law are just a first step. There are more questions to ask. Questions like “where are my characters standing, how do they perceive the magic/technology? How do they know what they know, and how do they think about it?” and “Where do I want my reader to stand? How do I want them to think about this?”
In the end, it’s true that any magic needs to make sense to the reader, but “make sense” can mean a lot of different things, and doesn’t necessarily mean “I can draw a diagram of how this works.” It can also mean “this feels right.”
TLDR, “sufficiently advanced” is not some objective benchmark, it’s a question of who is perceiving and how they’re perceiving it.
I’ve been playing Farm Together 2, which is a definite improvement over the already enjoyable and soothing Farm Together. It’s in early access, and they’ve been dropping small updates every week or so.
And in the last month I’ve read,
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P Djeli Clark
This novella is a super fun read and you really should just give it a whirl, especially if you’ve like his other stuff. Which, why wouldn’t you?
Asunder by Kerstin Hall
Ok, yes, I’m cheating here. I read this months ago. I’m mentioning it again because it came out last week and it’s really, really good.
Ancient Rome on the Silver Screen by Gregory S Aldrete and Graham Sumner
A bit pricey, so maybe get it from the library. It’s a nice summary—with pictures!—of movies & TV that involve Ancient Rome and discusses the way they did or did not manage to accurately convey things Roman.
Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope
Don’t start here. Start with Can You Forgive Her, or if you’re in a hurry, with Phineas Finn.
A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher
I always find Vernon/Kingfisher to be a soothing read, even her horror. I don’t know why that is, I’m not generally into horror or very calm about horrible stuff. Anyway, this Goosegirl… retelling? Reimagining? is everything you’d want from Kingfisher.
I am sorry to say that I have not yet read The Tomb of Dragons by Katherine Addison but I have begged for an ARC and we shall see. If the ARC doesn’t materialize (or even if it does) I have the book pre-ordered.
Enjoy your September, and stay safe!
Ann