One of the interesting effects of my commute these days is that I’m now going through about two books a week. My BART ride, during which this reading is done, takes thirty to forty minutes; that equates to fifty or sixty pages. Thus, something over a hundred pages a day. So a three hundred page novel takes three days.
For years now, my preferred genre has been nonfiction history; I just polished off Steven Runciman’s The Sicilian Vespers and am going through John Julius Norwich’s new book The Middle Sea, a history of the Mediterranean.
As a slight digression, I have to say I am a bit disappointed with The Middle Sea. A history of the Mediterranean in one book might strike one at first as ambitious, and on second reflection as necessarily giving short shrift to many topics. And so it is. I dearly love JJN’s prose, and it is a joy to read here as elsewhere, but he pushes through the millennia with such haste – of necessity – that a sense of opportunity lost permeates the book. His Byzantine trilogy remains, in my opinion, among the best books of its kind ever written, and is a fine example of what he can do when not laboring under the constraint of placing such an ambitious topic in a single volume. By Christmas.
Nonfiction history, though a genre endowed with a great many fine works, has one strong drawback. Those books are generally quite expensive. And at a rate of two books a week, that’s a habit that while not approaching methamphetamine addiction could become quite pricey. Lafayette is endowed with a nice albeit small public library, which I plan to leverage, but I’m a book collector – no, hoarder, I don’t take good care of them I just need to possess them – as well as a reader.
So I’ve gone back to science fiction and fantasy, which can be had for seven dollars a pop. I just polished off two by William C. Dietz, which were engaging space opera, although in any matters beyond the strictly military (i.e. romance) the overbearing triteness was painful. I followed those up with Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides, which has just been reissued after a few decades out of print. My expectations were very high but the book came close enough to them that I was well satisfied.
For this week I picked up two from Dark Carnival in Berkeley (as compared to last week, when I obtained them from the Other Change of Hobbit, also in Berkeley). A fantasy epic by Steven Erikson, chosen purely at random, and an Iain Banks novel.
I’ve started with the Erikson novel, and am thus far unimpressed, but it’s only Tuesday so I’ll give him some time. It suffers a bit from the overuse of fantasy linguistic tropes, and is wildly disjointed and dare I say confusing, but some authors write that way and manage by the end of the tale to have pulled the reader in, given them understanding through experience, and by use of sudden immersion made the world more real. Whether that will be the case here, I shall find out.
Just as the Dietz novels made me want to write space opera, though, this Erikson novel makes me want to write my epic fantasy. (As an aside, a trip to Dark Carnival is both uplifting and daunting for would-be genre authors, and for the same reason. There are just so many books. Which is uplifting because if all of those can get published – and many of them are tripe – why then so can you, and daunting because, well, why would anyone seize upon your book in such a sea of competition?)
One of the key components of epic fantasy is, of course, magic. In the Erikson book it’s everywhere and fantastically powerful, with armies marching with arch-mages and balls of eldritch fire leveling cities. In my would-be novel, not so much. Sure, there’s magic, but it’s pretty rare and certainly not world-shaping. At least, not in an overt way.
But I was thinking about magic and the use thereof in fantasy literature. What is magic, after all? My definition, which contains reflections of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous pronouncement, is that magic is something that is inconsistent with understood natural laws. Dragons, fireballs, tarot cards. None of them ought to work. Hence, magic.
(As compared to, say, dark matter, or rather the behavior of galaxies which makes dark matter theoretically necessary. Oddly cohesive galaxies are not considered inconsistent with natural laws, they imply that we do not fully understand the natural laws at work.)
So what then might allow magic to exist, at least, in one’s fantasy setting? Many great fantasy authors – Tolkien for instance – saw no need to deal with such a question, but I’m a big fan of systems and explanations. And an interesting answer to the question that I’ve been mulling over is: chaos.
Natural laws are a manifestation of order. Magic is thus a departure from order – men flying through the air, shooting fire from their fingertips, seeing into the future… all things that should not happen, given the laws the universe operates by.
So one could build one’s fantasy magic around the central conjecture that what wizards did was to tap into some source of chaos. And then they use that chaos to defy the laws of the universe, and achieve some aim that ought to be impossible.
The trick being, of course, to defy the exact laws and create the precise effect that you want, without just unleashing some random chaos and disturbing entirely unrelated laws. Which, of course, works perfectly in a traditional fantasy wizard setting, requiring years of study and offering lots of ways to get oneself hurt, and correspondingly few wizards. It also lends itself to explaining why wizards tend to be anywhere from eccentric to mad – repeated exposure to chaos would do that to one.
Plus hapless wizards attempting to fly and instead turning themselves into a patch of spotted mushrooms – a flying patch of spotted mushrooms – is just good fun.
At first one might think “well, if wizards unleash chaos, why would they need to study – chaos follows no laws, kind of pointless to study”, but of course what requires study are the laws. Because to achieve anything other than random shoggothy chaos will require that only the right laws are bent in only the right way. The difference between an expanding fireball with velocity and an expanding fireball without velocity is the difference between a fearsome wizard and a warm pile of ash.
Anyhow, that’s how I’m rolling these days. Fantasy novels on BART. Beats hell out of two and a half hours a day of white knuckles on a steering wheel, let me tell you.
- Sun Ra