Rational versus Irrational Magic

Confession: I cried for the last 150 pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Almost nonstop.

Reading:

• Master of the Cauldron by David Drake

Revising:

• "Illuminated"

First of all, thanks to everyone on the Accentuate Writers Forum who helped with the revisions of "Illuminated." Super giant shout out!

In revising "Illuminated," I noticed that this is my first ever fantasy story, or even fantasy idea, with what I like to call "irrational" magic.

It all comes down to the type of magical system employed in the story. Some are almost scientific in their complexity, like the One Power in the Wheel of Time. There are some mysteries and inconsistencies, sure, but having read twelve books in that universe, I feel I could sit down and write a pretty good research paper on the way the power works. Moreover, I could make explicit what is and is not possible with the One Power. Magic, in that universe, is merely an extension of the laws of physics, not something that breaks those laws.

David Edding's The Belgariad (and The Malloreon which followed) is similar in a way, not with magic, but with prophecy. The ways that prophecy work in those books are very explicit. Much of the interest of the series derives from that overt view of prophecy as something that can be studied rationally.

And that's the keyword for me, rational. These are systems that make sense, within the context of the story in which they're written. The authors have made entirely explicit the causes and consequences of their magic systems, and we have the ability to predict how things will work in those words irrespective of whether the authors actually wrote about those scenarios or not!

That's why The Wheel of Time would make such a great role playing game. The rules of magic are so explicit that they could be easily encapsulated into a rule set. (The D20 RPG did an okay job, but it could be done better.)

You'd never get that level of explainability with, say King's The Dark Tower or Susanna Clarke's Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell. In both cases, magic is unpredictable and irrational, and the reader never knows what it may or may not be capable of.

That's not to say that there aren't rules, but in both cases, those rules come from what the characters themselves are capable of, not what the magic system can achieve. The vast majority of magic is hanging out there as a great unknown, and it remains a mystery what it can accomplish.

In the case of Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the irrationality of magic was actually a theme of the book. For centuries, English magicians had been trying to study it as if it were a rational system, but as the book proves, it is inherently irrational. One of the main characters concocts a potion that bestows temporary madness just so he can understand magic better. The end result is the assertion that the world of magic (in the book, that is) is more great and wonderful than the human mind can comprehend.

Given my background, I'm much more comfortable with the scientific approaches to magic. My longterm project, Dairhenien's Library, uses a very explicit and rational magical system itself.

"Illuminated" is my first attempt at an irrational system, although I don't think that was my purpose in starting out writing. I give no explanation as to why the four books exist, only that they do. And I establish rules... if Lasair had not resisted, he would have lived; if he hadn't broken the rules earlier on, he wouldn't have gained the forbidden knowledge that frightened him so and caused him to try to resist the final page. It was his choices that defined the outcome, not some undefined magic system. Yet, I hope, I left the reader with the idea that there were parts of nature that were great and terrible and beyond our comprehension.