Here we are, back at my own blog for the final post in my tour to promote The Necromancer’s Apprentice. This week, I’ve also been talking about the beauty of novellas on David Shrock’s blog, the importance of visuals on Katherine Hajer’s blog, and all about the mummies on Larry Kollar’s blog.
Today we’re back here to talk about magic! There’s a lot of magic, or magick if you will, in The Necromancer’s Apprentice – the eponymous apprentice, Jyx, starts out as a scholarship student at the Academy, until he’s handpicked by the necromancer general, Eufame Delsenza, to become her apprentice. He’s more advanced that his classmates and working on spells that he shouldn’t be encountering for another year or so. To him, magic is something that comes naturally, and if he understands it, why shouldn’t he have a go?
Most magical systems have rules of some sort, or at least some form of justification behind why they work. Disney’s 2010 adaptation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice had them attempting to justify the magic on display as being an extension of physics, and as much as I’d like that to be the case, the bottom line is that the sorceror in question was still firing bolts of energy from his hands. Yeah, because quantum physicists do that all day long, don’t they? I know there is an age-old idea that today’s magic is tomorrow’s science, but there’s still a line between the two.
Fullmetal Alchemist explores the concept of transmutation – essentially, you can’t create something out of nothing, so in order to create something, you need to have its component parts. It’s a bit like alchemical baking, really. Leave out the flour and it just isn’t going to work. I like this idea, I really do, and again it appeals to science – you can only create bronze by mixing copper and tin. Trouble is, Edward is just assembling random bits of scrap and turning it into whatever he needs at the time, just by putting his hands together and willing it. He’s like a magical MacGuyver.
This is why I quite liked the magical ‘rules’ of Harry Potter – essentially because the only real rule was ensuring you got the pronunciation right. (“It’s wing-gar-dee-am lev-ee-OH-sa, not wing-gar-dee-am lev-ee-oh-SAR”.) That in itself makes sense to me because how can the magic of your world know what you’re trying to do with it if you get its name wrong? At no point in the book do we find out where the magic comes from, or even how it works – we just know you need to have a wand, and to know how to use it. Simple. No “Oh I can’t do that because it’ll rebound on me threefold”, or “I can’t do that because there aren’t enough iambic pentameters in the atmosphere” – just a wand, and a witch/wizard. Indeed, we also find out that magical ability is something you either have or don’t have, and it seems somewhat random in its expression among humans.
I’ve got a fairly simple system in place in The Necromancer’s Apprentice. Much of the magic taught in the Academy consists of incantations, the wording of which I’ve based on Latin, but it rests on the principle that you have to get the whole incantation, or sigil, right. One mistake and it either won’t work at all, or it’ll do something totally unexpected. I suppose in some ways you could liken it to computer code – you can think you know what you’re doing, only to find out that you really, really don’t. Still, despite that, it’s magic. At no point is Jyx concerned with the physics or chemistry of what he’s doing because in his world, magic is the manipulation of the world using language or symbols. Wizards are commonplace, and there is no strict hierarchy of who can use magic and some can’t since different species or races have their own magic, and among humans it just depends on who is talented enough, or has access to a magical education.
Magic can be a difficult beast to use in fiction, since it can either become the whole plot, or the dreaded deus ex machina. I hate reading a book where it all comes down to “Oh! I just remembered a spell which will totally save the day!”, or the battle is won with the help of some kind of enchanted object which appears at just the right moment, but I want magic to be exactly that – magic. If I wanted science, I’d watch Star Trek.
How about you? What magical systems do you love…or loathe?
You can buy The Necromancer’s Apprentice from Amazon (where there is now a paperback option for those without e-readers), Barnes & Noble, and the Kobo store!
I’d never make it as a sorcerer in Jyx’s world. I tend to mix up my words, and I’d get the incantations all wrong. 🙂 Hogwarts would throw me out in the first year.
The science side of me likes the rule of can’t create something from nothing. Not only from elements, it could be transmuting objects or energy through gesture or incantation.