Caroline Duvezin, in a Romancing the Gothic lecture, mentioned this quote from Ted Chiang: “roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it’s science, and if you can’t, it’s magic… Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you’re a person… when the universe responds to you in a personal way.”
Ted Chiang: "roughly speaking, if you can mass-produce it, it's science, and if you can't, it's magic… Magic is, in a sense, evidence that the universe knows you're a person… when the universe responds to you in a personal way"
— C. M. Rosens (@CMRosens) August 1, 2020
I’ve been thinking about this Ted Chiang quote a lot recently. (Source of the quote is this 2008 article by Annalee Newitz in io9.) To me, it resonates with something N.K. Jemison said a few years ago, that magic doesn’t have to have rules:
Because this is magic we’re talking about. It’s supposed to go places science can’t, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own. In most cultures of the world, magic is intimately connected with beliefs regarding life and death — things no one understands, and few expect to. Magic is the motile force of God, or gods. It’s the breath of the earth, the non-meat by-product of existence, that thing that happens when a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it. Magic is the mysteries, into which not everyone is so lucky, or unlucky, as to be initiated. It can be affected by belief, the whims of the unseen, harsh language. And it is not. Supposed. To make. Sense. In fact, I think it’s coolest when it doesn’t.
I’ve long felt similarly. I’ve been frustrated at the countless worldbuilding articles that insist the magic in your fantasy must have rules and limitations and a logical system. I’m frustrated by readers who critique books because the magic was not understandable.
I think part of my frustration might be because I grew up with magical cultural traditions. My grandmother in Japan would cure a bad cough in one of her children by taking them to a healer, who would pray and rub a black stone over their chest and body to absorb the illness. When we went to the temple, we would pray and wave the smoke of the incense over our bodies, for protection. We learned that speaking while walking under a willow tree at night would wake a ghost. We prayed three times a day to our deceased ancestors and offered them rice and sake to eat, and lit incense for them. The ancestors were always spoken of as if they were still present, in their little shrines, watching and caring for us.
My mother’s cousin was a Buddhist monk, who lived at a temple that was in our family. One of our ancestors had turned himself into a mummy (known in Japan as a shokushinbutsu), which is a sacred, intentional practice. The mummy sat in an alcove covered by glass and people would come to pray to it. It was, I suppose, a form of sainthood although it wasn’t called that.
One night my mother’s cousin was very sick, dying. He slept in front of the mummy. He had a dream where the mummy came to him, and shook him awake, yelling at him to wake up, slapping him, hitting him all over with his hands. When the monk awoke, he was cured.
I grew up with stories like this that had happened to living people. Magic was oven into the realities and histories of my Japanese family. My mother, too, spoke of dreams that delivered magical effects. My sister as well.
None of these stories had a “logic.” No one who told these stories tried to ascribe logic to them: “You see, this happened because…” Magic just happened, because magic is part of the world, and sometimes it is granted to us to experience, and sometimes it is not. Sometimes the universe listens to your prayers, listens to your will, your desire — and sometimes it doesn’t.
And I agree with Jemison that that uncertainty and unpredictablity that is, for me, foundational to magic is part of what makes it such an exciting and interesting thing to write about.
So, I invite you to ignore all those articles that insist you need a magic system, that your magic needs rules. Those are, I think, Western imperialist ways of thinking, that magic is a thing that can be bound and conquered by a set of logical rules. Magic is by nature unbound and something outside human control, at least in my experience.
It is mysterious. It works when you can make contact with the universe, when the universe recognizes you. And that, to me, is a more powerful and beautiful idea — and a more humane, human-centered one too — for writing stories about magic.
Note: Bibliography for the Duvezin lecture can be found here: https://romancingthegothic.wordpress.com/2020/08/02/bibliography-oh-my-goodness-is-that-an-electrosplit-goopslimer-port-technofantasies-and-difference-engines-in-steampunk-literature-caroline-duvezin/