On a Sunday morning last August, I awoke at
Blackheath to find the garden turned to Wonderland by a generous
overnight dusting of snow. The sombre greys and greens of the azaleas
and rhododendrons had been transformed to glittering white, and the
scene looked like a Christmas card. The word “magic” occurred to me
then. “Magical” or “like magic” might have been better, as snow in
Blackheath is entirely natural, and dictionary definitions of magic
rely heavily on “supernatural”.
But “magic” is an emotive rather than a didactic word. It is used more
often to evoke feelings than to identify a condition or event. With
this aim, it is used to imply meanings outside those given in the
dictionary. Advertisers claim it for their furniture polish, ice cream
confections and many gadgets that they assure you will dazzle the mind,
and one has to suspect that the use of the word pays off. More
reasonable is its use in fantasy stories and derivatives such as opera
that owe their plots to fantasy or legend.
Being mainly an emotive word it must be used with skill and care when
crafting a story. Since, by its nature, magic can be invoked to account
for just about any conceivable event, its use must be rigidly
controlled by what the author gauges is the limit of the readers’
“suspension of disbelief”. This is usually achieved by confining its
use to a very few highly skilled or very gifted artisans, or to make
its use so difficult or hazardous that it is only a last resort when
non-magic means fail. Magic can be a special skill or power of a
particular being (human or otherwise) or a property of some special
object.
The indiscriminate use of such an object is limited by giving its magic
a narrow scope so that its use is only seldom of benefit, or its power
a dark side so that its use may appear to be of unqualified good, but
have harmful side effects that become evident later. Sauron’s Ring is
in this latter category, and it is a measure of those who come near it,
since its ultimately evil nature will in the end defeat anyone who
tries to use it for good. Even good magic can cause harm if the user is
incompetent. The sorcerer’s apprentice lost control of his spell with
disastrous results.
Horror uses magic in a similar way to fantasy but science fiction
usually presents it disguised as technology. As is implied by Arthur C.
Clarke’s “third law”, if the technology is sufficiently advanced it
can’t be distinguished from magic by people whose understanding is
insufficiently advanced. Many science fiction stories presuppose a
scientific and / or technological development well beyond the present
day, and currently impossible concepts (eg faster than light travel,
cheap hydrogen fusion power) may as well be considered magic posing as
advanced technology, but science fiction readers generally prefer to
avoid calling them magic.
Science fiction is typically set in a future of greater understanding
via science and greater power via technology. Fantasy is often set in a
past where, in a still more ancient past (a “golden age” from which
much important heritage has now been lost) great store of knowledge and
wisdom abounded. This may have come from a once great race of human or
superhuman beings, or from “the gods themselves”. Its heritage was
“art” or “skill” rather than science or technology, but a rule
analogous to Clarke’s law meant that it was, to all intents and
purposes, magic. In “The Lord of the Rings” we have the palantiri, the
three elven rings and the craft of stonework that gave us Orthanc and
other towers. These are monuments to the past, and their like may never
be made again.
Speculative fiction writers are nothing if not resourceful, and
variations on the nature and use of magic abound, so that a short
article can hardly do the subject justice. As one example, the writing
of Larry Niven covers both science fiction and fantasy. Some of his
science fiction “inventions” are currently well beyond any known
technology and may be inexplicable other than by magic. Yet Niven is
noted for “hard” science fiction, and for providing material with which
physicists and engineers like to play around, working out methods of
operation and calculating operational parameters (eg the physics of
Ringworld and the Smoke Ring - see Andrew Love’s essay “Physics in
Science Fiction”, currently on my website at
http://members.optusnet.com.au/guests/PhysicsinSF.html )
Yet Larry Niven also writes fantasy, and he has a unique method of
explaining magic. Elaborate spells, magical objects and mysterious
concoctions exist, but are all qualified by the notion that magic only
works with the consumption of an entity called “mana”. There was plenty
of mana around many centuries ago, back in the ages where most history
was not recorded and folk stories are all that remain. This “mana” has
now been used up so that magic no longer works. The analogy with a past
“golden age” is apparent.
Magic’s function is to allow the undoable to be done, the unbuildable
to be built and the inescapable to be escaped. It is the pumpkin coach
that took Cinderella to the ball, the kiss that turned the frog into a
prince, the willing belief (or suspension of disbelief) in fairies that
saved Tinker Bell’s life. Without it, fantasy would lose much of its
charm and those magic casements would just be ordinary windows, looking
out on our ordinary world, instead of on “perilous seas in faery
lands”.
