Jump to content

Notable Fantasy Magic Systems?


aimlessgun

Recommended Posts

Dragarea also includes shamanism, psionics, and living weapons. Also necromancy, alter plane travel, immortality, reincarnation, and time travel. The "everyday" magic ends as a mass-market product because civilisation manages to find a stable source that can be tapped by almost everyone at will, easily, and fast. Transport, construction, technology... once it's written as having been integrated in society like technology after an industrial revolution, it's no surprise it would cross into SF at one point, if you think about it.

That's true in some sense. For some reason my mind was linking sci-fi with plausibility, but huge chunks of my sci-fi reading are in no way plausible (looking at you Dan Simmons).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I seem to recall a short story by Anne McCaffrey (or was it Ursula Le Guin?) about a healer who used the magical mixing of snake venoms inside her body to cure illness. I would have loved an expansion of that idea.

I do like the idea of a cost inherent in the use of magic as a means to keep balance within any story's universe.

Julian May's Boreal Moon series uses objects made of various materials to focus magic from otherworldly 'god-like' beings, who then 'took' the pain back to feed themselves. I only read 2 out of the three books, I must have missed the third one being issued.

For pure Arthurian legend, my favourite is Mary Stewart's 'Crystal Cave and sequels, followed by Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'Mists of Avalon' et al.

Has anyone mentioned Octarine yet?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I seem to recall a short story by Anne McCaffrey (or was it Ursula Le Guin?) about a healer who used the magical mixing of snake venoms inside her body to cure illness. I would have loved an expansion of that idea.

Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What about such powers is science-fictional?

Their origin seems to be science-fictional more than the powers themselves. Errant Bard's covered it mostly, but, basically, the world seems to be an extraplanetary human colony. They came in and took over from the original inhabitants, the Serioli. Then some new aliens came in and started experimenting on the humans, creating two new races out of them, giving them the basis of their ability to perform one common type of magic. Eventually a big disaster (scientific, but also the source of the world's other commonplace magic) got rid of the alien overlords and turned some of their servants into gods (more or less). Though this science-fiction origin is balanced by the fact that no one but the gods really seems to know much about it, and the reader only gets hints scattered through the books.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Has anyone mentioned Octarine yet?
"Normal" magic never has much of its inner working explained in Discworld, but anyway, the greatest magic in Discworld is not that but the manipulation of narrative causality.

That is: if you want to absolutely hit the target with an arrow, you should make it so you only have one in a million chance of succeeding (and you might also want someone to say "it's a chance in a million, but IT JUST MIGHT WORK"). You want to stop an army: decide to fight it alone. You want thunder and lightning? Make a sufficiently dramatic statement with your back to a window (it helps if you're a vampire or a werewolf). And so on.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That is: if you want to absolutely hit the target with an arrow, you should make it so you only have one in a million chance of succeeding (and you might also want someone to say "it's a chance in a million, but IT JUST MIGHT WORK"). You want to stop an army: decide to fight it alone. You want thunder and lightning? Make a sufficiently dramatic statement with your back to a window (it helps if you're a vampire or a werewolf). And so on.

Good old Pratchett. I think that definitely counts as a magic system.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Have there been any books that had a magic-industrial revolution?

Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy books are based in an alternate history of Earth where Richard the Lionheart founded an empire where the laws of magic were studied and developed rather than the laws of physics and science. Lord Darcy is a detective who uses forensic sorcery to help him solve crimes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

The Spell of History: Magic Systems and Real-World Zeitgeists

"Every system of magic is a product of its creator. Robert Jordan gave us saidin and saidar. Margaret Weis and Terry Hickman gave us Solinari, Nuitari, and Lunitari. Brandon Sanderson gave us Allomancy. But systems of magic are also the products of the cultural forces that act on, inspire, or dismay their authors as they create their secondary worlds. And if we do a little digging, we can unearth the zeitgeist that helped give birth to a system of magic, put the two side by side, and learn a bit about how the one can influence the other."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Systematization of already existing chaos (as if there is a hidden order, and a character goes there and revolutionizes the paradigm); tends to use technical/science parallelisms - examples are the Rick Cook Wiz Biz series and Andrew Swann Broken Crescent - computer programming analogue, complete with compilers.

Express as a art, conceptualize magical effects into a 'art'. Can be only one, such as the dozens (of sometimes very high quality) settings that use painting as a medium for magic, or more than one in the settings.

Michelle West - The Augustine Painters, Kate Elliot - The Golden Key are examples of the first for 'painting', 'Naming' on Earthsea too, Tamora Pierce various Circle series are a example of the second

There are other qualities to consider to classify them on other parameters. For instance:

As a quality inherent to the practitioner - say some genetic capacity or gender divide.

As a quality non-inherent to the practitioner, that is maybe the only requirement or require 1) too - you might need a rare resource, such as metal on that Sanderson series or a education.

So i guess if you want a list you better choose a classification system first. Since magic is the ultimate weasel concept on fantasy books, it is infinitely mutable and often contradictory - on purpose or not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...