The Cost of Magic
Yesterday's post from Brandon Sanderson about his second law of magic got me thinking about how I have approached magic, or science fiction technology, in my own writing endeavors. I wrote a little bit about it in May last year when I shared my thoughts on what a good magic system needs, and then a follow up post with some thoughts on how to handle the nitty-gritty details of a magic system without boring the readers.
Brandon Sanderson's focus on how the cost is an important part in making magic interesting reminded me of the problems I had with that. The most recent occurrence was with the magic system I was going to use in my nanowrimo novel last year. I had a magic system where people could focus their aura into various parts of their bodies to become strong/faster/better (inspired by the magic used in Hunter x Hunter for those of you that read manga or watch anime). The usage part of the system was working out fine. I felt like I had a good system were the limits on what they could do was easy for the reader to see and the visual aspect of the magic made it fun to write about. The only problem left was how to make the magic users not omnipotent compared to a non-magic user. If they could go around and enhance their own abilities the whole time it would create a strange power balance in the world.
In the story I wrote for nanowrimo I ended up using the simplest solution; they get very tired after prolonged use. That restriction turned out not to be enough. The nanowrimo story spiraled out of control as I wrote it. As soon as the main character learned how to use his own power I realized that any interesting challenge would require the antagonist, or his minions, to have the same magical power as well. This in turn created a world were too many had magical powers, while I had created the setting based upon the thought that the magical power was a rare attribute. Thus the whole world, and all the challenges that the protagonist met, started to feel very contrived.
I realized that the abundance of magic was the source of the problem, but until I read the post on Sanderson's Second Law of Magic I had not been able to pin point the exact cause. It had to be harder to use the magic.
Now that I know the cause of the problem I'm looking forward to reworking the setting, and seeing what will happen to it when I add a better cost to the magic system. Not sure what the cost is going to be, but now that I know where to look I should be able to find something fitting.
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby is one of the classical novels that I have been meaning to read for a long time. Last year I got a copy for Christmas, and this month I finally found the right time to dig into it.
The story follows the life of Nick Carraway as he settles into life in New York during the summer of 1922. His neighbour is the elusive Gatsby, a man that throws great parties where no one really knows the host and very few people are ever invited. We see how Nick gets drawn into the social circles around Gatsby, and how he ends up dealing with the fleeting experiences they seem to live for.
This is my first time reading a book set America during the 1920's. I enjoyed getting a small glimpse into the excessive life style that the well off people indulged in during these years. In many ways it reminded me a of what I usually find in books set in the high society of late 19th century England.
I think the book did a very good job on portraying how a life can be fashioned around a dream and how it all can come tumbling down in the end. Knowing the history of the 1920's it is almost impossible not to see the correlation between the shattering of the dreams in the book and the shattering of the American Dream when the Wall Street crashed in 1929.
The protagonists somewhat passive role worked nicely in this novel. He gets a bit too sappy at times, but it never got to the point were it really annoyed me. His role was to observe how the other people shaped their lives and to give us an idea of how society viewed the splendour he found himself in. If he had been too active I think a bit of the magic that surrounded the setting and the other characters would have disappeared.
Once I got started the book was a very fast read, both due to its' short length and the easy language used. The easy language was especially noticeable in the dialogues, were the naivety and the main characters' strange view of life really shone forth.
After having finished the book I was left with mixed feelings. It was a very good book, but it did not quite live up to all the praise that I have been hearing about it.
Web of Lies, Venom and Tangled Threads – Jennifer Estep
If you haven't read anything about the Elemental Assassin series by Jennifer Estep you should take a look at my review of Spider's Bite (the first book in the series) instead of this review which covers the second, third and fourth book.
Even though I read these books in quick succession after the first Elemental Assassin book, vacation and general procrastination has stopped me from getting this review written earlier.
These books are very similar to the first one - as one would expect of books in a series. They are quick paced, with lots of action and just enough plot twists to keep everything interesting.
As the books progressed the voice of Gin, and the personality of the characters around her, grew stronger. I think this is both a case of Jennifer Estep getting a better hold of who Gin is, and us learning more about the history that lies beneath everything.
Even though the characters' personalities grew strong and more defined in these books they all remained more or less the same. Gin is probably the only character that goes through any significant change, and even that change is barely visible over the four books I've read in this series. But that is not always a bad thing. These are supposed to be quick and action packed books, and you don't always need deep character development to achieve that.
There are a few things that started to annoy me as I read the books though. The first of these is the healing of Jo-Jo. Giving her the ability to bring heal everything, using only a few hours, seems very cheap. It makes all the sacrifices the characters make seem a bit hollow. Who cares about getting their ass kicked and their faces beaten to a pulp, when you can get everything fixed by the time you wake up the next day? Even after reading all four books I don't really understand what Jennifer achieves by giving Jo-Jo this ability. I think it would have been better to enforce a long recuperation time to allow her healing to take effect, or at least add something to make an injury affect the main characters for more than a few hours.
The second thing that started to bug me was the amount of repetition in the books. A lot of lore is repeated again, and again, and again. Often using almost identical phrases. The prime example of this is the explanation about how the elemental magic of Gin works. Almost every single time it is used you are given an explanation of it, even when it is an application of it that we have seen before. There is also a lot of repeated descriptions throughout the books. The sexy characters are described with the same words almost every time Gin lays eyes upon them, and her routine when coming home is explained with the same amount of details each time.
I think the repetition parts would have been less noticeable if I had not read the four books is such a quick succession. Luckily for me I now have to wait a little while for the next book to arrive, so I am looking forward to seeing if the break from Gin's world will make the repetition less apparent.