This is a post I’ve been meaning to write since my first Wiscon experience (online) a few months ago. Wiscon has always been one of my dream cons and I’d given up on ever attending it but they made it online this year, which was really an opportunity I could not miss even though I said I was swearing off Cons. I was a lurker but I did love the many invigorating and insightful conversations I watched both through the livestream and on Discord. One of those conversations which bled into bsky (and that, I did participate in) was about the use of magic and magic systems in our fiction. There was a conversation about more structured magic systems and the numinous (I believe it was started by Sandstone) which had me nodding my head vigorously.
Very few of the fantasy books I remember reading had rigidly structured magic systems. I suppose you could consider a sort of structure in Tolkien’s fiction (but even so I feel his fiction was far more idiosyncratic and subjective in its approach to magic than many people suppose), and anything else that emulated his world-building, but I think mostly the kind of structured magic people are talking about exist in games, whether text MMORPGs (or the graphical variety), or TTRPGs etc (although as stated before, I’ve no experience of actually playing TTRPGs although I’ve peeked into a couple of rulebooks). In fiction, because of the very nature of the medium, things cannot really be successfully very structured. They appear structured in magic school or magic mentorship kinds of setups, no doubt. I did read some door-stopper fantasies in my teen-hood which did seem to operate on rules (Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, some of the novels written by the authorial team behind the name Jonathan Wylie, and arguably the magic systems exist in Raymond E Feist’s Krondor books) but even then there were aspects of mystery and the numinous. I suppose the most successful of those books for me were Tad Williams’s Memory, Sorrow and Thorn books. But even so, there was uncertainty baked into the more successful plots. And to me, uncertainty comes hand in hand with the numinous, and — dare I say it — the Uncanny.
Obviously, my favourite kinds of magic in fantasy narratives are the numinous, the ambiguous, the Uncanny, the weird, and the shiver at the base of your spine that tells you things aren’t quite as they seem. I’m thinking of George Macdonald’s Phantastes, the novels of Hafsah Faizal (I really love how she brings together an Islamic sensibility and Middle Eastern mythology into sprawling high fantasy worlds), the novels of Patricia McKillip, William Morris’s delightful fantasies, John Crowley’s Little, Big, Robin McKinley’s novels, Cecilia Dart-Thornton’s Bitterbynde Trilogy, Katherine Kerr’s Deverry Cycle, Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince, Dragon Star and Exiles series (I will never not pine after the unpublished third Exiles book), Tanith Lee’s glorious phantasms and many other books that continue to rock my world like those by Borges and Calvino who remain my main authorial inspirations these days.
Recently, I’ve been on a Wheel of Time re-reading kick and was musing about the whole saidar/saidin magic rules of that world — but the magic in those books also to me work because there’s a sense of tension between the magic found in Tar Valon and the magic found everywhere else in the world (from the Wisdoms, to the Women’s Circles to the Atha’an Miere). The magic works because there is still so much unexplained and mysterious even though the central magical organisation seems to dominate the world (and even so, they are under threat). I’m so intrigued by these tensions that I’m wondering if I will have the energy (after I complete publishing all of the Cantata of the Fourfold Realm books) to write a series that actually has that kind of sweep in relation to magical systems.
For now, when I write fantasy I write back to the idea of the numinous and the irreal but I also inject some aspects of the real to make concrete the world around the irreal elements for purposes of juxtaposition (that slippage between what is concrete to the narrator and what is unfathomable/unknowable). You’ll find a lot of food in Watermyth to ground the narrative (also, because I’m a foodie so you know, it goes with the territory) but also to provide some blocking to the sympathetic magic happening especially with the Mishgalens. It’s not the first time I’ve played around with the concept; you can find it in The Faerie-Maker, and in some of my other published fantasy short fiction. They exist primarily because I like the notion of sympathetic magic in fantasy fiction and the ways in which they can propel the plot and make use of other “ingredients” in the narrative. You can find that aspect of sympathetic magic in When Sirens Sing of Roses and Of Delegated Power, in fact because I love parallels (also, that short story contains an easter egg for the Cantata of the Fourfold Realms which will become more apparent when Rosemirror is published).
In my twenties, working on my MA dissertation on Angela Carter’s short stories (the ritualistic elements), I read a lot of books on mythic and magical systems related to rituals. I argued furiously with Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Campbell’s ideas and slipped into Jungian psychoanalysis. Inevitably, these things became part of my toolkit although I’m more of a Lacanian girl these days when it comes to psychoanalysis (there’s been nearly two decades of Gothic scholarship during my PhD and these days as a Gothic scholar but that’s the subject of another post). Thus, mirrors, parallels and all sorts of literary hijinks related to magic and the numinous influence me both as a literary Gothic scholar and as an author. But at the end of the day I ask myself this question: “How does this serve my characters/the story/the plot?”. This is why I don’t like rigid magical rules and I’m not too shy to create some kind of magical sleight of hand which may sometimes seem illogical to puncture any sense of certainty or complacency about the world(s) I create.
In short, my main approach to my fiction is that there must be some kind of internal consistency for the world of the story but also sometimes you need to disrupt that consistency to invite in the numinous. If magical things happen every day on a magical island (as is the case in Yrejveree which lies at the center of the Cantata of the Fourfold Realms narratives) then it’s a no-brainer that it will not take anyone by surprise. But what if there were different kinds of magics? What if there was one that was an anathema to the others? But also, how does magic impact someone on a personal level? It’s these kinds of conflicts and tensions that interest me as an author and one I hope to explore more in future volumes of The Cantata of the Fourfold Realms. In closing, I think magic, whether metaphorical or otherwise, works better when you explain less about how it happens. If a magician on the stage explained every step of how she performs a sleight of hand, you might be educated, but you’d hardly be surprised.
Curious to read my debut novel Watermyth? Here’s the information on how to purchase the ebook (and how to borrow it from the library) and the print edition.