Do you prefer hard or soft magic in fantasy stories? Do you care about the detail, the scope, the price of magic? How it works, why it works, what happens when it doesn’t work? Or do you only care about the effects of magic on the plot? Or do you read a passage involving wand duels and go “well, that wouldn’t happen!”
A Spectrum of Magic
From Gilgamesh to Aladdin, from Harry Potter to Cinderella; there’s all kinds of magic in all kinds of magic systems. Sometimes the system matters, vital to the plot. Other times it doesn’t. You can call this a spectrum of soft to hard magic.
At one end, J.R.R. Tolkien employed the softest of soft magic. Just how powerful is Gandalf, or Radaghast, or Saruman? These are demi-gods, near-immortals, but what can they actually do? Gandalf creates light, summons eagles, talks to butterflies, fights a balrog. How? No idea. There’s a whole lot of large and small magic in Tolkien’s world, but lightning bolts? Fireballs? Earthquakes? No. Magic swords? Potions? Enchanted bread? Yes. Like many ancient tales from folklore, we just have to accept certain magic exists.
Brandon Sanderson at the other end codifies and systematises magic in every book series. He’s become famous for the invention of detailed and rigorous magic systems. The Mistborn books contain Allomancy. His magic users consume metal in order to wield electromagnetic effects; push or pull on metal objects. It gives them leaping, flying abilities and a kind of telekinesis. Thoroughly grounded in Newtonian physics, the laws of motion, action and reaction govern what you can do in the Mistborn world. There are limitations, specific ingredients. Sanderson himself boiled it down to having a whole crew of Magneto characters from X-Men. Mastering allomancy takes time, practice and dedication.
Middle Ground
In the middle, Rowling’s Potter-world has magical wands and incantations in cod-Latin that make the magic work. You go through magic school to level-up and gain expertise, maybe pick up some magical artifacts like the Deathly Hallows along the way. Before you know it, a teenage wizard takes down the Biggest, Baddest Sorcerer in existence because… the small print in the contract for who owns the Elder Wand.
Statute of Limitations
In all these tales, magic works by drawing energy from somewhere, transforming it and directing it somewhere else. In The Wheel of Time series, Robert Jordan explicitly calls it Channeling; that effectively describes what all magic systems do. Jordan sets limits on what magic can or cannot do, also on who can use it, and the price of said magic. Women can channel without ill effects. The rare men who channel inevitably go mad and kill everyone around them. Either they have to be gentled – their magic stripped away – or killed.
Some magic systems demand special ingredients for their transformational powers;
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork and blindworm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing.
That’s Will Shakespeare getting down and dirty in the Great Macbeth Bake-off. It’s a hard magic system with a surprising amount of detail; the long third stanza is particularly gruesome in it’s anti-semetism and racism.
It’s a short leap from there to the magic systems in old-school Dungeons and Dragons; no ingredients, no spell-casting.
Plenty of Ill effects
And what about the price of all that magical transformation of energy? Where does it come from? What happens if it goes wrong?
In The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Anne Margaret gets stuck with a seagull’s foot after a shape-shifting goes wrong. In The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Tom Baker’s wizard Koura ages a little with each spell he casts. Magic drains his life force with each use. No wonder he wants to find the Fountain of Youth.
And yet so many magic systems feature witches and warlocks able to blast each other repeatedly with magical energy with no discernible discomfort.
Them’s the Rules
Back to Tolkien; what are the rules of his magic system? No idea. He never tells us. Sanderson? He’s a gamer; video games, RPG’s, table-top games, card games, the lot. Game rules are his intellectual challenge. He codifies everything and makes sure you know it. He gets his kicks inventing then subverting the rules. Fans at conventions ask the most insanely detailed questions about magical investiture, and he answers.
So do the rules of magic matter?
They do if you want the reader to invest in your story. Civilised society has weirdly trained humans expect, even demand, rules of behaviour. Laws, codes of conduct, rules of membership, contracts; one of the most common phrases in everyday use – ‘terms and conditions apply.’ We will interpret the rules we’re given and extrapolate where there are gaps. Sometimes wrongly.
Woe to the author, then, who sets up their magical rules but then breaks them for flimsy reasons of plot. Expediency is no excuse. No Deus Ex miracle escapes here, thank you very much. If you set the rules, the reader expects you to stick to them. The more exceptions you make, the more flimsy and pointless those rules become. It’s a kind of betrayal; a betrayal of the reader’s trust and emotional investment.
The Softest of Soft Magic
Do I go for hard or soft magic in fantasy? In my series, magic is rare. Very rare. Mostly the stuff of folktales. But folktales are common, so is the belief in the existence of magic. But what kind?
As an author, I’m not interested in creating a prize-winning original magic system, only in what the magic enables in my story. I don’t have the time or the inclination. My stories are character-driven, not plot-driven. And also, I don’t want to tie myself down to a rule-set that limits my stories in the future. Or that opens the door to arguments between rule-pedants.
My shaman has healing powers and some control over the weather. I lump those under the well-used, perhaps over-used tag of earth magic. One of my antagonists has invisibility. I call that air magic. Is this going down the elemental route? No.
The Brotherhood comes along with the psychic power to compel people. But some strong-willed individuals can resist – now define ‘strong-willed.’
Then Sister Aeryn has a little telekinetic power I call Motion. It has limits; she can push, pull, lift, throw, deflect, even stop objects up to a certain mass. She can’t move anything larger than herself, and she certainly can’t fly. I don’t explicitly state those as rules, I just hint at them. Where does Motion come from? How does it work? No idea. It just does.
Myths and Archetypes
Here’s a good one; another character can speak in any language, including ones she’s never heard. How is that possible? A little psychic trick, she tunes into the brainwaves of others, the speech centres in the brain. It helps that she’s not really human and her father is the Serpent who speaks all the tongues of men… a phenomenon culturally embedded in nearly all the major religions of the world. By tapping into myths and archetypes, I can quickly setup a mini-magic system that people recognise as ‘authentic.’
So it goes with shapeshifters (one), truth-sayers (one), remote viewers (one) and seers of the future (many). Do I explain how any of those work? No. Will that satisfy every curious reader? No. Will they resort to interpolating the rules for themselves? Probably. Does that work for me? Absolutely.
What’s your preference; hard or soft magic in fantasy stories?