mahiwaga

Ever since I heard of Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law—any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic—I’ve often found myself thinking of how magic would end up being studied in a post-scientific revolution civilization. I know a lot of fantasy authors don’t like making their systems of magic explicit, because it inevitably makes it magic less magical (and not making it explicit is also incidentally in line with Tolkien’s thoughts on how magic should work: internally logically consistent the way logic in fairy tales and dreams are internally consistent, no matter how weird.)

One of the magical systems that I think works pretty well is that established by Ursula K. Le Guin in her Earthsea Cycle (and apparently lifted wholesale by Christopher Paolini in his Inheritance Cycle.) The idea is that there is a language—the language of dragons—that can be used to manipulate the universe itself. The True Speech. Every object in the universe has its own name by which it can be explicitly addressed, and potentially transformed.

I’ve also been fascinated by systems that revolve around the elements. The magic system from Avatar: The Last Airbender is perhaps the best of these, but elemental schools have been a staple in the Final Fantasy games, are part and parcel of the Wheel of Time saga, and are present in MMOs like the World of Warcraft.

But systems of magic implemented in games never translate well to stories. Often times it’s just about uttering magic words and formulae, but ideas that seem derived directly from Dungeons and Dragons or from Wizardry seem too mechanical. Things like memorization and spell points and mana. Perhaps it just seems too silly because it’s so pervasive in gaming. It has become too familiar, which then makes it unmagical.

The reason why I started thinking about this was because I was trying to rationalize why magic users have to perform rituals, use reagents, and utter verbal formulae. So I started imagining a system where practitioners have to perform rituals, use reagents, and utter verbal formulae not because they are essential for performing magic, but because these are the only ways that the practitioners can form the relevant patterns in their head, and it is the patterns themselves that are necessary for magic to occur.

I’ve actually tried to translate a consistent magic system into a science-fictional advanced technology, divided into elemental schools not because it is essential, but more out of pedagogical convenience. But if I ever end up writing a fantasy novel, I’ll have to see if I can succeed in showing, not telling, without turning magic completely banal.

But this got me to thinking about how a lot of magical systems basically end up being programming. One of the recurrent notions in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea stories is that, because dragons speak the True Speech, and True Speech creates reality, then dragons cannot truly lie. If what they say is untrue, then it becomes true.

This leads me to the notion of the “=” operator in most computer languages, which, while it can be used identically to how it’s used in math—to denote equation—it’s also often used to assign values. Whereas in math, “a = b” can be true or false depending on what a is and what b is, in programming “a = b” is always true. If a does not already equal b, then it will. Whatever is written becomes true. You cannot lie in C. Or BASIC.