tags: True Speech

2006

May

2006 May 15

in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end was the word

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her fantasy world of Earthsea, comes up with a brilliant system of magic, one predicated on, essentially, words.

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2012

July

2012 Jul 14

systems of magic

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.)

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