Narrative Fusion

I just finished reading Sufficiently Advanced Technology by Christopher Nuttall. I loved it.

The story is set in the distant future and humanity is far advanced technologically. The author terms it a post-singuarlity society, but I disagree. And I disagree because I distinguish post-scarcity and post-singularity. The human empire depicted is definitely post-scarcity, but it is not transcendent. In fact the advanced technology on display is decidedly NOT transcendent. If you are expecting your aliens to be really alien, and your transhumans to be incomprehensibly advanced, be ready for disappointment. Mr. Nuttall shows us supermen like the Greek gods, and calls it transcendent. (If you want to see what I mean about mind-blowing superintelligent aliens, I recommend Michael McCloskey's stories.)

Nevertheless, the humans and their AIs realize that they're missing out on transcendence. And they're trying to get it by scouring the galaxy for anomalies left over by alien races that are either Ancients or Elder Races, I'm not sure whether they're the same or different. Here's a weakness in the novel: Mr. Nuttall doesn't seem to be sure either.

It seems that what distinguishes the advanced human race and the Elder races who have gone on is achieving the ability to manipulate the quantum foam. If you can control quantum foam, you can do rewrite reality. This is like magic. It turns out that a survey ship has run into a primitive world where magic works. And a team of boffins is sent to investigate.

The characters that make up this team include Elyria, a 150-year-old scientist whose rejuvenation treatments have left her looking like a hot 20-year-old, and Dacron an AI who has been jammed into a cloned human body. (Yes, Dacron is the name of a synthetic fabric.) On the magic planet we meet Joshua, a sorcerer's apprentice and his master. On the magic planet we see three kinds of magic users: Pillars who are local despots ruling each city state, Scions who are loners studying magic in the wilderness and getting ready to take over, and apprentices who are being groomed to take over somewhere. Rule is transferred from a Pillar to whoever can murder him with magic.

Eventually, the space people show up and they are quickly found out by the magic users. Elyria gets to know Joshua and Dacron's AI mind is extremely well suited to magic. In fact, when Dacron figures out how magic works, it is very procedural, like a programming language. And this reminded me of Rick Cook's Wizardry series.

I've said before that I generally see magic in stories as either being demonic or incantational, as exemplified by Aladdin (a djinn is a demon) and Harry Potter (incantational). But this novel fused the two categories in a way I never expected. Kudos, Mr. Nuttall. This is one time when I won't give a spoiler.

You see the stuff you expect where the indigenous apprentice regards high tech as magical, and the space boys & girls regarding the magic as sufficiently advanced technological. Happily, Mr. Nuttall has enough in this novel that he doesn't have to dwell on this.

The fight scenes could be fleshed out a little better. When the magic users go to war against the space people, I'd have liked to have seen some more creative use of magic and more integrated combined arms action with magic and Amish-level tech being deployed against the main villain.

Is this story Science Fiction or is it Fantasy? It's a bit of both, I suppose. That's why I called this post Narrative Fusion, because it fuses SF and Fantasy, and it fuses Demonic vs Incantational magic.

Mr. Nuttall has done a marvelous job of world-building. His Elder/Ancient races have left all kinds of things for the humans to trip over, and he just casually drops references to several of them.

This novel appears to be the first in a series and given the quality of world-building, I look forward to exploring it in depth. 5-stars.

How Much For A Rabbit In A Hat?

The always delightful Sarah Hoyt started a post with "It is a cliche, tired and worn, that one has to remind new writers that magic must have a price."

My knee is quick to jerk about any statement that's so broadly unqualified. Surely, there must be some exception, some time when magic does not have a price. Maybe the price varies depending upon how you define price. And it depends upon how you define magic.

Let's suppose you define magic along the lines of many Grimm's fairy tales. For instance, you can get these magic powers if you sell your soul to the devil. (If you do, hire Daniel Webster, my Whig hero to defend you.) Another example of this sort of magic is one where you can do magical tasks, but each time you do someone drowns a kitten. This is a common approach in some stories including magic. Let's call this Aladdin-style magic.

One thing I have noticed about Aladdin-style magic is that it depends upon a mortal making some deal with some angel, demon, devil, or deity to get that supernatural being to do stuff. Hence the price of Aladdin-style magic is a matter of bartering with the supernatural being.

It also requires some cleverness on the part of the magic-user to prevent the supernatural being from becoming annoyed and squashing your hero like a bug.

Then I started to think more broadly and I found reasons to think that magic might not have a price. But I realized I was thinking of a different sort of magic. Something more procedural in nature like Harry Potter. Or better, think of the magic in Rick Cook's Wizardry novels. One needn't have any special powers, just the knowledge and intelligence to master certain abstruse studies. Let's call this Alchemical-style magic.

I happen to be a technologist of no small skill. I strongly identify with Rick Cook's fiction. Anyone who has ever engaged in software development can appreciate the magical aspect of using science and technology to do things mere mortals cannot. Most technical wizards can find similarities between what they do and Alchemical-style magic.

If I run a perl script, there's a few electrons that move around differently, some ones and zeroes change, and the electric bill is some quantum higher, but all told, that's too cheap to account for. If you want to make the case for magic that doesn't pay a price, then start with Alchemical-style magic and liken it to running software. And ignore the magical-utility bill.

But if you persist in saying that ALL magic has a price and you think the price is much more significant than a mere magical-utility bill, then consider again the technological world. The expense of custom-made software is my time and what's rare is my expertise. Sadly, while others were fitting themselves for high elected office (smoking dope and cheating on tests) I was studying mathematics and computer science. Tuition was expensive then and it's much worse now.

Presumably, the wizard's apprentice has some college tuition debts that must be paid.

My daughter drew a large tick on the back of her last bill from Sally Mae, and that image COULD fit nicely into a wizard's apprentice tale.

If I ended now, I suppose Sarah was right that all magic has a price. But it depends upon how you set up your world's rules of magic. And if you're dealing with Alchemical-magic, the price varies with one's skill set. Perhaps a very highly skilled mage can perform much more powerful magical tasks with much less effort than a low-skill mage. That fits with the technology analogue.

Today I can perform feats of computation on the little phone in my pocket that would melt NASA's lunar lander's flight computers. Moreover, I routinely use algorithms that are much more efficient than those available to me 20 years ago. Greater skill gives the technology user the ability to more at less expense. Moreover, that little phone I'm carrying around replaces my tape recorder, my walkman, my video camera, my still camera, my calculator, my daily planner, and my calculator. But it won't play Angry Birds. I won't let it. Technology has enabled radical deflation of the price of high-end goods.

One would expect that if all magic has a price, the creative author could figure out ways for the price to go way down. It really is up to you. You can do anything you want when setting up how your story's magic works, except be half-baked about it. Think through how magic works as a system itself without regard to the needs of your story.

Always make the story fit your world-building, never make your world-building fit your story.