Do What I Tell You

I think one way to know the maturity of writers is to look at their characters. Or hear them complain about them.

The poor writer never has any problems with his characters. He wants them to race in the Indy 500 Monday, then kick a heroin addiction on Tuesday, then cure cancer on Wednesday, then go on a killing spree on Thursday. His characters are like chess pieces he pushes around the board, except he makes bishops move off diagonals and knights go wherever he wants. There's no structure shaping the characters' actions.

A better writer has internalized the character's mind, habits of thought, temperament, and nature. Saint or criminal, tinker, tailor soldier, spy--the writer knows what the character can do and won't do. This writer has to advance the plot and she's got this lot of characters to do it with. And they're all going of in their own directions.

I guess they have to take the plot where they want to go and the writer just has to roll with it.

I think that is what happened to Larry Correia's novel Warbound.

I love the setup, Jake Sullivan is a bitter ex-con detective in a gritty noir setting. The guy loves solving puzzles. He should be doing detective stuff, but with magic. Like Harry Dresden, but a lot more Phil Marlowe.

But I think Larry Correia couldn't get Jake to cooperate. Instead, he gets caught up in all this geopolitical stuff. International conspiracies and fighting foreign powers leaves no time for divorce cases, stolen jewelry, and missing husbands. There wasn't any of that in Warbound.

And then Jake is supposed to be come kind of warrior scholar. Which is also cool, but that doesn't quite work either.

Then out of nowhere comes the oakie girl who has been an enigma in the first two novels. Nevertheless, at the beginning of Warbound she is a most powerful enigma. Then as her true nature is disclosed, we see other aspects of how the magic system in these novels works.

Larry Correia does a good job of answering story questions he's planted in the first and second Grimnoir novels, but you get the general impression that he generally wanted to zig, and his characters forced him to zag.

The only thing missing from the climax of Warbound was a direct quote from or allusion to Lord Acton's "power tends to corrupt."

Warbound gets 5 stars for several well staged fights and for taking the story where it should go instead of where Mr. Correia may have originally intended it to.

I have also reviewed Hard Magic, the first book of this series. As well as Spellbound, the second book of this series.

Fantasy vs Science Fiction

The lines between Fantasy and Science Fiction have never been impermeable or as well defined as one might like. I've been to Cons where this was the topic of panel discussions.

I have a simple rule of thumb: is there more polished metal or more rough-sawed wood? The former betokens Science Fiction and the latter betokens Fantasy.

Consider Babylon 5, a TV show set on a space station in interstellar space. The various alien species could just as easily be replaced by Elves, Dwarfs, Orcs, etc. Or take Conan the Barbarian, he could just as easily be a post-apocalyptic tough-guy dealing with occasional bits of technology so advanced they're indistinguishable from magic.

When you try to enforce hard boundaries between SF and Fantasy, you have to answer questions: Can you go faster than light-speed and still be SF?

What about mind-reading through ESP? There's no science to justify these story elements, but during the golden age of SF, these things were scientifically plausible. Moreover at that time science-fact notions like programmable matter and nanotechnology were implausibly magical.

Years back I wrote a story wherein characters used "mental telephony": They had chips in their heads that allowed them to wirelessly communicate without speaking. I think that was clearly SF.

Or consider time travel. I've heard some science fiction writer claim that all time travel stories are pure fantasy. If you go back in time, there is absolutely no way it won't change the present in some unpredictable way.

Chaos Theory tells us that a change as big as the mass of an electron at the opposite edge of the universe makes an observable, unpredictable difference.

Scale that up to the effects you'd get if you were to send Sid & Nell back to WW2 Greenland and you've got big trouble doing so without disrupting the time-line.

So, is Finding Time a collection of Fantasy or Science Fiction stories? Tell me what you think.

Aladdin vs Harry Potter

I'm a Christian, and if you've got a problem with that you may want to stick around because I'm going to complain about some Christians.


Think back to when the Harry Potter stories came out. He was a witch and he went to a school for witchcraft.

You may know that Christians take a dim view on witchcraft. And for good reason. How can you go about building a technological society when you're fussing with toads and newts? Witchcraft is not real and it does not work. Take your most fervent wiccan and she'll take her kids to soccer practice in a car, not a broom. It is the denial of reality that's at the root of Christianity's conflict with the elder religions termed pagan. There is no spirit in the tree that keeps it evergreen and no reason to bring it into your house so that this spirit might protect you.

Christians also take a dim view of the Devil. You may have heard that he was once an angel and he led a revolt of other angels, and these other angels are now what we call demons. Christians take a VERY dim view of consorting with demons.

Though Christians take a dim view of witchcraft, we have no problem with technology. Isaac Newton figured out the law of gravity and tied calculus to it, and gave us a better explanation for planetary motion than angels pushing them about. Christianity and Science will butt heads from time to time, but never about whether something works or not. Do all those funky things with relativity or quantum mechanics bother Christians? No.

With this in mind let's consider Harry Potter. He goes to school and he learns the rules of how magic works. He's a magic technologist. Brooms fly in Harry Potter's world because there's some force he can control that overcomes gravity. Not much different from science fiction, except it's a "science" that doesn't exist. There's not a lot for a Christian to object to in that sort of magic-technology.

Contrast that with the Aladdin story. I didn't hear any Christians whining when Disney made the Aladdin movies. Or decades ago before Larry Hagman became J. R. Ewing and he Dreamed of Jeannie.

What is a genie anyway? If he's a djinn, he's a demon. And if she's a djinni, she's a lady demon. So, Aladdin and Larry Hagman are consorting with demons. They get magic things done by making a deal with the demon and demonic forces are employed by the demon as he wants.

As you may recall I am a Whig, and the greatest Whig was Daniel Webster who had his own dealings with the devil. Mr. Webster argued in court for the soul of the unfortunate Jabez Stone who'd sold his soul to the devil.

The only difference between Jabez Stone and Aladdin or Larry Hagman are the terms of the deal they make with the demonic.

Happily, these are all fictions and we can sleep easy knowing that the devil's not going to come down to Georgia lookin' for some soul to steal. Nor is there any imp in the bottle.

But there are Christians who gets their knickers in a knot. If they're all mad about Harry Potter, point them to the much bigger problem they should have with Aladdin and Barbara Eden.

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.