Sunday 3 August 2003

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the anime Da Capo.

Low-magic worlds

When books and movies mention magic, it is usually "all or nothing". Either magic doesn't exist, or it is very powerful. Magic may be restricted to a small group of mages with a special talent; but once you're in, it is a power to be reckoned with.

It is refreshing to see a different take on this, in the anime Da Capo. In this animated series, magic is fairly common but not particularly powerful. The main character, a young man, has some basic magic training. But all he can do is watch other people's dreams (without interfering) and conjure sweets out of thin air. A girl in school can read thoughts, but she is not happy about it. The thoughts are often embarrassing; it doesn't help that she is popular and good- looking, either: People tend to think of her a lot. There are also other small hints of magic, such as the cherry trees that bloom around the year. The self-aware robot may belong in this category too, although that is more like science fiction I guess. (But in my opinion, self-aware robots are unlikely to happen without magic. Or nanotech, which is basically the same thing ...)

***

There is something endearing, in my opinion, about a magic that is reliable but not very powerful. If you had a talent for fire magic, for instance, you would still not be able to cast deadly fireballs at people. But you would be able to light candles and even the fireplace without matches or lighters, perhaps even pop your own popcorn ...

I can think of many such weak magics. They would confer a moderate benefit, so the magic genes would probably spread throughout the population. Kinda like Piers Anthony's Xanth, where everyone has one magic talent, even if it is only to make a spot appear on the wall. But unlike Xanth there would be no royalty class magic, because magic in itself would be so diluted that you could not perform major miracles.

For instance if you had a talent for levitation, you might at best be able to drift slowly upward; not really much better than a ladder, except when you don't have a ladder around. If you were a healer, you might fix cuts and small bruises, but not cancer or blindness. You would be the equivalent of a nurse rather than a surgeon.

Of course, there are some forms of magic for which we simply don't have a technological counterpart. For instance telepathy. It would be really nice for a judge to be able to read the minds of both the accused and the accuser. But then again - how would anyone know he spoke the truth about what he had seen in another's mind? You would need another mind- reader to say for sure ... Same thing about predicting the future: If you warn against a disaster, and because of this the disaster is averted, how can we be sure it would have happened in the first place? It is one thing if you check a car and the brakes aren't working, but how about canceling a flight that would have crashed? If you don't find anything wrong with the plane, do you still assume the soothsayer was right? Who pays the cost of the lost income?

***

If everyone had only one or two magic talents, then the pressure toward technological progress would be much like in our world. Of course the actual history would be different, because the actual people would be different. But it need not be much more unfamiliar than any other parallel timeline that diverged far in the past.

But if magic was weak but easy to learn for anyone, there would be no need for flashlights and matches and ladders and band-aid and so on ... in that case we would face a world where technology had much less reason to exist. Even though advanced technology would be far more powerful than the weak magic, it is not obvious that we would ever have the basic technology that our modern technology is built on. Perhaps science instead would focus on trying to find ways of amplifying or concentrating magic, and we might eventually end up in a more classic magic world setting where magic is a scarce resource but very powerful. But that is quite a different story.