Wednesday 21 June 2006

Pic of the day: Of course, magic crystals are not the only way to fulfill wishes. (Screenshot from the Japanese TV series "Ah My Goddess" season two, also called "Everyone has Wings".)

"Slow magic" fantasy

This is still pretty vague. The no-magic teen story is still the one I'm dabbling in. But the whole placebo / slow magic thing set me thinking. Long-time readers will know that I have sometimes speculated that our world may not so much be a magic-free zone as a slow-magic zone, in which there are no fireball spells but where ritual magic can increase the probability of some otherwise improbable thing. (For instance, why do religious elderly people on average live longer?) There is a lot to say about that, and I may revisit it someday. But now I have been thinking about an imaginary world that lies a little closer to the magic side of things. And it even lets me recycle some old ideas.

One of my favorite worldbuilding concepts is the multiverse with a hot center, "the forge of creation" as I use to call it. Worlds closer to this center are more chaotic but also richer in magic; worlds further out are mundane and eventually stiff, cold, boring. I think it was a dream that set me on this... I dreamed that I walked in a world far more boring than my own. A world so still, so dry, so poor in color and texture that even I felt bored. All I did was walk a seemingly endless path or narrow road. When I woke up (and boy was I glad to) I suddenly had the idea of "cold worlds", those even less magical than ours. From this, the idea of "hot worlds" comes naturally. I have been there too in my dreams, during fever. The chaos, the fear of a world where laws of nature are suspended and anything could transform into anything else. So I guess our world isn't so bad!

I notice that Jack Chalker had a similar layered system of worlds, with the more magical worlds further down. But one of my favorite plot devices is something that can leak magic between worlds. Actually it is more like an exchange: Order seeps from colder worlds while at the same pace chaos seeps from hotter wolds. Each of them enables magic in the world where they are received. In the "Magic:" scenario that I first used when writing on the Youthnet BBS network, "wells" connect worlds from different levels. A well draws magic from a lower level, but there is also a risk that chaotic "demons" may appear. These wells are pretty dramatic features.

A smaller approach is the one I used on a story I never translated into English, Worlds of Varia. In it, crystals facilitate the exchange of order and chaos. The world is somewhat more magical than ours, but not like Tolkien's Middle Earth or similar "high fantasy" stories. All mages in that world use crystals, and are trained to build "packets" of order in their mind which they then exchange for creative chaos to perform their spells.

My current vague idea is an even colder world, actually almost indistinguishable from our own. But crystal lore is not well known, and anyway it is connected to a less intense magical world. The magic just leaks out from the crystals, slowly and unnoticed. For now I assume that not all crystals are conducting magic, just some of them, and most people would not know.

In the beginning of my story, a young man is contacted by an elderly relative in amazingly good health. The older man explains that he owns a crystal that is leaking magic from another world. The leakage is so slow, it cannot perform obvious miracles, like magical spells. But it can be harnessed by simple ritual magic which works over time. This is how he has stayed young even though he is approaching 100. But now he no longer feels at home in a world that has changed beyond his recognition. Besides, his secret would be revealed if he stayed young longer. He gives the crystal to the young boy and instructs him in its use.

The fun part about this is that I could make the story creepily subversive. There are already heaps of New Age people who honestly believe that crystals have supernatural properties. With a sufficient semi-scientific spin on the multiple-world theory, I could play up to this. And the crystals don't let you cast fireball spells, they just work by gradually increasing the probability day by day until the unlikely becomes unavoidable. Winning the big lottery would take weeks of careful ritual magic, while a smaller win could be reached in days. Raising the dead would not work because the speed of decomposition outpaces the magic from the crystal. But curing cancer should be well within its limits.

If I could complete such a story (for a change) I might promote it on my Zaadz blog (not that I have a Zaadz blog, but I plan to). While I won't earn money, I would still take some satisfaction from seeing a few score overly excitable New Agers run off to buy crystals and try to perform magic. Not that I'm saying it wouldn't work... but if so, not because of the crystals.

In any case, I won't be writing this anytime soon. Perhaps for NaNoWriMo, if I get the chance to take part this year again.