12 KiB
Blog post related to rational fiction (esp. WHY we write it and read it)
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Author: u/TK17Studios Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning*
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URL: http://dogearedanddogtagged.com/2015/07/27/harry-potter-and-the-unwritten-epic-of-tomorrow/
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Score: 15
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Created: 2015-07-27T17:49:35
Post:
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
One question I've been asking myself lately is how to make something wondrous that's also beautiful when picked apart?
I was disappointed by the fact that so much of the Harry Potter books revolved around learning magic but so little magic was actually learned. Potions is an excellent example; Half-Blood Prince is about potions, but we never learn anything other than it's a matter of memorization. The way of Ravenclaw is shown as useful, in the form of Hermione, but our primary character blows off so much of it. Of course, there wasn't actually anything to the magic of Harry Potter; there were no rules beyond those that created whimsy or drama.
So I've been trying to think of the properties of a system which is both wondrous and maintains that wonder when the reader learns its true nature (or whose wonder is enhanced when the true nature is learned). Stars are a good example from the real world; if you look up at them and can actually pay attention to them, they're stirring in some way. But when you learn that they're fusion reactors so far away that we're just now seeing light that was generated thousands of years ago, that wonder is enhanced.
I don't really know how to do that in an invented magic system. I hang out in /r/magicbuilding quite a bit, and see a lot of people create these things that are ... sensible, I suppose, and certainly with distinct rules, but not that inspire wonder strictly in what they are, even if they're capable of wondrous effects.
u/Kerbal_NASA [+6] (2 hours later)
A lot of stuff that becomes wondrous the more you know about it is boring when you don't know about it, but has super complicated, deep and surprising stuff that underlies it. Stars are a perfect example of that, like you said. With no knowledge about them, you just see some points of light when you look up, which is kind of boring. But when we learn about them, we find out all the surprising and complex things. You get the surface level surprises like how they are farther and bigger and hotter than anything else we know of. Then you get deeper surprises by the interconnection of its systems with other stuff. Like how the stars are so massive they pull around entire worlds with the same effect that worlds pull us down with. And then there's the near endless deep and complicated things you can learn about them like how they are so massive that they crush their own atoms so hard they fuse together, releasing a bunch of energy and photons that we see. And how that creates an entirely new state of matter called plasma that has complex patterns of flowing almost like weather. And how the stars can be formed from pressure ways of supernova explosions travelling through interstellar gas. And so much more!
A lot of magic in fiction is basically the opposite of that. The effects themselves are flashy, but there isn't much actual meat to it. And the thing is, in order for magic to have substance the story has to spend a ton of time with the characters discovering/revealing information about magic. For example, we take for granted our knowledge about the stars, but if I wrote a story that mentioned stars to someone who lived in a cave a thousand years ago and never heard about these things, that knowledge isn't there in the audience's mind. The amount of explanation I'd have to give in order for them to appreciate stars like an average person can would be... astronomical. I'd have to explain the kind of scale that these objects work at, which is unlike anything they'd ever dealt with. I'd have to explain about what atoms are and how they fuse, what photons are, how gravity really works, what an explosion is, etc. I'd have to relate all of these concepts in terms that they could actually relate with. All of that to explain why sometimes when the characters look up, they see little lights. It would pretty much have to be the centre of the entire story.
Not only would the story have to devote all that time to the magic system, you'd have to make the thing both self-coherent and surprising/mind blowing to discover. I think that might be extremely hard to do the more deep you go into it, especially with how it interacts with the rest of the world. Its super simple to say "X happens when you Y" (e.g. a firebolt appears when I say "abbra cadabra!") but in this case you'd have to go "When you Y, this causes X and Z, because of the O principal and its interactions with Set A of effects that come from the properties of M, N, L, the half life of any substance in contact, and how much oxygen is nearby, it triggers blah blah..." and then make sure you know all the possible outputs this system generates and the implications of that (or at least what the readers might come up with if you just want to avoid fridge logic). If you go deep enough into the rabbit hole, it could be akin to creating a whole new branch of physics. That's what the truly wondrous stuff in the real world can be like.
Anyway, that's just my speculation, I'm not particularly sure how accurate it really is.
u/vilefeildmouseswager [+2] (an hour later)
I think both scale and a mystery are necessary for wonder. In HP there are wondrous things but we experience it through HP we do not experience wonder directly.
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
Do you need scale? Can you not get a sense of wonder from breaking open a geode or watching a bird hatching from its egg? Can't you get wonder from watching the perfect sinusoidal curve of an ocean wave, or seeing the Fibonacci pattern in the head of a piece of asparagus?
Do you need mystery? I went to an orchestra concert last Thursday and spoke to the composer afterward (it was the premier of the piece). He said that as he listened, the world melted away, and he forgot that it was something he composed. I think there's a strong argument to be made that mystery might be beneficial to the experience of wonder, but I don't think that it's a requirement.
I'm not really sure what my definition of wonder is, but while I think both scale and mystery can help, I don't think that they're a requirement. If you've seen the video in the article of the little girl seeing a train ... even though people get on trains every day, even though they might know (is only in general terms) how the train works, I don't think that being inured to the wonder is a permanent thing - in the same way that ignoring the stars every night of your life makes them less wondrous. (Partly, I think wonder can be provoked by just clearing out the mental cache.)
I don't know that this is helpful as far as writing fiction which provokes wonder even in its explanations though.
u/vilefeildmouseswager [+1] (3 hours later)
I was speaking direct to wonder in fiction.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
I think that scale and mystery aren't necessary components of wonder in general, which makes me uncertain that they're necessary components of wonder in fiction.
u/Sagebrysh [+1] Rank 7 Pragmatist (6 hours later)
So I've been trying to think of the properties of a system which is both wondrous and maintains that wonder when the reader learns its true nature (or whose wonder is enhanced when the true nature is learned). Stars are a good example from the real world; if you look up at them and can actually pay attention to them, they're stirring in some way. But when you learn that they're fusion reactors so far away that we're just now seeing light that was generated thousands of years ago, that wonder is enhanced. I don't really know how to do that in an invented magic system. I hang out in /r/magicbuilding quite a bit, and see a lot of people create these things that are ... sensible, I suppose, and certainly with distinct rules, but not that inspire wonder strictly in what they are, even if they're capable of wondrous effects.
I've posted about the magical system in my world to /r/magicbuilding just recently actually, and its designed from the bottom up to make sense down to the most granular level. Check it out, see if you can figure out my 'trick' :P
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicbuilding/comments/3e9wlc/magic_in_aeria/
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (14 hours later)
The shards from worm are an almost perfect example of what you mean, I think. As a dot in the sky is to a massive fusion reactor lighter years away, the ability to shoot fire is to a moon-sized hyperdimensional organism re-directing physics such that you can shoot fire.
The lesson seems to be, if you want wonder then make it big and impressive and vaguely terrifying. "Oh I'm not shooting darkness, these are nascent universes! it's just the scale that's off you see." "What's that? Levitation spell? Pish posh, I'm stealing reverse gravity from an alternate dimension! They won't miss it... I think."
u/eaglejarl [+4] (21 hours later)
A counter opinion for that: the Entities in Worm were wondrous, as you say. Creatures larger than a planet that warped reality as their form of communication and were literally made of the best that a million civilizations had to offer? That right there, my friend, is some wonder-inspiring stuff.
The shards, on the other hand, completely ruined it for me. They were a literal embodiment of the Conflict Ball and often the Idiot Ball, and the largest narrative cheat I can remember reading, ever. They were literally the only reason the story happened, and they forced everyone to behave in strange, suboptimal, and unbelievable ways.
u/callmebrotherg [+1] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (a day later)
Megapolismancy in Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness has that sort of effect for me, but that might be personal appeal rather than something universalizable.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (2 days later)
I don't think you can make a magic system that's wondrous. I think the wonder comes from the story itself, usually with the young hero who knows nothing about the system in the beginning.
u/Nepene [+1] (2 days later)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Star_Chart.jpg
http://bensow.deviantart.com/art/Solar-Flare-263480942
These are the sorts of things that make stars wonderous to many. They are visually fascinating and exciting and powerful.
I imagine if you really wanted it wouldn't be that hard to do the same with Harry Potter. Take the scene where Dumbledore gets into the secret cave of Voldemort.
You could have some sort of image on one page where Harry asks Dumbledore what he's doing, an image of the cave.
Then on the next page you could have it from Dumbledore's perspective with sworls of magic in fractal patterns lunging towards them, feeling at their hearts. Give a sense that beneath the senses there's a hidden world of information and knowledge that grants its users great power.
That's the sort of thing I try to do in my worldbuilding. I make the magic beautiful. Finding out why it's beautiful grants you enhanced power.
