34 KiB
[BST] I'm in a dilemma. My very genre defies rationality.
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Author: u/chaosattractor *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3hm7sh/bst_im_in_a_dilemma_my_very_genre_defies/
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Score: 11
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Created: 2015-08-19T18:36:38
Post:
I like my fiction to be rational. I really do. One of my favourite book series ever is ASOIAF, because when characters do stupid things, the plot comes back to bite them in the ass at least temporarily.
But, and this is a heavy but, my favourite genre (which happens to be the genre of my original WIP) is one that defies rationality. Magical realism isn't supposed to be rational. Irrational things are supposed to happen. Blood is supposed to flow across a street and dodge the furniture and end up at a grandmother's feet. My main character is supposed to drop into a flower's dream and wake up and move on and the world is supposed to keep turning.
It's hard. It's really hard to write this. But I don't think I can write it any other way.
Basically, do you think it's possible to inject rationality into a fairy tale world that's explicitly written in a fabulist style? Because I'm drowning without it.
Comments:
u/alexanderwales [+11] Time flies like an arrow (16 minutes later)
Basically, do you think it's possible to inject rationality into a fairy tale world that's explicitly written in a fabulist style?
In short? No.
Okay, let me back up a little. "Magical realism" has a lot of definitions, some of which contradict each other. But if you specifically mean magical realism in the sense that there are unexplained things going on which aren't given due examination, then I think that's a genre directly opposed to rational fiction. It's the opposite of "sane and consistent". (This is totally fine for that kind of fiction, it's just not rational.)
Now, some other definitions of magical realism I think you can do as "rational". If you mean "magical realism" as "the supernatural contextualized as mundane" that's totally doable; you can write a story with werewolves and vampires as just part of everyday life, following distinct rules but not surprising to anyone or remarked on as strange. But I've always thought of that as "weak" magical realism.
I would welcome some counterexamples of "rational" magical realism though, if anyone has them.
u/chaosattractor [+6] (50 minutes later)
Yes, I specifically mean traditional magical realism (for lack of a better phrase). The genre of One Hundred Years of Solitude, like I alluded to in my post. It's supposed to be insane. It's supposed to be inconsistent. I'm just trying to find some rules, however loose, to restrain the damn thing and give me some peace of mind.
It's hard because I know the moment I start explaining things the story is out of the genre and on its way to plain fantasy. Like the example you gave would be cheating - in a traditional magical realist book vampires and werewolves in particular would not exist. A character who eats raw bloody meat and growls and howls and can pick out the stranger in town by scent, yes, but once they're described as a being other than plain human that forms special pack dynamics then you've broken the mundanity.
u/eniteris [+2] (56 minutes later)
One Hundred Years of Solitude was batshit insane. Beautiful, but insane. Wonderful dreamlike logic.
u/chaosattractor [+1] (an hour later)
Oh yes. It was the book that got me into writing in the first place. Utter insanity, like that guy whom yellow butterflies just used to follow.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
It's supposed to be insane. It's supposed to be inconsistent. I'm just trying to find some rules, however loose, to restrain the damn thing and give me some peace of mind.
Let's say it runs on dream-logic or story-logic. What's the logic of a dream, or a story? Well, there's psychology to this: for one thing, the logic of a dream is often a lot like the way we really model the world, but with our ability to use priors turned-off (Yvain once posted an article on that). So things that have absurdly low genuine probabilities but high likelihoods when priors are set to uniform 1 could happen in dreams.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
If the story just runs on story logic, then you haven't really done anything rational with it; it's just a story. Stories that run on story logic are the default.
If you go meta and remark within the story that the story runs on story logic, then you're not doing magical realism, you're doing postmodernism. And if the story points out that it's running on story logic without actually doing anything with that fact aside from telling a story-logic story, it's doing postmodernism badly.
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (3 days later)
You can exploit story logic intentionally or systematically even without embarking on a self-referential commentary about the nature of story logic. The words of The Gollux in James Thurber's "The Thirteen Clocks" is a good example.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (57 minutes later)
It's supposed to be insane. It's supposed to be inconsistent.
See, that's the crux of the problem. If you give rules, and make those rules discoverable to the reader, then you're moving out of the realm of traditional magical realism and towards just fantasy. If your rules aren't discoverable by the reader, then there's not really a point to having rules.
(As somewhat of a tangent, I would actually argue that vampires and werewolves can exist within magical realism so long as they're treated as mundane by the characters and text. Yeah, Bill is a werewolf, but no one makes a big deal about it. There's an argument to be made that "mundane fantastic" and "magical realism" are distinct things instead of overlapping, but I don't buy it.)
So yeah. Short answer, no, the genres are pretty much the antithesis of each other.
u/chaosattractor [+3] (an hour later)
I don't know, simply having rules to guide your planning can make a whole lot of difference in how believable your world is. I've come up with at least one basic rule: that all magic has a price. It's the mechanics of that price that I'm stuck on...
(Along that tangent, what I meant was that werewolf pack dynamics, with the associated seclusion, can't really exist in a magical realist world. Being in a pack is something that quickly becomes a central, primary part of a character's identity, which in turn hammers in the fact that there's magic to the reader if not the other characters. Vampires are easier to do, since "drinks blood occasionally, doesn't eat in public, comes out at night" is much more whimsical.)
u/xamueljones [+6] My arch-enemy is entropy (an hour later)
It's a bit of a cheat, but you can have rational characters in an inconsistent magical world. I mean, you have an entire community of rationalists here, but not all of us are trying to learn the laws behind physics and quantum mechanics (I know, I know, magic is more useful than an understanding of physics, but I need an example). Apply the same thing to magic, the rules are too complex to learn in a short period of time or no one knows the rules in the first place.
You can even have your main character experiment a bit to show how hard or impossible it is to understand how to use magic. Of course this reduces magic to a plot device or source of conflict and the protagonist can't use it to win (else Deus Ex Machina).
TL;DR - Make the magic a source of conflict/plot device, and the protagonist has to save the day through other means.
u/Charlie___ [+4] (an hour later)
From my perspective, my favorite part of rational fiction is that characters show good habits of thought (all definitions on the sidebar are, after all, just one guy's opinion). This can absolutely be done in magical realism - things can still be magical and unexplained, it's just a matter of being sensible about them.
If peoples', say, cats are disappearing mysteriously, the typical rationalist story focuses on finding an explanation. But suppose that you have characters who are very sensibly trying to find an explanation, but no explanation is to be had, and so that part of their story must end with defeat and ambiguity. Can that still be magical realism? (I'm reminded of House of Leaves.)
Or suppose a person wants to achieve a thing, like escaping from small-town Quebec to move to the city where their older sister is, and mysterious and metaphorical events happen along the way. And further suppose that as a condition of the story, the character cannot be appropriately shocked or sidetracked by all this magic. Then still, your character can show good habits of thought, e.g. can ask "what do I want, what do I have, and how can I use the latter to get the former?", so long as they do it in mundane contexts.
u/chaosattractor [+1] (2 hours later)
"what do I want, what do I have, and how can I use the latter to get the former?"
She wants her brother back, she...well, has a sort-of immunity to malicious things, and she's going up against one of the oldest and most powerful people around (who kidnapped said brother) hoping that her immunity won't fail her (and is also desperate and doesn't really have a choice).
(Don't worry. She fails. Epically. But then she gets better.)
(Yes, my WIP is basically The Snow Queen)
u/Charlie___ [+5] (3 hours later)
Oh, I thought of one more way. When using magic-as-metaphor, you can also have rationaity-in-metaphor. If the blood flows across the street and pools at Grandmother's feet because her granddaughter cut herself, this can be a metaphor for children running to their family with injuries, and the family supporting the children. And so Grandma can be acting rational-in-metaphor if she soothes the blood, and promises it that everything will be alright, and coaxes it into a bowl to take back to the child, even though if blood actually pooled at your feet in real life, this behavior would be real weird.
u/narfanator [+6] (3 hours later)
Wildblow's "Pact" actually does this fairly well. There aren't "rules" in the classic science sense, but there is a logic, and you can learn how to work in that world.
So yeah, I tots think you can. Think about chaotic social situations. Plenty of irrational things happening! But you can still act rationalist. You can still try, and, arguably, full-on bayesian rationality is the only form that'll really work, since it's the one that inherently recognizes probabilities - in other words, that a set of causes are some degree of likely / unlikely to result in the same effects.
u/TwoMcMillion [+4] (4 hours later)
On the other hand, you could potentially use a story like this a deconstruct the rationalist ethos: you could argue that the universe inherently defies human comprehension, and that even if humans were capable of comprehending the workings of reality it would be better for us not to. That's somewhat like the Lovecraftian outlook, but I don't think a story like that has to be depressing.
I may or may not be working on a project along those lines.
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+3] (2 hours later)
From a rationalist perspective, the only difference between magical realism and regular fantasy is how far away the explanation is. The story I've written that I'm proudest of (which I'm not putting on Reddit or any connected accounts) blurs the line between the two, by having events initially appear unexplained, but gradually make more and more sense over the course of the novel - as though Hagrid's "yer a wizard, Harry" reveal occurred during the third act of Harry Potter rather than the first. Therefore, it shouldn't be that hard to do rationalist magical realism - the explanation for the events just needs to be beyond anything a rationalist could uncover during the course of your story.
u/eniteris [+2] (18 minutes later)
I think the main concern of rationality is that your world must be internally consistent. Inexplicable things can happen, but they should always causally follow from the same source, whether it be a godlike entity driving the show or the power of magic. Leave as little room for coincidence as possible.
u/Anderkent [+4] (22 minutes later)
So anything is rational as long as the preface states there's an omnipotent actor acting on a whim? Since that makes anything internally consistent.
u/eniteris [+2] (55 minutes later)
One: the godlike entity need not be omnipotent. If they are shown to have powers, ensure that they stick to those powers. No introducing new powers as you go along. Characters can try to evade the powers based off limitations of power.
Two: The characters should, in some way, interact with the godlike entity, and preferably find a way to use its power for themselves. If you can't interact with god, by Occam's Razor it doesn't exist.
u/chaosattractor [+1] (58 minutes later)
I don't know, I think I can run with this. A rule is a rule even if it's just "this all-powerful character acts at random" (that's basically God, come to think of it). It's consistent as long as that character keeps acting on a whim (perhaps manifested as dice or something of the sort) and demonstrably doesn't get into the politics of situations. If they're shown to be as likely to shoot themselves in the foot as to give themselves an advantage, then that's consistent and arguably rational on some level. If on the other hand they end up cheating and working towards an agenda, then that's an inconsistency.
Kind of like Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, I think? Willing to gamble even his own life on his coin tosses.
u/LiteralHeadCannon [+5] (2 hours later)
A project I was working on a while ago but put on hold centered around an omnipotent teenage boy who had been omnipotent his entire life, and therefore, in my opinion, couldn't be considered rational by definition, for several reasons:
Omnipotence from birth influences someone's mental development so much that they're essentially psychologically alien. It's only really a courtesy to the reader that everyone's speaking in English - it's just as likely that everyone would be speaking inexplicably comprehensible baby talk. I guess the character, as a baby, chose to make himself communicate like everyone else rather than the other way around.
Rationality is about optimizing victory. Omnipotence makes victory trivial, and seeing as the character had always been omnipotent, he wouldn't really have a concept of optimizing victory being a challenge.
The character completely lacks empathy, because they never had a reason to learn it.
The story as a whole wasn't even about defeating him - he's at least rational enough to keep himself invulnerable. The entire world was really just his internal struggle, and the story was a kind of dystopian thing about what it's like being stuck in his internal struggle as someone non-omnipotent.
u/eniteris [+1] (a day later)
That sounds really cool. Are you still working on it, and if not, do you have any scraps of writing you could share?
u/DCarrier [+2] (5 hours later)
Irrational things are supposed to happen.
Rationality is not an attribute of things that happen. It is an attribute of people. Do people just accept that magic works in mysterious ways, or do they try to predict it? Whenever it stops feeling like quantum randomness and starts feeling mysterious, that just means that it started looking predictable. You just know it's going to dodge this next piece of furniture just like it dodged all the previous ones. Perhaps the world is supernatural and things happen on a mental level rather than a reductionist one, but that just means that you need a person to predict it rather than a computer model.
Rational doesn't mean reductionist. It means being smart enough to accomplish your goals.
u/chaosattractor [+1] (6 hours later)
The thing about magical realism is that it's not magic. It's a natural occurrence that just so happens to defy what rational minds gatekeep as the laws of nature, which is why there is no mystery to be solved on the part of the characters. It's only predictable so far as you can say "strange things are going to happen".
(Jose Arcadio's blood didn't dodge every piece of furniture it comes across. It dodged a particular character's rug because it didn't want to stain it. And here, blood having sentience is not a supernatural phenomenon, or even a phenomenon one expects to be replicated - it's just a thing that happens because a man is dead and his grandmother needs to know.)
u/Kuratius [+1] (4 days later)
It's only predictable so far as you can say "strange things are going to happen".
Oh boy, that could be as exploitable as comed tea. Because even if comed tea worked through compulsion charms, it could still potentially be used to predict the future because it'll prevent you from drinking it if a funny moment will not happen any time soon.
u/ishaan123 [+2] Sidebar Contestant (20 hours later)
Of course you can! Rationalist doesn't necessarily have to be "reductionist", or even particularly clear headed in tone. It just has to attempt to improve the reader's rational decision making process (which many stories do t some extent, but in rationalist works we're explicitly trying to do that). Even many of Yudkowsky's stories don't always clearly define what's going on - the Sword of Good, for example, is merely deconstructionist - we don't bother with world building at all. Same with the Pebble Sorting story - it's an allegory, like Plato's Cave: we're not meant to ask questions about how this ridiculousness scenario came to be.
Aesop's Fables come to mind. "The goose that lays the golden eggs", is about hyperbolic discounting - no one cares about the mechanism of the thing. In "Sour Grapes" we don't need to question that the fox can talk, we don't ask why a sentient fox can't just get a crate to stand upon to better jump at the grapes...none of that actually matters for understanding the lesson about rationalizing failure that Aesop was trying to convey.
In fact, the story Sour Grapes itself is kinda dull isn't it? I bet the only reason it got popular was that the common population presumably found it very valuable to condense "the act of deciding something is bad because that view prevents one from feeling the pain of not getting it, and rather than out of any reasoned judgement concerning its worth." into the idiom "sour grapes". This implies the story successfully improved people's thinking about thinking. Lesswrong does this condensation of complex ideas into short "jargon" phrases which make it easier to think about pretty often.
Religious texts are great sources for non-reductionist tales aimed at conveying a lesson of some sort: mahabharata, elder edda, bible. You also see it in classics like The Little Prince, and it's actually really common in movies: the recent Inside Out for example. More obscurely, I thought the Devil's Carnival did it particularly well. (It doesn't matter if the story sometimes teaches a bad lesson - the point is that the medium can communicate lessons)
I think it would be fairly easy to depict rationality-improving concepts like loss aversion, gambler's fallacy, etc in any genre or style. Flawed characters in fairy tales teaching by negative example is a proud old tradition. Deeper philosophical lessons are possible too, but it's more work, of course.
I'd advise thinking "When I started writing this story, what is it that I wanted to tell?" and then going forward from there. If you were drawn to the "fabulist" genre (I googled it but I'm still not sure quite what it is?) to communicate this, then I don't think reductionism need necessarily play a part in what you were trying to tell.
(Or do you specifically want advice on logically-consistent/reductionist stories which can be solved in a puzzle-like fashion that retain a dreamlike style? That's harder but I bet it could be done...)
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+1] Roll the Dice on Fate (26 minutes later)
Maybe. It depends really. Does cause follow effect in your story, or do unspecified things just happen regardless of whatever? If cause follows effect and results can be extrapolated from actions with any degree of certainty, then you can have rational actors. If doing x mostly leads to y, then rational actors still have an advantage over others.
If however the rules of magic, aren't. If there is no structure to the effects. If throwing spells is the same as hurling a bucket of multicoloured paint where you could get a painting or chaos then not so much.
u/chaosattractor [+1] (an hour later)
The magic itself is largely unpredictable, yes. Though there are some things I've been able to wrestle in, like only life paying for life.
What I'm trying to do is get the plot itself to stick to at least some amount of rationality. I'm trying to justify things without justifying them. I need a reason why, for instance, my main character's bucket of paint hurled at the climax of the story would give her the painting she needs instead of more chaos. I know most readers can suspend their disbelief and accept the fact that it's the climax and that's what happens at a climax, but I need it to make sense to myself at the least.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (an hour later)
Well, that's a tough one then. Pratchett used to make the world run explicitly on narrativium to justify such things, but he's a hard act to follow. Any chance you could have her figure out how to throw the bucket just the right way earlier on in the story? It's a little contrived I suppose, though.
You could still have the characters be rational actors even if the world itself is chaotic. Choosing when and why to fight based on what will give them the best odds even if the worst could still beat the best by a stroke of chaotic luck.
u/chaosattractor [+2] (an hour later)
Yes, I do have a bit of that, though it's mostly in supporting characters. They're helping the MC because they know she's the right sort of person - ingenué with a special brand of cunning, walking a path fueled by pure love - to more consistently attract the powerful magic they need.
Pratchett used to
I'm never going to get used to that :(
u/clawclawbite [+1] (2 hours later)
If everything has a cost, then what has she paid into the bucket? Tears? Blood? Whispered secrets? Lost hope and ruined plans?
u/chaosattractor [+1] (4 hours later)
The scale runs all the way from her shoes to her sexuality (yes, she has to give up all possibility of sexual desire for a particularly powerful bit of magic). The jury is still out on how the story will end, so she might end up unwittingly sacrificing the entire rest of the world at some point.
u/Nepene [+1] (4 hours later)
It's not impossible. From wikiing it the style is very much about magic being not explained. Not magic being irrational or such, but making the real seem supernatural and the supernatural seem mundane.
It would be very easy to investigate this magic. It run on narrative. It's a semi sentient force that does what is appropriate, and you could investigate how to effectively use it- what sort of curses worked on what sort of people, how much blood was needed for certain effects, where the best place to go to relax was.
After a bad day should you go to a field to dream with a flower? If you are cursed should you run away or try to shed your own blood to oppose the effect?
Those sort of questions are things you could ask. But you shouldn't, because that doesn't fit the style.
Instead, focus very hard on the human element.
Why is the villain attacking me? Why do they hate me? Who are they sending against me? How are they monitoring me? What's the best plan to stop this? How can I gather more resources? Who can I ally with?
As a background, in this world magic happens. It's unpredictable often enough, it's strange, people don't question it much. People have some normal ways of handling it. What do you do when you're pulled into a dream world? What do you do when a magical threat approaches?
All that is in the background, people have their normal responses, that's mundane and normal.
What's unusual is why whoever is angry at your protagonists is attacking and what flaws in herself and her allies enable that. Focus heavily on that social side and investigating that in a rational manner. How is she solving the problems that are happening in her life?
The magic shouldn't be random and meaningless. The yellow butterflies? Not that random. Yellow is repeatedly used as a colour of death. Jose Arcadio dies in a pool of yellow champagne, the suitor of Remedios with his yellow flower, Mauricio Babilonia had his yellow butterflies, when the founder of the town Jose Arcadio Buendia dies a rain of yellow flowers falls over the town, the yellow train brings the yellow banana company down which brings great death.
The magic should mirror the actions and futures of the characters, not be some alien force that opposes them. Magic should worsen the deaths of people who are flawed, intensify emotions, symbolize future events to the reader. It should mostly be fairly subtle, the sort of thing a poorly educated person might see as normal, with rare hints of something greater.
u/chaosattractor [+2] (6 hours later)
It would be very easy to investigate this magic. It run on narrative. It's a semi sentient force that does what is appropriate, and you could investigate how to effectively use it- what sort of curses worked on what sort of people, how much blood was needed for certain effects, where the best place to go to relax was.
It doesn't run on narrative so much as it is a narrative device. Where in a non-genre book the story of Jose Arcadio's death might have been borne by mail or word of mouth, in that one his blood itself bears witness to his grandmother that he is dead. It's not something that any other grandmother and grandson combo can expect to replicate, since it's tied so strongly to their personal history, the manner of his death and the social circumstances surrounding his death. So in understanding it you learn that it's not something you can expect to use. I actually want to incorporate something like that into the story, where a character tries to replicate a particularly powerful supernatural event but eventually gives up the project after coming to understand that it's not possible (along with the associated character development, of course). I'm struggling to keep in style though, since if he starts acknowledging and questioning the mechanics of the supernatural it breaks the mood.
I definitely don't think that the magic in One Hundred Years is meaningless, and I don't expect mine to be. It is however random, in that although it's linked to the characters and their lives it's also completely beyond their control. They can observe it, but they rarely can touch it and almost never can call upon it. It's...something the universe performs, not the characters. Like rain at a funeral, but more stylized, the yellow flowers that fall when Jose Arcadio dies might be symbolic, a lament...or they might just be rain.
My point is, it's difficult for me to get into the mindset of a fictional world where there is powerful magic, where magic is an omen and an aide and a stumbling block, but the people involved are pretty much powerless to weaponize it. For some reason I keep imagining my characters with a wand in hand :/
Why is the villain attacking me? Why do they hate me? Who are they sending against me? How are they monitoring me? What's the best plan to stop this? How can I gather more resources? Who can I ally with?
This is great! It's very much a coming-of-age story as well, and her quest to retrieve her brother (who's been kidnapped by a tyrant) is also her transition into adulthood. She picks up serious political clout along the way, though the fact that she never really asks why the villain is attacking them comes back to bite her in the ass. Majorly.
u/Nepene [+1] (7 hours later)
They wouldn't be waving a wand. They'd be using it to predict the future. The magic would shine a light on things they already had some reason to predict or know, as in the book, and help them better understand themselves.
This is a chance for rationality. Suppose they see some sign and they're not sure if it's coincidence or magic. They have to analyze events rationally to see if they can predict the consequences of what this person will do are.
People might mock people who don't have a magical death, because they weren't important enough to affect the story.
There would be people who were very ready to exploit a magical effect, watching out for it to make money off it, adapt to it.
Imagine your people stumbling around with a looking glass. What they see is often hard to interpret, but it's better than going around blind. Information is a great weapon of war.
She picks up serious political clout along the way, though the fact that she never really asks why the villain is attacking them comes back to bite her in the ass. Majorly.
As it's a rational story, she should consider why the villain is attacking, although perhaps come up with the wrong answer based on incomplete information/ bad omen reading.
u/None [+1] (5 hours later)
"Mr. Data, things are only impossible until they're not."
If your blood is flowing across the street and dodging furniture, find out what it considers to be a street and what it considers to be furniture by doing various tests, and perhaps why it feels compelled to do so, and how. There is no such thing as an irrational thing that is supposed to happen, only a rule you haven't understood yet. Even if some sentient malevolent force is watching you try to determine its whim and actively dicking around with your results from behind the veil, that's the rule, and signaling will eventualy give that away too, and then you're talking to the god of magic on its own terms.
u/chaosattractor [+4] (6 hours later)
That's...not how magical realism works...
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (5 hours later)
There already is such. The world may not be rational/consistent/examinable, but that doesn't mean there can't be rationalist characters. They're pushed into the Genre and Trope Savvy category, as their world runs more on tropes and genre than physics, but that doesn't make it any less scientific. For an eminently sensible example, read Clyde's Tales.
u/chaosattractor [+1] (6 hours later)
Magical realist stories aren't fairy tales, and they can hardly be said to run on tropes or genre since they're by and large literary fiction.
Have you read Kafka's Metamorphosis? Or anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Or by Haruki Murakami? It would be absurd to claim that the supernatural in any of those runs on standard tropes.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (9 hours later)
Believe it or not, there are magical realist tropes. And I'm not saying that magical realist stories are fairy tales, I'm saying that a lot of fairy tales are examples of magical realism.
u/None [+1] (8 hours later)
Not all fiction needs to be rational. Look, I enjoy the fiction I get from this subreddit as much as the next guy, but it doesn't represent the only way to write.
Many authors are revered precisely because their fiction shows us a world that is irrational, nonsensical, yet still recognizable. Pynchon, Kafka, Marquez come to mind among many others.
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (a day later)
I think you can apply some rational ideas. A rational character is just one who behaves with common sense, after all. So make sure your characters act the way real people would act in their shoes, and that they don't just do what the story needs them to.
The next step, I think, is to make sure that the rest of the world works the same way. A lot of authors use "magic is random" or "magic has a will of its own" or even "magic has a sense of drama" as code for "magic does what the author wants". If you're to be rational, make sure you don't do that. Magic can be random, or have a will of its own, but like any other character it must be free to do things which are inconvenient to the author.
Remember, rational writers must be constantly trying to outwit their own characters. You must always be looking for the sensible thing to do that would instantly resolve the entire story, and then arrange the universe so that it doesn't work.
Rationalist ideas, of course, are right out. There will be no munchkinry, no transhumanism, and no attempt at educating the reader. And that's fine.
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (3 days later)
I think Neil Gaiman achieves this balance, to some extent. For one short example, read "The Problem of Susan". It combines rational analysis with that which is unknowable. Some of Roald Dahl's stories strike this balance as well, although they tend to err towards one side or the other, and involve too much humor generally. GK Chesterton also achieves this, when he's not being overly sanctimonious.
I don't agree with the people who think it is impossible. I think it's a rare and difficult combination, but not an impossible one.
u/krakonfour [+1] (22 minutes later)
Rational is as simple as a character performing A and getting result B every time.