Conworld without magic, anyone?

[CatDoom]

Game of Thrones has very little magic, but it's getting stronger with events in the story. I love fantasy, but GoT has so little magic, I find it jarring when it does appear. I think it could do just fine without it.

I actually really like the magic in the Song of Ice and Fire book series (less so some of the directions they've taken with it in the TV series... particularly in a certain recent episode >_>), and I think part of the reason is that it *is* jarring. When something obviously magical happens in the series, it's pretty much always an "oh shit" moment. It's a break from the ordinary, even within the fantasy world of the books, and that makes it feel exciting and... well... extraordinary. It's an approach that I find much more interesting than having tons of wizards around casually throwing around spells as basic problem-solving tools.

I also like that the series pretty neatly describes why magic isn't more common. Aside from the fact that long-dormant magic returning to the world is one of the themes of the books, when we see magic used it's generally depicted as dangerous, unpredictable and, most of all, expensive. When spells get cast it almost always involves a blood sacrifice of one sort or another or, in at least one case, the sacrifice of some less tangible part of a person's mind or soul.

Even characters who use somewhat subtler magical tricks that don't seem to require such a sacrifice make a point of saying that it's not easy to do what they do. In the words of the Faceless Men "if it were easy, all men would do it."

[Torco]

I very much like conworlds without magic, and i don't think any of mine has any. magic just gives me the feeling of a copout, like "i want the world to be consistent and plausible, except sometimes i don't care about that and things just happen because". i don't want to sort of bash people who like magic by saying that, i get the aesthetic of it to a degree, but my reaction is always a bit like that. I was moderately disappointed with the scene where red woman gives birth to monster thing in GoT. until that point the narrative very much allowed for both 'there's real magic whatever that means' and 'it's all in people's heads' readings of magic and i felt it was better for it.

[CatDoom]

Well, the scene where Daenerys loses her baby and Khal Drogo is returned to sort-of-life is pretty explicitly magical, at least in the books. Plus, Daenerys walks into a bonfire without being burned, and gets ancient, fossilized dragon eggs to hatch by throwing the Maegi on Drogo's funeral pyre. Also, at least in the book, the warlocks of Qarth have some pretty explicitly magical stuff going on. Then there are the Others and the wights in the north. All that stuff appears before Melisandre does her thing.

Come to think of it, the very first scene, in both the books and the show, involves a non-human creature riding a dead horse and wielding a sword made of ice. Like it or not, Game of Thrones is pretty up-front about the existence of magic in the setting.

[WeepingElf]

In order to work well in a conworld, magic must have limits. There must be clear rules what it can do and what it can't. Otherwise, economy and plots break down. If wizards can do anything such as unlimited matter transmutation or drawing arbitrary amounts of energy for free, the world will cease working. You need especially clear rules of magic in an RPG, of course, but also in fantasy novels. Fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson came up with what is known as Sanderson's First Law:

An author's ability to solve conflict satisfactorily with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.

In my con-universe, magic is based on the manipulation of morphic fields (as in Sheldrake's theory) through the mind. It is thus informational and not an energy source; there is no way to break the physical conservation laws with magic. You can't, for instance, drive a machine with "magical energy", and you can't transmutate matter. Magic can only do what is unlikely to happen without it, but not what is otherwise impossible. A good magician can cause a lightning bolt to strike a particular target during a thunderstorm; but he can't do so out of a clear blue sky. Also, magic is rare and unreliable and therefore prohibitively expensive. It furthermore requires a very thorough understanding of what one is trying to affect, to a point that quite often, the necessary understanding for working magic is sufficient to work out a non-magical solution of the problem!

[Aili Meilani]

A good magician can cause a lightning bolt to strike a particular target during a thunderstorm; but he can't do so out of a clear blue sky.

This restriction strikes me as completely arbitrary. If magic can do what would be unlikely to happen without it, why can't a magician, apart from not being good enough, cause a storm cell from elsewhere in the world to tunnel into their vicinity, cause a bolt to strike a target and cause the cell to tunnel back where it came from? Sure, the likelihood of all the particles comprising a storm cell tunneling together is extremely small, but it's non-zero.

[WeepingElf]

A good magician can cause a lightning bolt to strike a particular target during a thunderstorm; but he can't do so out of a clear blue sky.

This restriction strikes me as completely arbitrary. If magic can do what would be unlikely to happen without it, why can't a magician, apart from not being good enough, cause a storm cell from elsewhere in the world to tunnel into their vicinity, cause a bolt to strike a target and cause the cell to tunnel back where it came from? Sure, the likelihood of all the particles comprising a storm cell tunneling together is extremely small, but it's non-zero.

Sure, if he is good enough he can influence the weather such that a thunderstorm arises in the right place.

[gaiusmarchaave]

I've edited the question in the starting post, but I have copied it here albeit in small font:

Right now I am asking for more of the latter one, which is science fiction. Actually I want neither in my conworld, so I am asking whether there are those conworlds which simply look like the Earth. Yeah you find it more boring, but I guess that's what we call personal preference. :p

Or maybe I am confused on meaning of science-fiction conworld and fantasy conworld. Right now I find Wikipedia's definition of high fantasy and low fantasy confusing since neither can seem to describe my conworld.

A good magician can cause a lightning bolt to strike a particular target during a thunderstorm; but he can't do so out of a clear blue sky.

This restriction strikes me as completely arbitrary. If magic can do what would be unlikely to happen without it, why can't a magician, apart from not being good enough, cause a storm cell from elsewhere in the world to tunnel into their vicinity, cause a bolt to strike a target and cause the cell to tunnel back where it came from? Sure, the likelihood of all the particles comprising a storm cell tunneling together is extremely small, but it's non-zero.

Sure, if he is good enough he can influence the weather such that a thunderstorm arises in the right place.

Hmm....

[Salmoneus]

In order to work well in a conworld, magic must have limits. There must be clear rules what it can do and what it can't. Otherwise, economy and plots break down. If wizards can do anything such as unlimited matter transmutation or drawing arbitrary amounts of energy for free, the world will cease working. You need especially clear rules of magic in an RPG, of course, but also in fantasy novels.

Sez Yu. And Sez Brandon Sanderson. JRR Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, GK Chesteron, HP Lovecraft, the Brothers Grimm and so forth would obviously disagree. And I think they know more about it than Sanderson.

[Sevly]

Sez Yu. And Sez Brandon Sanderson. JRR Tolkien, Gene Wolfe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, GK Chesteron, HP Lovecraft, the Brothers Grimm and so forth would obviously disagree. And I think they know more about it than Sanderson.

Nah. WeepingElf overstated things but Sanderson actually addresses this. It's not that magic has to have well-defined limits, its that magic has to have well-defined limits to solve conflict. (Really, this extends beyond magic. The resolution of any conflict should seem obvious in hindsight, which is kind of difficult when that resolution depends on anything that the reader couldn't possibly have known about beforehand.) Sanderson specifically points to Tolkien as an example of mystical rather than mechanical magic which is used beautifully for narrative effect and works because it is used to create problems that are ultimately solved in a mundane manner. Similarly, Marquez's magic realism establishes enchanting settings and carries his unique voice, but the supernatural elements are more often sources of misfortune than blessing.

I feel like I'd drive myself crazy if I attempted to come up with a fully-structured, self-consistent magical system that fit with the kind of world I'd want to create.

There was a time when I worked really hard to come up with an alternate physics system for a storyworld, even going so far as to work out equations for how I wanted my "irregular forces" to work—and that's force in the Newtonian sense rather than Star-Wars. But I've come to the point where I think this is a bit of a fool's game, especially for storyworlding, since you end up spending a lot of effort on elements that are too boring to fit into the main story and because any alternate physics system breaks down at some level, anyways. Every little element of real-world physics ties in with the rest, and then with chemistry and biology, too, so if people want to quibble about plausibility then they can always find some inconsistency, somewhere, unless you go to the point where you've written a library of Ph D level theses and what's the point of that?

I think that with alternate physics, or functional magic—whichever you want to call it—the best thing really is to just have clear set of rules which are consistent with themselves, even if they end up violating the first law of thermodynamics and what have you. To use Imralu's dragon example, it's great if the author can fit in the evolution of firebreathing without dragging down the story, and it's awesome to see such explanations in a conworld, free of story constraints, but I personally have no problem if the creator doesn't bother to explain the mechanisms. Heck, in a story I don't even care if the dragons are able to breath fire in space, as long as the ability is set out early in the story and not slapped on us willy-nilly whenever it becomes convienient. Should we still be calling it "fire" if it doesn't involve a combustible material and an oxidizing agent? Eh.

available to everyone in that world, not just a mage class

Yeah, I really love stories where this is the case. I like to see the impact of magic on society, and universal magic makes for interesting differences in setting even when magic isn't the focus of the story. Salmoneus had a great post here analyzing the societal effects of magic when it's availability is limited, and while a world where everyone can use magic would avoid these scenarios, it's bound to have its own problems.

That said,

Any sufficently advanced technology, etc.

Part of the "etc." is the inverse, "sufficiently analyzed magic". If magic has well-defined rules and can be used by anybody, what exactly is distinguishing it from technology? Especially if you write quasi-modern worlds, as I like to, then the only difference from soft science fiction is that you get to work with an alternate world rather than a world that is an extension of ours. The lines become blurred pretty quickly, which is why it's sometimes easier to just call things "speculative fiction".

[Salmoneus]

It's not that magic has to have well-defined limits, its that magic has to have well-defined limits to solve conflict. (Really, this extends beyond magic. The resolution of any conflict should seem obvious in hindsight, which is kind of difficult when that resolution depends on anything that the reader couldn't possibly have known about beforehand.) Sanderson specifically points to Tolkien as an example of mystical rather than mechanical magic which is used beautifully for narrative effect and works because it is used to create problems that are ultimately solved in a mundane manner.

Better, but still Sez Yu. Of course, the real difficulty in finding unambiguous counterexamples is simply that outside Sandersonesque novels and Hollywood films there's normally no such thing as 'resolves conflict' vs 'creates conflict' - generally, each resolution of one conflict brings about another.
But having said that, here's some counterexamples:
- In One Hundred Years of Solitude,

More: show

the entanglements caused by the beauty of Remedios II, which have already caused the deaths of several men, are resolved when she is spontaneously elevated into heaven

, and

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Aureliano Segundo becomes rich(er) because when he has sex with his mistress all his animals do so too, breeding at a prodigious rate

.
- the entire plot of The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings:

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a couple become rich when they capture a man with enormous wings and turn him into a sideshow attraction. The moral quandaries of this are obviated when a woman is turned into a tarantula, taking away his fame. He's left in a terrible state and reaches the point of death, but then miraculously becomes entirely healthy and flies away.

- in a very similar vein, in HG Wells' The Wonderful Visit,

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an angel comes to earth, gets shot, and his wings atrophy. At the end, he finds the house he was staying at on fire, and the girl he's fallen in love with is inside. But it's OK - he just goes into the fire, his wings magically heal, she magically turns into an angel, and they both magically fly away and presumably go to heaven

- in The Lord of the Rings,

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werewolves are scared away with fireballs and a demonic spider is scared away by magical light

- every good thing that ever happens in the Silmarillion. Just in Beren and Luthien:

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Beren and Luthien use magic to disguise themselves as a werewolf and a vampire; Luthien uses magic to send the Dark Lord to sleep; Beren and Luthien die, but it's OK because they're both magically resurrected and Luthien is magically turned into a human

. More importantly for the story as a whole,

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the gods come out of a machine at the end and fix everything, including Earendil returning to earth in a magical flying battleship and killing Ancalagon.

Or, one of the more staggering examples:

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Ar-Pharazon attacks the Valar with a force so terrifying that even the gods are afraid. But then Eru buries his armies under a mountain, putting them to sleep until the end of eternity, destroys his fleet in a storm, sinks his entire continent under the sea, reshapes the coastlines of all the other continents, removes the continent of Aman from the world, oh, and turns a flat discworld into a spherical planet just to make sure that not only is this conflict resolved, but it can never happen again!

- Similarly, every good thing (and many of the bad) that happens in The Book of the New Sun...
- the ending of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
- the ending of The Man Who Was Thursday
- Angier's eventual discovery of his magic trick in The Prestige
- the ending of David Gemmell's Legend
- etc etc etc...

[Sevly]

Of course, the real difficulty in finding unambiguous counterexamples is simply that outside Sandersonesque novels and Hollywood films there's normally no such thing as 'resolves conflict' vs 'creates conflict' - generally, each resolution of one conflict brings about another.

Yeah, this is definitely a flaw in the phrasing of the law. After all, a diabolus ex machina is just as annoying, if not more so, than a deus. I don't think it's any more in the spirit of Sanderson's law to have the bad guy kill off the hero using magic that blatantly violates everthing you've established than it is for the hero to do the reverse. Even though Sanderson says that it's "always okay" when the magic is "there to screw up things for the characters", screwing things up applies as much to the antagonists as it does to the protagonists, or any of the characters in between. Having the villain make his escape is just as much solving a problem, from the villain's perspective, as it is creating a problem, from the hero's, and as you said in most cases the resolution of one conflict brings about another.

What is important to a Sandersonesque work is that the clever tricks that characters use to get they want be foreshadowed—the obvious-in-hindsight element that I mentioned earlier. That's what makes the tricks clever, rather than merely mystical. By establishing the rules of the magic early on and sticking to them, you allow the reader to participate in the magic, to solve problems alongside the characters and actually understand them. It's basically fair play for fantasy.

The law, reinterpreted as so, can explain some of your examples. Fireballs scare away werwolves? Why wouldn't it, it's fire. Demons driven away by magical light? Builds upon a common archetype. The ending of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Foreshadowed by the source material of its allegory. Spontenously elevated to heaven? Miraculously becoming healthy? Ah. Hmm.

Oh, alright, sez mi. I mean, some of those moments, taken out of context, do make the works sound terrible, but they're not. Most of them aren't my favorite type of fantasy, but then again, that's your point. Here I am moving the goalposts and the ball still goes into the net. Damn it, Sal.

tl;dr Write more Sandersonesque stories so that Sal has fewer examples thx

[Salmoneus]

A few points there:

- regarding LOTR, the inexplicable isn't the effect of magic (which is usually sensible), but when it can and can't be used. What's odd about Gandalf shooting fireballs at the werewolves isn't the fact that he does it, but the fact that he doesn't then go around shooting fireballs at all the mumakil etc in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Tolkien never really establishes what magic can do, or when it can be used - sometimes you can toss around fireballs, sometimes you can't. The reader might hypothesise some restrictions for themselves - perhaps fireballs are OK against unnatural monsters but not against people (God levelling the playing field), or perhaps fireballs are OK against munchkins but if you try it when the Dark Lord himself is watching, it doesn't work or backfires. But those are just things the reader might guess in hindsight.

- re Aslan: the fact that the child readers might on some level spot that elements of the book were like christianity (while others were very different) isn't really enough to license what happens at the end, which you wouldn't guess was possible unless you knew about the book already

- I see what you mean about 'fair play'. This reminds me of the argument between Asimov and Campbell about whether it was possible to write mystery novels in a SF setting - Campbell argued that it wasn't because the magic/technology could make too many things possible that the reader couldn't have guessed in advance (at least, not without far too much exposition having happened). Asimov wrote 'Caves of Steel' to disprove this - he said that it could work if you set out the rules simply and clearly and stuck to them rigidly. The thing is, a murder mystery is a genre that relies on fair play - it's all a game and the reader plays along. If you don't have the fair play, you can't do stories in that genre. But not all genres are like that. For instance, one of my favourite films is 'Being John Malkovich' - and nobody could ever the hell guess what's going to happen when they sit down for that. In fact, that film twists the game on its head: instead of "I'll play fair, can you work out exactly how this works?", it's "I'm not playing fair - can you even begin to guess anything that's going to happen?" - now of course, you could say that it has its own narrative logic, and it does, as all stories do... events follow 'naturally' from one another. But there's nothing systemic or lawlike about it: the narrative isn't limited by rules of fair play. Instead of the author having to find a way to make an interesting narrative within his laws, there the author makes an interesting narrative and his challenge is to convince us it makes some sense in hindsight.
More generally, there are entire genres based on a lack of fair play. Horror films, for instance - where the villain often seems (even when not explicitly stated) to have supernatural powers, invulnerability, or just astonishingly good luck. The whole point is the author telling the audience, 'I'm not playing fair... so no-one is ever safe'. And there are even genres of uplifting fiction where the author is unfair in the opposite direction, and everything always works out for the best even though logically it shouldn't.

- what Sanderson is doing is trying to use one of those things they teach people on writer's courses and turning it to fantasy - that is, "co-incidence can be used to make things worse, but never to make things better". Sanderson is treating lawless magic as essentially a form of coincidence. But there are two problems with this. First, that's a false dichotomy - you can have magic that has its own internal logic, without being lawlike. This is why Tolkien doesn't feel like a string of coincidences: because even without intelligible laws, his magic feels natural, because he lets it be shaped by various tendencies and ideologies that we can recognise subconsciously without really being able to articule (things drawn from myths and folk tales and religion and so on). Terry Pratchett, likewise - if you get right down to it, virtually anything can happen on the Discworld, and a lot of it does, and yet things rarely feel contrived... he hints at an underlying logic of 'narrativium', but when you get right down to it this just means 'whatever the author wants to happen can happen', which is in no way a 'fair play' sort of ruleset! Or a classic example: Loony Toons. Loony Toons cartoons often have their conflicts resolved (or at least, the 'good' character saved) through a combination of insane coincidence and outright magic that follows no rules whatsoever.

To give an example (this is something I saw recently): the Baddy paints a tunnel (/door/whatever) on a rock (/wall/etc) and encourages the Goody to run into it at speed, knocking him out. The Goody runs... and is able to run through the tunnel to the other side. The Baddy is astonished, and tries to chase after him... and gets knocked out running into the solid wall that now just as a painting on it. The magic here (the symbol becomes the thing symbolised) explicitly works to save the Goody and hurt the Baddy. There's no other logic to it. Indeed, the Baddy then gets up, and taps the painting of the tunnel, and sees his hand go into the tunnel, reassuring him that it is indeed a tunnel for him... but when he runs at it, it's a wall. This is the author not just not playing fair, but slapping one character around the head shouting 'it doesn't matter how much you try to find a loophole, you can't, because I'm not playing fair!'.

And then there's the second problem: that rule doesn't work even for coincidences. Yes, relying on helpful coincidences is often a bad idea for an author. But if you think about it, the number of succesful stories that rely on what is basically one or more completely coincidental windfalls is immense! Even the archetypal 'fair play' genre, the murder mystery... how many of them come down to exactly the wrong fragment of paper surviving in the fire, exactly the wrong chance remark triggering the detective's memory, on the murder taking place on exactly the one day in the year when it was raining AND the gardener had moved the ladder to the other side of the east wing? Best example: Columbo. Most columbo episodes rely on a ridiculous coincidence to save everything - and yet the good ones are still immensely satisfying. [The game being played becomes different: it becomes 'spot which seemingly unimportant coincidence is actually going to bring the bad guy down!']

[Jūnzǐ]

I very much like conworlds without magic, and i don't think any of mine has any. magic just gives me the feeling of a copout, like "i want the world to be consistent and plausible, except sometimes i don't care about that and things just happen because". i don't want to sort of bash people who like magic by saying that, i get the aesthetic of it to a degree, but my reaction is always a bit like that. I was moderately disappointed with the scene where red woman gives birth to monster thing in GoT. until that point the narrative very much allowed for both 'there's real magic whatever that means' and 'it's all in people's heads' readings of magic and i felt it was better for it.

I agree: Cytàm also lacks magic completely. However, MAR Barker's Tékumel - probably my favorite conworld, is full of magic and mysticism.