The Magic Goes Away
Once there was magic in the world... But hordes of selfish, short-sighted magicians have used up the mana that moved the world, and the magic goes away. Even the most powerful spells are fast becoming futile, and so Orolandes, sad Achaean with half a sword, goes on a quest in search of the lost power. But all the gods and Fair Atlantis are dead. The creatures of spirit, the unicorns and centaurs, are dying. Soon all the sparkling things will be gone from the world and only clay will remain - and those damned stupid barbarians with their damned stupid swords will win after all... from the cover
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- Larry Niven. His older stuff: Ringworld. and all his short-story collections, especially Neutron Star.
He also did a scifi take on magic, in The Magic Goes Away.
I see Vinor Vinge's AFUTD and ADITS as the closest thing to Niven.
- Missed opportunity dept.: the title should have been "The Magic Goes Away", in reference to the Larry Niven novel.
- I believe telling small children scary stories so they would refrain from doing something particular damaging is quite common among many cultures.
In Grant Morrison's seminal "Doom Patrol" run, he talks about fairy tales as a means of traumatizing children to prepare them for life.
And when children once grow older or are particularly smart, they would mistrust it and everything adults had told them, clearly more damaging than beneficial.
A lot of this has been lost in modern sanitized re-tellings, but lots of traditional culture is rife with double meanings and subtexts. (I was in a trad fusion band, and I remember the moment when our lead singer started to realize this. Much good-natured ribbing was to be had that day and days after.) My take is that the smart ones are meant to realize that these things aren't to be taken literally. Rather, they are meant as cautionary tales and as a sort of map to the maze of inner feelings and impulses within all human beings. [1]
There is a scene in Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away where one wizard (Clubfoot) is talking about being one of many young apprentices taken up to a mountaintop by his master. The master wizard enchanted a cloud and let them play bouncing around on it, no warnings, no explanation given. Clubfoot speculated that it might be a sort of implicit test. Any apprentices stupid enough to go back up the mountain and try to jump on an unenchanted cloud would effectively take themselves out of the apprenticeship and the gene pool. This has a lot to do with how I think of traditional stories and myths.
Certainly, yelling at small children or even spanking them is not optimal and often not very helpful but anger is not the evil per se either. The key is to choose wisely how to act on this particular feeling. Suppressing or even disguising it under a friendly facade is not helpful, often even damaging for one’s mental health and relationships.
A lot of this has to do with the cultural environment. If a child is surrounded by people who implicitly enforce certain values and have a certain demeanor, the child will tend to pick that up. Inuit children are the way they are because they are in that particular culture. What US culture apparently does to children strikes me as horrifying. One thing I love my wife for, is that I can see that she's wonderfully nurturing, while I also very much see the "Tiger Mom" within her.
([1] Jordan Peterson's work in this regard is very interesting. Look up his take on Pinnochio.)
- That is strangely reminiscent of Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away."
- I'm subscribed to Audible as well; I generally like it.
The 2 credit per month plan covers my needs pretty well. In some occasions I've had to buy extra credits, but it still ends up being much cheaper than buying individual audiobooks.
It definitely pushes you to strike a balance between longer and shorter books, though. It's kinda crazy that a 4-hour story like The Magic Goes Away and a a 50-hour novel like A Dance with Dragons both end up consuming 1 credit.
- This entry doesn't feel like a complete thought to me, basically some observations on notional "magic" and the rules for developing and implementing the same. Conceptually there has been a lot of work done on Magical systems, both from a technical point of view and story point of view, very little of which seems referenced :-).
Typical RPG systems use magic either entirely, or mostly entirely, for combat. Meaning attacking and defending against attacks (physical and magical) which result in damage to the player or the opponent. And unlike Magic in books like the Harry Potter series where it has more of a 'tool' nature (travel, lighting, retrieving things, fixing things, cleaning, Etc.)
That said, having dabbled in game design I have found that "real world" things like economics and physics express self contained and dynamically stable systems. That can be useful in the fantasy world given that one ever burning fire spell could burn everything in the game universe if there wasn't something which prevented that from happening. So thinks like the inverse square law and conservation of (magical) energy really help out in keeping the game from becoming radically unbalanced.
When I read "The Magic Goes Away" by Niven I felt it was an interesting take on 'magic as alternate scientific thing' and Zelazny's unfinished "Changling" trilogy about magic in an alternate world an interesting 'magic is where you find it' sort of system.
