Bittercon: Historical Reality in Fantasy

[attackfish]

Why have castles in the same world as dragons? How would having magic actually impact a feudal society? What roles would sorcerers really occupy in such a world?

I’m told this is a well worn topic, so I will begin by saying I’m relatively ignorant of the discussions that have already taken place.  Most of the takes on this topic that I have seen have been primarily from a military angle, if you have dragon riders, what good is a high walled, unroofed fortress like a castle?  If your average wizard can kill at a glance, what good is armor?  Intentional or not, this is the direction in which most of the genre guides us.  Much of fantasy is concerned with war, epic battles being one of the favorite topics, which makes military inconsistencies like these more obvious.  As much as I love a good adventure, I’m more of an anthropology buff and politics buff than a military tactics buff, so I intend to take a slightly different tack.

Magic can be seen as an analog not only for military technology but for technology more generally, which has always been segregated by class.  A feudal system, with its rigid class divisions, can only survive if technology, and infrastructure are distributed in such a way as to support it and make it necessary.  If a kingdom has a strong communications network (scrying mirrors, long distance telepathy...) and a quick way to move people around (flight, teleportation...) then that kingdom’s king doesn’t need a bunch of lords and knights around to help him control his kingdom.  In Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books, because of this, though Valdemar has lords and Ladies, and relatively little modern industrialization, the political system is highly centralized, with the monarch holding most of the power, and her own band of highly mobile magic users circulating through the country to keep control.

And what about worlds where peasants are constantly being born with magic?  How long would an inherited hierarchy last when people on the bottom rungs so frequently find themselves in possession of that much physical power?  Does the system have permeability for magic users?

There are a number of ways to make magic reenforce a feudal hierarchy, if a writer decides that’s the direction they wish to go in.  Magic could be born only within certain bloodlines, like in Robin Mckinley’s Damar books, where kelar is born only to members of the royal family.  Magic could be something gained instead of inborn, either through some ritual or through long term study.  Magic users could themselves become another form of nobility, much like the Medieval Catholic Church.

Authors could also start with a magic system and see where it leads them.  Maybe magic being born unpredictably throughout the population leads to magic users each becoming small-time warlords, controlling villages and city-states.  Maybe the authorities make a successful go at finding and killing magic users before they can use their power to uproot the system.  Maybe nobody has magic inside, and power is centralized around rulers who hold magical artifacts.  Maybe magic has made fields and crops so fertile that the bulk of the population no longer has to farm, and almost everyone lives in large cities.  Maybe magic users have become godlike figures.  Maybe one country has magic and another does not.  Fantasy in no way binds us to historical accuracy, or even to drawing on the past, although fantasy writers often do.

How do yo think politics and culture would be shaped by magic?  What kinds of magic systems would you like to see the consequences of explored?  What books or series have you seen tat dealt with this topic well?

Written for bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic adapted from a panel at the 2012 Chicon, the text of which is quoted at the beginning of this post.

Comments

[sholio]

This is such a huge topic that I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around it without delving into specifics .... It's kind of like saying "how would technology impact society". Clearly it DOES, but you have to choose what technology you're talking about just to have a basis for the conversation, and that's how it feels to me here -- I mean, the options for magic are SO vast. It's an utterly different thing to have small numbers of very powerful sorcerers controlled via a guild-type system, vs. magic being a subtle thing that's all around you in the world (as in, say, CJ Cherryh's "Rusalka" books), vs. a population of hereditary magic-users that live side-by-side with non-magic users (as in A:tLA), vs. a world like Piers Anthony's Xanth in which everyone has magic and there's a sort of sliding social hierarchy based on how powerful you are.

I'm having trouble thinking of examples of fantasy books in which magic had no impact at all on society, because if you're writing a book with magic in it, you've got to think about the way that it is controlled and maintained and passed along and used by people in power, if only to a shallow degree. But on the other hand, I'm having equal trouble coming up with examples where the interaction of society vs. magic is the main point of the book; mostly it's somewhere in the middle, where it's addressed somewhat, but not to a particularly large degree. Which makes me wish that an author would really take it on; it's awfully hard to come up with new varieties of magic that haven't been written before, but much easier to come up with new angles to approach them from -- such as this!

In a classic fantasy-style setting, where magic is controlled and passed down by a relatively small hierarchy of wizards (and generally not available to ordinary people or controlled by the ruling class), I think your comparison with the medieval Church is about as perfect an analogy as you can get. The dynamic between the feudal lords and the wizards is very similar to that of feudal lords vs. the Church, I think, especially since authors often use various handwaves for why wizards don't deus ex machina the characters out of their problems (because the wizards have their own problems, because they have a code that forbids interference except in certain cases, etc) that end up stripping wizards of most of their literal magical power within the context of the story while still having the potential power available. Which sounds almost exactly like the Church (i.e. you don't need miraculous demonstrations of the local clergy's power every day to believe that the clergy has that power and behave accordingly).

[lavanyasix.livejournal.com]

How the world would be shaped would depend greatly on the specifics of the magic system itself. Is magic a new development or something that's been with humanity since the dawn of time? This was a point that got turned over in a few early critiques of TLoK, near the start of its run. The idea being that a non-bender/bender conflict couldn't work in the same was as X-Men's human/mutant conflict, as benders (magic) had been around for thousands of years, so civilizations in-universe would have had long ago incorporated bending (magic) into their structure. So talking about bending/magic as an 'impurity' came off as a little weird and vaguely unjustified, given there's gotta be thousands of years of cultural evolution in the setting's backstory that would say otherwise.


And what about worlds where peasants are constantly being born with magic? How long would an inherited hierarchy last when people on the bottom rungs so frequently find themselves in possession of that much physical power?

There's actually a really neat description of the classic shonen fighting anime "The Fist of the North Star" that talks about how the world it presents is, basically, a dystopia brought about by the fact martial arts can make a few people superhumanly tough. Lemme bring it up:

Imagine just how messed up life would be for an ordinary person in a world where all the real power is wielded by a relatively small number of people, and that power is not financial or political, but militaristic. Democratic government is essentially meaningless since no union of ordinary people can stand against the might of a lone Badass. Because everyone knows that violence is the force that drives the wheel of civilization, fights occur constantly, and everyone with a bit of ability wants to claw their way as high up the badass scale as possible, whether for the sake of protecting innocents or enforcing their own will on others. The only genuinely powerful people who have any interest in being in charge are usually megalomaniacs, and sociopaths besides. Governments tend to be either tyrannies, or farcical constructs whose laws can only be adequately be enforced by sympathetic vigilantes and a few Knight Templar civil servants who butt heads with them at every opportunity. Countries are constantly in flux between the two as Evil Overlords are dethroned by good guys, replaced with ineffectual governments, and conquered again by new bad guys.

Star Wars is similar, although it works on longer time scales. No matter what form of galactic government is built up, every so often the Jedi and the Sith will set the galaxy aflame with their wars of philosophical/religious supremacy. Because they wield Just That Much Power, and even a planet-smashing moon-sized space station armed to the teeth is insignificant against what any random backwater farm boy can do with a little training.


btw -- Good, thoughtful essay.

[marycatelli]

A major factor would be healing magic: when women have to bear ten children on average, which results in two of them living to adulthood and having children, it has a certain impact on society.

Or agricultural magic. Are the overwhelming majority of people just scratching out a living on their farms, and thoroughly exhausted by the back-breaking labor?