Fantasy Revolved

(Loreena McKennitt - Kecharitomene)

 

Well, it's only been two years. I might as well write the third part of this rant, finally. Magical fantasy worlds should better integrate natural adaptation, sure, but the bigger issue is recursive: how does magic in turn affect the world, and vice-versa?

 

Slight aside: once upon a winter I volunteered to write mission dialogue for a startup (and now long vaporwared) game. I was tentatively accepted based on a writing sample and then kicked out a few months later for failing to actually write any missions. Yes, I am one of those rarely gifted individuals who can get fired from volunteer work. Stop pointing and laughing. But though my own failings chiefly caused my failure (my old depression cycle hits hardest in spring) it also confirmed what I'd always suspected: that this is not, strictly speaking, creative work. You're handed down edicts from project leads whose greatest concept of compelling storytelling runs no further than lining up carets and parentheses in program code, or worse indirectly from investors interested only in reinforcing the mass market lowest common denominator, imitating their rich peers' moneymaking scams. And you're told to make all those "boy meets girl" stories or wouldn't-it-be-cool-if notions into flavor text that somehow draws customers and pays off.

 

At one point we were mailed a concept render for a brand new race the bosses thought would look great in their SciFi project. It was, quite literally, a little green man. Space-goblins, yeah that'll make you stand out in the internet age's most crowded field. Sure, I can write some background text for that. See, it involves a magic ring out in space that a little guy with fuzzy feet in space has to go throw into the sun in space. Another bright idea was literally bright: a fire elemental. For a SciFi game. Now, granted, you can write riveting SciFi for creature made of <plasma> as Arthur C. Clarke demonstrated in Out of the Sun, but you have to stretch your concept of environments a bit. A humanoid fire elemental you just pop with your Smith&Wesson laser six-shooter out in the woods behind your log cabin on planet It's-Just-Like-Earth? No. Just. Fucking. No. You don't need me to string words along to that particular effect. Hire some random sixth-grader. (And that, btw, is all you'll get from maximum-likelihood text elongation too.)

 

The bar is set considerably lower for the more childish genre of fantasy, motivating its much wider representation in pop culture. Even most SF is science fantasy with psychic space wizards frowning and grunting and shooting finger-lightning at each other. "It's magic" explains so much... and yet nothing at all. Relevantly here, note magic never changes anything. Oh, sure, you blow up a mountain now and again, but somehow the world about still consists of coyotes chasing rabbits and farmers pitchforking hay and cozy monkey clan social life with mommies and cousins. Magic means nothing until the plot requires it. Bow before status quo!

 

But here's the thing: life adapts. Lucky Lae'zel was wearing her stompin' boots when I hit BG3's gremishka-infested attic, but it got me thinking animals adapted to magic are actually far more likely than we usually see; they need not cast spells but just exploit magical effects. With magic as universal catalyst, you can actually have those impossibly exo/endothermic reactions otherwise making human torches impossible. Except catalysts are by definition applicable to the same reaction wherever available, and most fantasy explicitly describes magic as a universal force pervading all matter or at least all life. If a druid can make a field of barley grow, then the principle of natural selection would still apply: some stalks of barley would absorb that magic better than others and benefit more, seed faster or more plentifully and be better represented in the next generation, especially if the farmer wants faster-growing barley and selects for that trait. After a few dozen generations (and fantasy worlds tend toward deep, deep timelines (if not plots)) you'd get magic-infused barley which is just as hopelessly dependent and maladapted for life without magic as most of our domesticated species are without their irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and flea collars.

 

And then what? How does that evolution feed back into the world's magic?

 

If your magic barley gets better at eating magic than its competitors, and magic is by necessity generally treated as a finite or limited flow resource, then the better species get at eating it, the less they leave available for others, a continued war of attrition like for any other microelement.

Conversely, if magic is a destructive force, those better adapted to avoid it would fare better, and competition would favor those better able to identify and stake out magic-free habitats. No action without reaction.

Can you write a fantasy story about rabbits running rampant because wolves switched to eating magic? Maybe an RPG quest to use your own spellcasting to drain an area's magic before it poisons the food chain?

And does it bio-accumulate? If every rpg is full of dire wolves, dire bears, dire badgers, how does this affect the ecological niche of wolves, bears and badgers? Would there be any normal ones left? Are the dires all eating dire rabbits and dire blackberries? Is that how dire Popeye gets his dire spinach? Conversely, would destructive magic cause worse and worse mutations farther up the food chain? Will you grow a third eye by eating dire wolf meat?

Need trophic chains even remain contiguous with a source of infinite energy flying about? If magic can sustain gigantic dragons, why not a forest devoid of herbivores, where the wolf shall lieth down with the chestnut in harmony? Do magic doggies poop?

Either way, the effect of magic on life would feed back into magic itself, and so on, generation by generation. That in turn would impact social structures. Just as with real-world agricultural revolutions, less labor requirement per caloric unit would shift more workers away from farming... and toward what? Plains-ape social structures are built around hunter-gathering and the need to manage breeding rights. Divination for paternity tests, evocation for population control (an 'acid splash' up the cooch oughta blast the parasite right out of her uterus; 5gp at your nearest midwife (10gp extra for the cure light wounds)) enchantment to impose obedience on children and decrease the monstrous cost of caregiving (no need to spend half an hour re-reading pokey little puppies for every kid; 6 seconds for a sleep spell can take care of an entire creche, assuming you bunk the beds right) and who'd pick up dog shit raising the beasts when you can just summon them from hell?

 

An infinite supply of social engineering would create something more novel than a medieval anytown!

 

But even if that's not your cuppa, then admit at least most fantasy world gimmicks would make no sense. Every RPG is full of the "tomb of suchensuch" - who the hell buries instead of cremating when zombies are real? And would maggots evolve to preserve zombie muscle and tendons intact so they can run their corpsey carriage around dispersing the insects as they pupate? You could implement zombies literally farting butterflies in your game, with all the justification you'll never have for a SciFi fire elemental!

Or take wizardly creations released into the wild. A lab-grown monstrousity might look impressive, but it could easily lack the adaptations and instincts to actually function out in nature. Imagine tracking the mighty owlbear to the forest it invaded... only to find it cowering in fear of windblown pines' motion, starving to death because it doesn't know what acorns and blackberries are and being bled dry by ticks like a ghost moose, especially if clerics have been casting spells of eternal summer and fomenting climate change!

Or take a spell of eternal night. Even if you hand-wave the photosynthesis angle, the lack of light would favor invasion by nocturnal or cave-dwelling species. Your lush mountain streambank, shrouded in dim starlight for a lifetime, would look even more memorable with bleached, blind cave fish replacing the trout and bats out-competing eagles.

 

In only one respect, the pitfalls of a genie's wish, does such storytelling ever acknowledge repercussions.

 

Think it through!

This whole rant can be summed up as that very old, very exhausted, centennially-repeated plea to purveyors of "speculative" fiction: do try to actually speculate instead of rehashing primitive power fantasies. When magazines like Astounding and Galaxy revived the genre of Science Fiction in the mid-20th century, it was by doing exactly that: thinking it through. First by realizing that new technologies worked differently than medieval jousting and something like beta radiation cannot be substituted for simply hitting things with a stick, then by addressing how such differences would affect the human condition. Can't you do that for fantasy?

 

Umm... well, no, I don't think you can. Improve fantasy's coherence and causality and eventually it simply becomes SF with old-timey period-piece trappings. As I've said so many times, SF is a bottom-up build-up of causality whereas Fantasy mimicks the top-down law-giving of religious infantilism, where things work simply because some omnipotent mommy and daddy up in the clouds (or a mean big brother bully down below) want them to work a certain way. Substitute "fate" or "cosmic balance" or some nebulous "will of magic" or "the force" for a more watered-down version. The genre's fans like it that way. It carries a primal, visceral (or primitive and scatological, depending on your viewpoint) appeal. And I doubt you've got enough time before civilization wholly collapses to grace myth with hard F however that may look.

 

But where overlap occurs, I'm sick of seeing it skew eternally in favor of the lower brow. I once said "Magitek can work for elevating primitive supernatural thinking via at least a veneer of rationality. Its reverse, science fantasy, wears thin much faster for degrading a presumably rational setting to primitive, infantile thought patterns." Even if Fantasy as a genre cannot be improved, at least on a small scale can you not occasionally improve one or ten particular fantasies by thinking them through?