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Encyclopaedia Arcana #59: Normals and Magic (Part Five)

The final part of this series will look at the ways in which a normal’s attitudes towards magic can change.

The Shallows and the Depths

Most apprentices (and more mages than should really be the case) view the categories of normal and sensitive as fixed and unchanging, like whether you’re born with blue or brown eyes.  The reality is more complicated – like most distinctions in magic, the categories of normal and sensitive are continuous ones.  There’s no clear point at which a normal stops being a normal and starts being a sensitive, just a gradual shift.

Imagine a swimming pool.  The deep end is very deep, so much so that you’re very unlikely to ever reach the bottom, while the shallow end is only a few inches.  Since the deep end has so much more volume, it contains a lot more water, although most of that water is hidden beneath the surface.  By comparison, the shallow end contains very little.  The shallow end of the pool is the sensitives, and the deeps are the normals.

Normals from the deep end are the ones who are completely unable to perceive magic.  Sensitives from the shallow end are the ones who can sense magic just fine, and are going to perceive it regardless of whether anyone shows it to them or not.  Then you have all the people in between, who aren’t one extreme or the other.  The interesting question is:  can you move around in the pool?

The short answer is “yes, but”.  It can happen, but there are forces that work against it.

Open Your Eyes

The most common way in which normals move towards the more “magic-y” end of the pool is by gradual exposure.  The more time a normal spends around magical effects, adepts and mages, and the accessories of magic, the more they tend to absorb the associated way of looking at the world.  Even just hanging around with those who can perceive magic, such as sensitives, can have an effect.  A normal who does this isn’t going to suddenly start casting spells, but they can slowly learn to perceive some of what sensitives do.

This, however, assumes that they want to perceive what sensitives do.  The simple fact is that in the vast majority of cases, if a normal doesn’t want to become more sensitive, no-one’s going to make them.  Learning to sense magic (and developing the ability once you have it) takes time and effort, generally for no very obvious reward.  It doesn’t help that most normals tend to find sensitives and adepts weird at best and actively disturbing at worst.

Another thing to consider is numbers.  Adepts are rare, and mages are rarer still.  Statistically, most normals are not going to grow up sharing any kind of close relationship with anyone able to use magic, even if adepts and mages were equally distributed throughout the population and equally likely to hang out with normals as they are with each other (which they’re not).  With no-one to act as a pointer towards the magical world, there’s little likelihood that a normal without a connection to it is going to get one.  As they age they become more set in their ways, and correspondingly less likely to seek out something new.

Shock Treatment

Every now and again a mage or adept will (for one reason or another) want to explain the magical facts of life to a normal.  As mentioned above, the best way to do this is gradually and incrementally, over months or years.  In practice, relatively few mages are likely to have a sufficient supply of time and motivation to do this.  For those in a hurry or less inclined to diplomacy, there’s always the direct approach.

The direct approach has the merit of being fast.  If applied with sufficient vigour, it’s also quite effective at getting a normal’s attention.  The downside is that introducing said normal to the magical world in this manner tends to have negative psychological consequences.  Most normals will react to visible spellcasting with disbelief – breaking through that disbelief usually requires extreme measures, enough to push said normal all the way through “disbelief” and out the other side into “unrestrained panic”.  When the panic wears off, the normal is as likely to pass the whole thing off as a hallucination or mental breakdown as anything else.

If the mage persists, it’s possible that they’ll forcibly relocate the normal into a “shallower” category.  However, it’s just as likely that the normal will respond with fear, hostility, or both.  Such reactions may be entirely justified – even aside from the obvious reasons to be scared of magic-users, a normal who does make the radical mental shift to come to believe in magic is likely to have trouble readjusting to their ordinary life afterwards.  In many cases they really are better off not knowing.

Chosen Chapter 1 Online!

You can now read the first chapter of Chosen here on this site!  The full novel will be coming out on September 5th in the UK, and on August 27th in the US.

And for those who haven’t started the series yet but are thinking of getting into it, the UK edition of Fated is still on sale at the Kindle Store for all this month – as I’m writing this it’s #1 in Contemporary Fantasy !

News!

Three big bits of news today!

Firstly, the ebook edition of Fated is on special offer at the Amazon UK Kindle Store.  It’s been picked for their ’100 books under £2.99′ deal, and for all this month of July it’ll be on sale for only £1.49.  So if you know anyone who might be interested in getting into the series before Chosen comes out in September, now’s the time!

Second, Alex Verus #5 is finished!  (Last night, in fact, and no, it doesn’t have a title yet.)  Yes, I know, you guys haven’t read #4 (Chosen) yet, but that’s the way the publishing business works.  The important thing is that it’s done and delivered on schedule, meaning that it should be coming out in a year or so.  Next summer would be my guess, though don’t quote me on that.

And third, with the release of Chosen only a couple of months away, I’m going to be posting the first chapter in the Extracts section this Friday, so check back then for a first look at the next Alex Verus adventure!

Big News Next Week!

No Encyclopaedia Arcana this Friday.  I’ve got one more entry in the Normals and Magic scheduled, but I’m going to hold off on posting it for a couple of weeks – instead I’ve got three bits of big news to share.

Unfortunately I can’t tell you what they are, because for a variety of reasons I have to keep them secret until Monday.  (Most of them, anyway.  One of the bits of news I’m going to have to sit on for a while longer.)  On Monday I can tell you though, so I’ll have a post going up next week telling the story!

Well, back to work.  Lots to do . . .

Encyclopaedia Arcana #58: Normals and Magic (Part Four)

Continuing from the previous entry, this part will look at some of the other kinds of normals.  It’s worth stressing once again that given the enormous variance of the normal population, all of these categories are very broad generalisations and only cover the respective group’s attitude towards magic.

Insensitive, Narrowly Credulous

For every widely credulous normal, there are many more who’ll believe some impossible things but not others.  They might be hard-headed in most respects, but in some particular area they’re more likely to listen and they’ll accept explanations that they’d reject out of hand if they came from anywhere else.  In most cases, from a mage’s point of view, this doesn’t matter much.  Just because a normal’s more likely to believe something if it’s justified as a religious miracle (or psychic powers, or a political conspiracy, or super-science, or whatever) that doesn’t make them functionally very different.

Every now and again, though, you get a normal who doesn’t believe in most out-there stuff but who does believe in magic.  They’re rare by normal standards, but since normals outnumber everyone else by such a huge margin that still makes for a lot of them.  Without a sensitive’s abilities they can’t perceive magic directly, but they can figure things out the ordinary way.

These types of normals often gravitate towards those religions with magical traditions, such as Wicca or druidism.  Those with a more investigative bent frequently unearth evidence of mage society and magical creatures, and there’s a small but widespread community of them who meet privately and online to share information about the magical world.  Much of what they ‘know’ is wrong, but some of their conclusions are surprisingly accurate.

Narrowly Sensitive, Credulous

Blurring the line between sensitive and normal are the narrowly sensitive.  They can sense one or several types of magic (perhaps even a whole family) but not others.  It’s still possible for them to have the same psychological aversion to magic that normals do, although it’s less common.  Narrowly sensitive people are more common than full sensitives, but they’re still rare, outnumbered at least ten to one by full normals.

Widely credulous, narrowly sensitive people end up being more or less indistinguishable from widely credulous, insensitive ones.  Other normals can’t tell any difference at all.  From the point of view of a mage, the narrowly sensitive observer is more likely to notice when something genuinely magical is happening, but it’s unlikely that they’ll get anyone who isn’t also a credulous type to listen.  It’s not unknown for mages and adepts to strike up relationships with them, but it’s rare – more often they end up in the position of the crazy old aunt or uncle whom no-one really listens to, even though now and then they’re the only one who can see that something’s going on.

Narrowly Sensitive, Skeptical

Being narrowly sensitive doesn’t necessarily make a person easily convinced or trusting.  Knowing that a small fraction of reports of magic are true can just as easily make one impatient with the false ones – once you’ve experienced the real thing, it’s hard to take the substitutes seriously.

Skeptical, narrowly sensitive normals only have a small perspective into the magical world, but it’s a real one nevertheless, and it puts them a step ahead of even the most dedicated insensitive.  By the same token, the fact that they’re only narrowly sensitive means that they tend to have much more in common with skeptical normals than full sensitives do.  This – coupled with the fact that mages tend to get on much better with narrowly sensitive but skeptical normals than they do with credulous ones – means that the members of this group often end up acting as the bridge between normals and the magical world.

Of all the six categories looked at over the past two entries, this group is the smallest, yet from the point of view of the magical world perhaps the most important.  From the doctor who knows when to call in a life mage to treat an otherwise hopeless case, to the detective who acts as liason between the Keepers and the regular police, these are the people who span the gap between the mages and adepts of the Council bureaucracy and the great structures and organisations of the mundane world.  Their influence isn’t as obvious as that of the mages, but they tend to be the ones who keep things running from day to day.

Interviewed and Interviewing with Francis Knight

Two interviews this week, both with Francis Knight, author of the Rojan Dizon books.  I met her at a convention in 2012 and later found out that we were going to share a publisher – her Fade to Black was published by Orbit last year!  In the first interview I interview Francis, in the second one she interviews me.

In other news, August/September is starting to draw near, which means the release date of Chosen!  Right now I’m spending all my time finishing Alex Verus #5, but come next month I’ll be starting to put up some samples.

Encyclopaedia Arcana #57: Normals and Magic (Part Three)

Normals are not a homogenous mass, and while they share the trait of being unable to perceive magic (well, mostly) they vary in just about every other way.  It’s worth looking briefly at some of the more obvious subcategories of how normals behave towards the magical.

As a very rough approximation, normals can be categorised along two axes:  how skeptical or credulous they are, and their degree of sensitivity or insensitivity to magic.

Insensitive, Skeptical

These are the normals that mages tend to think of when they use the word ‘normal’ – or to be more accurate, they’re the closest match to the stereotype that mages have of them.  The popular conception is of the rationalist, skeptical normal, who believes in science and positivism and is scornful of anything mystical or fantastic.

The stereotype is a little inaccurate.  While some normals do match this reputation, the skeptical rationalists are in reality a very definite minority, though an influential one.  They tend to be from the ‘deep end’ of the normal pool, making them even more difficult than usual to convince of anything magical, and they’re the main reason that the Council has so little trouble maintaining the secrecy of magic.

Since false reports of magic and other supernatural occurrences vastly outnumber true ones, this means that when skeptical normals dismiss claims of magic, they’re right far more often than they’re wrong (which further reinforces their own beliefs in turn).

Insensitive, Neutral

The majority of normals fall somewhere in the middle of the skepticism axis.  They’re unlikely to believe in magic, but they’re not ideologically committed to disproving its existence either.  People like this tend to have room in their worldview for supernatural things of some kind – they might not actively believe in them, but they’re usually willing to entertain the possibility that there might be something there.

However, there’s a big difference between entertaining a possibility and taking it seriously.  A normal might read a story about fire mages controlling heat and flame and not automatically disbelieve it, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to have any effect on how they act in everyday life.  If their house catches fire, they’re not going to go looking for a fire mage, they’re going to call the fire service.  Likewise, if they do happen to see something magical, they’re easily convinced by a mundane explanation.  It’s possible to make these kinds of normal half-believe in magic, at least temporarily, but it generally doesn’t stick.

Insensitive, Widely Credulous

Not all normals are skeptical and rational.  Some are the exact opposite.

In any society there are a certain fraction of people who believe in stuff that is, for want of a better word, questionable – astrology as a predictor of daily life, ghosts and hauntings, memories of past lives, witchcraft, and many, many others.  Sometimes these beliefs have something to them, but as a general rule the conviction with which they’re held is completely unrelated to the likelihood of their being true.  Credulous normals believe a lot of things, and they’re usually keen to share them.

Mages tend to avoid widely credulous normals.  While they’re more likely to believe in magic, it’s not because they’re perceptive, it’s just because they have really low standards.  They usually make a bad impression on anyone who doesn’t share the same traits, and mages dislike being lumped in with the con-men, quacks, and frauds that cater to these people.  On top of that, it’s quite possible for a normal to have this mindset and yet still have the same aversion to magic as the skeptics – which means that they’ll believe absolutely every paranormal explanation out there except the one that’s actually true.  Most mages find this intensely irritating.

Nine Worlds this August

I’m going to be at Nine Worlds Con this August 9th-11th!  Events are still being scheduled but I should be doing a panel and a reading or so.  Lots of authors I know are going to be there, so it looks like fun – the fact that it’s in Heathrow and so I only have to take the Underground instead of going cross-country by rain helps too!

Encyclopaedia Arcana #56: Normals and Magic (Part Two)

So what is the explanation for why magic goes largely undetected?  The answer lies in the difference between normals and sensitives.

Normal Distribution

Normals make up the vast majority of the human population of the world.  The exact proportion is hard to settle on, since there isn’t a clear cut-off between normals and sensitives – it’s a continuum rather than a hard division.  Stricter definitions of sensitive place the normal population as high as 99%, while more lenient ones put the fraction of normals at 80%-90%, with a ‘in-between’ group of sensitive normals occupying most of the remaining 10%-20%.  All mages, however, agree that normals are dominant.

Normals are physically, physiologically, and genetically similar to sensitives, adepts, and mages as far as any test has been able to establish.  Normals aren’t aware of the distinction, and in fact have little reason to believe that there’s any distinction in the first place.  Nevertheless normals are quite different from sensitives, and this difference lies in how they perceive the world.

A Normal Point Of View

The distinguishing feature of normals – what makes them normals rather than sensitives – is their inability to perceive magic.  Sensitives can pick up rudimentary magical auras:  they can’t analyse them in the detail that a mage could, but they can generally sense when something magical is going on.  Normals can’t.  It’s like being blind, except that instead of just being unable to perceive magic, this manifests as an active aversion to perceiving or recognising it.

What this means in practice is that when brought into contact with magic, a normal will come to some explanation that doesn’t require accepting the existence of magic as a premise (i.e. an incorrect one).  It doesn’t matter what they see, hear, or are told, the conclusion they’ll come to will almost never be “that was magic”.  In fact, they’ll believe virtually any other explanation before they’ll believe the magic one, even ones that are so patently ridiculous that the existence of magic starts to look quite sensible in comparison.

Novices tend to have a hard time accepting this.  The common objection is something along the lines of “but if you just cast a fireball they’ll have to believe it then”.  The answer is “no, they won’t”.  This comes up often enough that it’s worth going into in detail, so we’ll examine the following hypothetical exchange between a normal and an (increasingly frustrated) novice fire mage.

Fire Bad

• Approach #1: Honesty

Mage:  “So, I can cast fire spells.”

Normal:  “Sure you can, buddy.”

• Approach #2: Testimony

Mage:  “Here are ten other people who’ll tell you I can cast fire spells.”

Normal:  “So what, they’re all part of some sort of cult?”

• Approach #3: Visual Evidence

Mage:  “Here’s a picture of me casting a fireball.”

Normal:  “Did you draw it or did you use Photoshop?”

• Approach #4: Video Evidence

Mage:  “Here’s a video of me casting a fireball.  Twice.”

Normal:  “Wow, the special effects on that movie are really good.”

• Approach #5: Eyewitness Evidence

Mage:  “Okay, I’m going to blow up those boxes with a fireball right in front of you.  You watching?”

*BOOM*

Normal:  “Cool!  Was that some sort of bomb, or a flamethrower, or what?”

Mage:  “I just told you, it was a spell.”

Normal:  “No, seriously, what was it?”

• Approach #6: Repeated Eyewitness Evidence

Mage:  “That’s three fireballs, two flame blades, and I just used a blowtorch on my hand.  Do you believe me yet?”

Normal:  “Look, I admit this is impressive, but why don’t you tell me what you’re really doing?  Are you using some sort of high-tech stuff?”

Mage:  “No!  I’m casting spells!  What do I have to do to make you listen?”

Normal:  “Look, I know magic isn’t real, so whatever you’re doing must be something else.  Either it’s not real fire or you’re wearing asbestos or something.”

• Approach #7: Loss Of Temper

Mage:  “You think THAT’S not real fire?  You believe me NOW, asshole?”

Normal:  “AAGH!  I’M BURNING!  OH GOD, THE PAIN, THE PAIN!  MAKE IT STOP!”

Things generally go downhill from this point on.

Review Set: 3 of 3

A third set of 3 reviews of the Alex Verus series, this time from the site Sleepy Book Dragon!

Fated

Cursed

Taken

There have been quite a few reviews over the past few months . . . should probably get around to collecting them one of these days.  Although the novelty factor’s worn off I still enjoy reading them, particularly when they pick up on something that doesn’t usually get spotted.