Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 73

Chosen US Cover

To match up with the UK cover I posted a little while back, here’s the US cover of Alex Verus #4, Chosen!

 

They seem to be cycling through the colours of the rainbow, one per book.  I’m going to see if I can get them to choose green for the next one.

On the subject of the US, the Comicon trip is booked and confirmed.  I’ll be flying out to NY come October!

Encyclopaedia Arcana #52: Advanced Divination (Part Five)

A little-known fact about divination magic is that it is divided into two subtypes.  Both have gone by differing names over the centuries, but nowadays are most commonly referred to as Apollonian and Dionysian divination, although few would recognise the terms.  The two techniques are not mutually exclusive – nearly all diviners have at least some talent for both – but most show a marked preference for one over the other.

The Distant Archer

Apollonian divination is by far the better-known type of divination, and for most mages is the only type of divination they know anything about at all.  All of the previous four parts of this article have been describing Apollonian techniques, and most of the iconic abilities of divination magic – precognition, path-walking, danger sense – are Apollonian in origin.

Apollonian divination is rational, ordered, and impersonal.  It teaches that the universe is an essentially understandable place which can be analysed and predicted through the application of divination magic.  Since the universe is understandable, the Apollonian approach emphasises that a diviner should be able to spread their intake of data (to absorb as much raw information as possible) while also developing the ability to narrow their perception (to focus on specific chains of events into order to precisely predict them).  Apollonian divination perceives events from afar, in order to see them more clearly, and diviners who follow the Apollonian model often develop a degree of disconnection from their visions of the future, even when they’re watching their own fate.

Apollonian spells tend to be very good at predicting machines, natural forces, and physical events that follow a primarily deterministic pattern.  They’re less good with people and other living creatures (note that ‘less good’ doesn’t mean ‘bad’ – they’re still a powerful tool).  The main drawback to Apollonian divination is that it’s completely unable to foresee the future once enough complicating or unpredictable elements enter the picture, meaning that for any event involving other people there’s an effective hard cap to how far Apollonian divination can see.

Self-discipline is very important to an Apollonian diviner.  They take in vast amounts of information, yet strive to order it rather than letting it wash over them.  As a result, Apollonian diviners tend to be mentally organised and self-controlled.

In Vino Veritas

Dionysian divination works on a very different model from its partner.  It holds that the universe is an essentially mysterious place that can never be fully understood.  Dionysian divination is murky, unpredictable, and above all, personal – what one diviner sees with it will be very different from the visions of another.

The methods and techniques of Dionysian divination are poorly understood compared to Apollonian ones.  Dionysian lore has traditionally been oral, passed down from master to apprentice and rarely recorded in books – Dionysian diviners tend to believe that the essence of divination can only be understood by practice, and written guides are misleading.  In addition, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw sporadic attempts by factions within the Council to suppress Dionysian techniques.  As a result, what Dionysian diviners can do is better known than how they do it (which isn’t saying much).

Interview with The Bookbag

Just realised that this interview went up a month ago and I never linked to it!  Oops.  Well, better late than never, so here it is.  It’s an interview with the Bookbag’s Ani Johnson, talking about the Alex Verus series, my writing influences, as well as the world of the Verus books (plus Alex’s love-life).

Encyclopaedia Arcana #51: Advanced Divination (Part Four)

Divination can be used for more than combat and social interaction – it also helps with movement and with certain types of codebreaking.

Second Sight

By focusing their vision into the short-term future, diviners can sense their surroundings.  They observe the various futures in which they move in different directions, and see what happens.  Some directions end in a collision, others are unobstructed, and by piecing together the different possibilities a diviner can assemble a mental map of an area.

Diviners can’t literally see in the dark.  They wouldn’t be able to sense “there are a bunch of Lego blocks on my bedroom floor” – instead what they’d sense is that walking barefoot in that direction leads to sudden pain, hopping on one leg, swearing violently, and falling over.  This means they can’t, for instance, read in pitch darkness, as all they’d see would be varying futures of them staring blindly at nothing in particular.  However, they can sense things that wouldn’t be visible to the eye even in broad daylight – if the floorboards ahead were rotten and about to break, they’d see themselves crashing through them if they walked in that direction.  This particular ability makes diviners quite good at climbing, leaping, and similar feats of physical agility, as they can sense whether a handhold is stable, whether they can clear a jump, and so on.

The same technique, slightly modified, is also useful for stealth.  It’s easy for a diviner to tell whether a particular action will set off an alarm, and by the same token it’s only slightly harder for a diviner to tell whether a particular action will attract somebody’s notice.  Diviners who practice this skill learn to categorise futures in terms of whether they’ll be detected, visualising the possible futures in terms of areas of movement;  these directions will lead to detection, these ones won’t.  Of course, this is limited by the diviner’s ability to perceive whether they’ll be detected – if the consequences of detection aren’t immediately obvious, the diviner will have to look further into the future to tell whether they’ve escaped notice or not, which narrows their focus.

One of Many

The stealth abilities of diviners lead in to one of their signature tricks – the ability to pick out correct solutions out of a great number of possibilities, which makes them very good at guessing codes and passwords.

The problem with path-walking is its narrow focus – you can only study one future at a time.  This is fine when you only have two or three choices to pick between (such as which direction to turn in) but is less effective when you have thousands or millions of choices (such as inputting a code).  The solution is a specific subtype of precognition, grouping futures to pick out the one desired.  If a certain group of futures are similar enough, it’s possible to group an almost unlimited number of them together, matching like with like.  The futures that aren’t identical stand out against the crowd – it’s like spotting one white thing in the middle of a thousand black things.  This only works if the ‘wrong’ futures are almost identical – one ‘access denied’ message from a wrong password is the same as any other, but one wrong person looks completely different from another wrong person.

Divination in codebreaking is a complex subject, and there are various tricks and counter-tricks designed to make a system impregnable to diviners (and others designed to let a diviner access just such a system).  Further details are beyond the scope of this article, and will be covered elsewhere.

Ask Luna #8

From: Claire

This is probably going to sound like a really boring question in comparison with all the others, because the rest are either really intelligent or just cool, but anyway… 

So Alex spends half the time fighting the forces of evil and generally being epic, and the other half he… well I don’t really know what he does. I mean he hardly ever opens the shop, so what does he do for money? Does he have some sort of innate power that only mages can tap into that allow him to hypnotise everyone in to believing he’s paid the rent? And if so could he teach me? Just realised, I’ve asked three questions in this thing haven’t I? Four, dammit! Sorry!

Don’t worry about it – it made me laugh!

Alex does actually open the shop pretty often, like four or five days a week.  I guess if you listen to the stories it sounds less common than that, but that’s because you’re not getting the boring bits, just the highlight reel.  Sometimes whole weeks go by without anything unusual happening (okay, not often, but we do get SOME quiet weeks).  

Still, you’re basically right – what with the days he misses and everything else, the shop doesn’t really make much money.  It’d make more if Alex sold the really powerful/expensive items, but he says he doesn’t want to and I kind of understand why.  The real way Alex supports himself is . . . well, let’s say he uses his magic a slightly more direct way.  I probably shouldn’t spell it out in public, but here’s a hint:  what depends on short-term probability and has a lot of money changing hands on short notice?  (If you want more details, you’ll have to wait ‘till September.)

Most mages use their magic to make money, rather than earning themselves a living the normal way.  It’s kind of what you’d expect really.

From: Orion

Dear Luna,

in regards to your luck magic, how does it compare to a chance mage?

is their magic more powerful or controlled and would they have the ability to counteract your magic?

I’ve never hung out with another chance mage long enough to know for sure, but from what I’ve learned I think I’d be able to match them, at least when it comes to what I can do.  From what Alex has told me most chance mages don’t go in for fighting, so what with the amount of practice I’ve gotten in over the last year or two I might actually be stronger than them when it comes to my fortune shield/curse.  

The downside is that while I might be able to beat a chance mage at the one thing I can do, they’d have a lot more things that THEY could do, and some of them might work for counteracting my curse.  That’s the problem with adepts and mages.  You can be better than them at one thing, but they’ll always have more options than you will.

From: Orion

Dear Luna,

I was wondering how imbued items are made, such as alex’s cloak?

Haven’t a clue.  Well, okay, I know ONE way that obviously worked, but since that involved the mage dying and putting himself in the item, it’s kind of got its drawbacks.  

As for making them the non-suicidal way . . . well, Arachne can do it, but I don’t know how.  Mind you, I don’t know how she does any of her other tricks either.  

Your name is sounding really familiar, by the way.  Do you keep writing in with these questions, or—

From: Orion

Dear Luna, 

I was wondering how magical constructs are made? and do you know what time of mages Talisid, Morden and lyle are?

—guess that answers that.  

For constructs – no clue.  It’s only the older mages who seem to do it.  

Morden is supposed to be a death mage, but I’ve never seen him in action, so I don’t know for sure.  Lyle’s an enchanter.  No idea about Talisid, he keeps his cards very close to his chest.  

Fantasy in the Court Tomorrow

Just a reminder that I’ll be at Fantasy in the Court tomorrow evening at Goldsboro Books, from 6pm to 9pm (or whenever I get there)!  A bunch of other authors will be there too, including Ben Aaronovitch, Mike Carey, and Francis Knight (the full list is here), and I think everyone’ll be signing books – if you’re in the area, come and say hi!

Once that’s done, I’m off to a LARP event for the Easter Bank Holiday weekend.  Weather forecast is . . . not good, so hopefully I’ll make it back on Monday without freezing to death.  Having to be thawed out would really mess up my schedule for the current book.

Encyclopaedia Arcana #50: Advanced Divination (Part Three)

The last entry studied the use of path-walking in divination:  this entry will look at its short-ranged counterpart, precognition.

Broad Focus

Like most divination spells, precognition is more of a mental technique than a magical one.  It functions in the opposite way from path-walking:  instead of looking at one future in the long-term, precognition looks at a lot of futures in the very short term.  The goal with precognition is to gain a limited and superficial impression of all your short-term futures, gaining a vague idea of what’s most likely to happen in the next few seconds.

The obvious problem with this is that all the short-term futures are different.  Trying to look at each one individually is a hopeless task:  in the time it took to study even a tiny fraction of them, events would have moved on and all the futures would have shifted again.  Instead, what precognition does is look for common elements in the futures.  You don’t look at a future in detail:  you sort futures in bulk according to whether they have a certain easily recognisable element or not.

Assembling a Pattern

The best parallel for precognition is the way the eye sees colour.  If you see a pattern of a hundred red tiles and a hundred blue tiles, you can lean in and study one tile in detail . . . but you can also look at the pattern as a whole, seeing the shape it makes.  The eye easily picks out things of a certain shade:  if you have a collection of a hundred blue things on a red background that spell out a giant letter then you don’t have to look at them one at a time to figure out what the letter is, you just read it.

Precognition works the same way.  The diviner trains his inner eye to ‘see’ the element he’s looking for in the same way that a normal person searches for red or blue or green.  The thousands of possible futures make a mosaic, and by stepping back and looking at the overall shape rather than the individual tiles the diviner can see the pattern.  Some futures are good, some are bad:  by backtracking the diviner can figure out what he needs to do to end up somewhere in the middle of the good ones.

Knowing what to look for takes practice, however – developing precognition to any useful degree requires the diviner to spend a significant amount of time training their mind’s eye to pick out one particular thing.  For diviners with an adventurous streak, the first thing they train themselves to detect with precognition is usually danger.

Spider Sense

Defensive precognition is a signature ability of diviners, and for good reason:  it’s very effective at what it does.  A diviner trained in defensive precognition is constantly looking into the short-term futures, searching for threats.  Any kind of serious attack registers on the precognition as a spread of futures showing threat and injury, and the diviner instinctively alters their actions to move themselves into the futures where they’re not hurt.  As long as the diviner is paying attention and as long as there are available futures in which they aren’t hurt, then they can keep themselves safe.  A diviner can run back and forth across a highway blindfolded, cars zipping by at eighty miles an hour and missing them by inches, without the slightest danger – to bystanders it just looks like outrageously good luck, but from the diviner’s point of view luck’s got nothing to do with it.  They know which way safety lies, and they go towards it.

For all its power, defensive precognition has limits.  The degree to which a diviner can see danger is limited by their skill at sorting futures and the speed at which they can process information – they might see a threat too late to respond in time, or they might just not be paying attention and miss it.  There’s also the issue that the usefulness of precognition depends on the diviner being able to take some kind of action that reduces the danger.  When every possible action leads to the same danger, precognition isn’t terribly effective:  if you’re next to a bomb with three seconds on the timer, then all precognition will tell you is “you’re about to be blown into tiny pieces.”  But for all its limitations, defensive precognition is powerful, and a trained diviner is very hard to hurt.

Goldsboro Books 28th March

I’m going to be at the Fantasy in the Court event this Thursday 28th March.  It starts at 6pm and runs to 9 or so.  Should have some signed copies too if anyone wants one!

Encyclopaedia Arcana #49: Advanced Divination (Part Two)

There are many ways of using divination magic, each with their advantages and disadvantages.  This entry and the next will look at two of the extremes:  the very narrow (path-walking) and the very broad (precognition).

Narrow Focus

Path-walking is generally considered to be the second-longest-ranged ability available to diviners.  It’s also one of the most difficult, and requires an extremely delicate touch.

Path-walking can be best described as stringing together a very long chain of if-then conditions.  Normal divination just looks at a single possibility:  if I open that door, what happens next?  Path-walking keeps going:  it looks at what would happen if you open the door, then walk down the corridor, then turn left, then open the door at the end, then look along the shelves, and so on.  It’s a lot like assembling a chain one link at a time.

The main disadvantage to path-walking is that it only works as long as every link in the chain is formed out of a predictable event.  Any significant concentration of chaos or unpredictability is an impenetrable barrier:  you can path-walk up to an unpredictable part of the future, but you can’t path-walk beyond it.  It would be like crafting the next link out of sand:  as soon as you put any weight on it it would collapse.  This is why a diviner can see up to unpredictable situations, but can’t see beyond them in any kind of detail.

The length of time into the future that a diviner can path-walk is limited by the diviner’s skill and by the total uncertainty of all the links in the chain.  Even if each link is mostly predictable, the total uncertainty will eventually accumulate to the point where no further information can be gathered:  it’s like building a tower out of uneven blocks.  Small imperfections in the construction multiply until the whole thing falls apart.

(The observant reader will note that for this reason, path-walking is largely useless if the diviner is in an unpredictable situation already.  There’s no way to build a chain since you can’t get a stable first link.)

Clarity of Vision

The best way for a diviner to minimise the limitations of path-walking is to place themselves in a highly predictable and stable environment.  Out in a busy street, a path-walking diviner would be lucky to see a few minutes ahead:  in the middle of a crowd they’d be lucky to see a few seconds.  But if they’re alone in a house then there’s very little to disturb them.  A room with a closed door and windows is a very stable environment:  you can leave it for months without any significant change.  It’s not timeless, of course – nothing in life is – but the changes are very, very small, enough to make an exceptionally good divining platform.  In situations like this, a diviner can predict quite long chains of events with extremely high accuracy, so long as they don’t go beyond the static area.

Human Contact

Despite the obvious problems, path-walking has some application to conversation.  A diviner can’t predict the entirety of an interaction with another human being (not unless the person in question is so set in their ways that they make a plant look responsive) but they can get a decent prediction of the first thing the person is likely to do.  So a diviner can figure out, for instance, which of a series of conversational openers is likely to work best, so long as the target’s reaction to those openers would be immediately obvious.

A diviner who’s really good can continue using the same technique during a conversation, constantly looking ahead to observe the futures as they shift with each exchange.  This is much like driving your car through city streets at rush hour while simultaneously navigating on a GPS phone which keeps updating every few seconds.  Still, it’s a handy trick, so long as you don’t mind the occasional crash.

Chosen UK cover release!

The UK cover for Chosen is out!  Provisional release date is 5th September 2013, assuming you’re in the UK (the Americans get it slightly earlier).  Here’s a first look: