Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 78

Encyclopaedia Arcana #33: Space Magic

Space magic gives control over location and distance, and space mages can bend, pierce, and manipulate space, allowing them to direct the movement of other people or objects and travel vast distances in the blink of an eye.  Although one of the less combat-focused types of magic, it has enormous utility.

The Shortest Distance Between Two Points . . .

The signature ability of space mages is teleportation.  While all elemental mages can gate, gating has significant limitations:  it requires the mage to know both his departure and destination points very well, it takes time, and it carries a small but significant risk of a nasty accident.  Teleportation bypasses these problems.  Although space mages can gate (better than elemental mages, in fact) teleportation has several advantages over gating:  it doesn’t require knowledge of the destination, it doesn’t carry the risk of cutting the mage in half, and it can be done in the blink of an eye.  Of course, it does come with its own trade-offs – teleportation doesn’t have the unlimited range of a gate, and while teleportation always works, it can still end up taking you somewhere you really don’t want to go – but it gives space mages an advantage that no-one else can match.

Not only can space mages travel, they can also prevent it.  Space mages can ‘harden’ the spatial fabric of a location, preventing it from being pierced or manipulated.  This is the origin of gate wards, which work against gate magic and teleportation alike.  While various rituals for the generation of gate wards have been developed over the centuries, it was space mages who first discovered them, and they’re still the best at it.  With a little time and motivation a space mage can make an area almost impenetrable to magical travel – though not to someone just walking in.

Eye Spy

Space mages with more finesse learn to create smaller and more precisely controlled gates that are only permeable to light.  This is generally referred to as scrying – although ‘spying’ might be more accurate.  A scrying portal allows a space mage to remotely view an area at a distance, and with practice sound can be transmitted as well, allowing for long-range communication (as well as eavesdropping).

Scrying does come with one major limitation – the mage still has to follow the principles of optics.  If he wants to see through the portal, then light rays have to actually pass through, which means that anyone he’s spying on can see him in return.  How the person in question will react to the sight of a pair of disembodied floating eyes is left as an exercise for the reader.

Bend, Fold, and Mutilate (Okay, Maybe Not The Last One)

The previous two sections only cover a tiny fraction of what space mages can do.  Space magic is a vast field, and the abilities of space mages include but are not limited to:  shrouding an area of space to make it unviewable, warping a section of space to create a ‘corridor’ within which the distance between two points is longer or shorter than it should be, bending space to cause a moving object or person to curve away from their destination while from their perspective they travel in a straight line, and even placing objects outside space entirely in a kind of miniature pocket dimension.

One thing space mages usually don’t do, however, is fight.  While space magic can be adapted to be used as a weapon, it’s not really what it’s designed for, and most space mages never learn any attack spells.  As a result, despite their power, space mages tend to be considered relatively harmless by other magic-users.  Of course, their lack of offensive power doesn’t make them defenceless by any means – it’s pretty hard to threaten someone who can blink himself to the other side of a wall.  Since they’re both very good at travelling and very hard to threaten, space mages often find a niche as ambassadors and couriers, ferrying messages, packages, and information between those who need the service and who can afford their (usually high) fees.

Off to FantasyCon

I’m off to Brighton for FantasyCon for Friday and Saturday!  Details are here.  A new Encyclopaedia article will post automatically tomorrow, and I’ll have more news next week.

Encyclopaedia Arcana #32: Magesight

The ability to see and analyse magic is one of the distinctive abilities of mages.  Although any sensitive can detect the presence of magic, when people refer to “magesight” they mean something more.

Seeing is Believing

All sensitives, adepts, and mages have at least a rudimentary ability to sense magic.  Many theorists believe that the ability to sense magic is the primary distinguishing factor between normals and the magically capable:  if you can’t tell that something exists, it’s hard to learn how to use it.

For most sensitives, adepts, and mages, the ability to sense magic begins at an early age.  They can perceive and take in a wider spectrum of information than normals:  mundane sensory impressions are mixed with something more.  Magical sensitivity is essentially a sixth sense, and learning how to interpret the information can be confusing, as it doesn’t naturally match up to any of the normal five.  In their early years, most children with magical talent sense magic in terms of emotion:  to them a place or a person or a time will feel strangely aggressive, or thoughtful, or wild.  Most adults will dismiss these stories as no more than children’s fancies, but to the more perceptive such accounts can provide an early indication of magical talent.

Most sensitives never learn exactly what it is they’re sensing:  they’re vaguely aware that they’re different, but they don’t know why.  For some, however, there’s a breakthrough, and at some point – usually in their childhood or early teens – they come to understand that what they’re perceiving isn’t just a feeling but real.  Once they’ve understood this, they can begin to specifically develop the ability.

Sight and Sense

Sensitivity to magic is a necessary condition for magesight, but it’s not a sufficient one.  Magesight gives vastly more information than the abilities of a sensitive – a sensitive can tell whether something is magical, but a mage can tell how it’s magical, along with the structure of the spells that created it, what type of magic it employs, and how it works.

Magesight isn’t just a talent – it’s a learned skill that requires practice.  In a lot of ways magesight is the foundation for all other spells, and a mage who can’t use magesight is like a writer who can’t read.  Apprentice mages spend an enormous amount of time developing their magesight, because it’s one of the best ways to learn other spells.  The better their skill with magesight, the more effectively they can analyse other mages’ spells and reproduce them.

Despite its name, magesight doesn’t have to involve sight:  it’s an entirely new sense, separate from the other five.  There does seem to be a natural tendency for mages to interpret the information visually – humans are vision-oriented creatures, and sight is their primary sense – but there are cases of mages who learn to perceive magic in an entirely different way, “hearing” or “smelling” it instead.  In all cases, since magesight isn’t actually dependent on the attached sense, it doesn’t have to obey the same rules.  Mages can “see” magic through solid objects, or “hear” it through barriers that block sound, though doing so is noticeably more difficult.

Through Distant Eyes

To a mage using magesight, the world looks like a very different place.  They see reality in the same way that we do, but the magical signatures of everything before them are overlaid upon their vision, providing an extra layer of information.  The exact visual representation depends on the mage, but the most common is to perceive magical energy as translucent light, its colour matching to the magic’s visual display.   The depth of detail is limited only by the mage’s proficiency:  more sensitive mages have to learn to limit their magesight to avoid being overwhelmed with more information than their minds can process.

A competent mage using their magesight can learn an enormous amount from watching a spell.  All mages have a distinctive style of spellcraft, and magesight reveals this:  a mage with a good memory can easily tell if a spell has been created by a mage he’s witnessed casting before, and he can make a good guess at its function and its weaknesses.  However, a mage who’s really good with magesight can go further.  Magic is shaped by its creator’s personality;  in a very real way, a spell is a reflection of its creator’s inner self, and studying it can give insights not only into the structure of the magic but also into the person who created it.  This, more than anything else, is the reason mages are careful about making use of their magic – knowledge is power, and you never know who might be watching.

FantasyCon next week!

I’m going to be at FantasyCon 2012 in Brighton on 28th and 29th September!

The current events I’m booked for are:

2pm-3pm Friday (Fitzherbert Room):  Blurring the Genre Boundaries

8pm-9:30pm Friday (Regency Lounge):  Mass Signing

10am-11am Saturday (Russell Room):  Fantasy Fiction: Keeping it Real?

8pm Saturday:  Reading

The con has events on the Thursday and Sunday as well, but I’ve got the deadline for Alex Verus #4 to meet, so I think I’ll just be there for the Friday/Saturday.  Hope to see some of you there!

Alex Verus: The Future

It’s been six months now since the first Alex Verus novel, Fated, was released.  I’ve done a lot of interviews since then and one of the most common questions I get asked is whether there’ll be more Alex Verus books after Taken.  I’ve been holding off on giving a proper answer, but now I can finally give one!

Fated was the first non-childrens book of mine to be published, but it wasn’t the first book I wrote – it was the tenth.  I’d had two books published before, the Ninja series, and they were books number four and five.  After the Ninja books I hit a slump, and the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth books I wrote were all rejected.  (For the curious, two were precursors to the Alex Verus series with a young adult heroes and an air mage main character, one was a story with no magic or supernatural elements set in an English university, and the last was a sci-fi story about a group of space fighters and their mothership making a journey home through the Earth orbitals during an intrasystem war.  No, they’ll probably never see the light of day.)

So when I finally sat down to write Fated, I wasn’t thinking in terms of a long series – in fact I wasn’t really expecting to get published at all.  I did have a certain amount of that perpetual optimism that all artists need to have to avoid going crazy (sure, everything else has been rejected, but maybe THIS one’ll work!) but experience told me the odds were low.  As a result there’s a lot of stuff in Fated that’s . . . well, not that serious.  In-jokes and references (most really obscure) and all kinds of bits and pieces that I lifted from other stories.  I could have hidden where they came from easily enough, but at the time I didn’t have any reason to – after all, it wasn’t as though anyone was going to read it, right?  The nod to the Dresden Files isn’t the only reference in Fated, and at the time I wrote it I never dreamt that I’d have a quote from Jim Butcher on the cover – it was just a throwaway joke.  (I’m still surprised that so many people notice it.)

Fast-forward two years and I was starting Cursed.  A lot happened in those two years.  Fated had been completely rewritten (it was originally set half in Camden and half in another world, but that’s another story), I’d spent half a year in China, gone to law school, and done a few other things.  Most importantly from a book point of view, I’d gotten contracts with both Orbit UK and Ace in the US for Fated, Cursed, and Taken.  I knew three books in the Alex Verus series were going to be coming out – but I didn’t know if any more were coming out.  Getting started as a debut author (which I effectively was, Ninja books or no) is a dicey business.  In the same year that I finished Cursed, another debut UF author, Harry Connolly, had his Twenty Palaces series cancelled.  (His contract was for three books, the same as mine, and he had a blurb from Jim Butcher and starred reviews from PW too.)

Partly as a result of this, I designed the first three Alex Verus novels on an episodic model.  The idea I had in mind was something along the lines of a TV series – things change and develop, but each episode is a self-contained story that doesn’t require you to have read the previous ones.  I’ve read lots and lots of reviews of the Alex Verus books, and one of the more common comments reviewers make is that so far there isn’t a dominating plot linking them.  By now you can probably figure out why they were written this way – there isn’t a dominating long-term plot yet because I wasn’t sure there’d be enough books to do it in!  (I’m kind of exaggerating here – there are long-term plot strands, especially in Taken, but they’re subtle and there’s no clearly established objective a la epic fantasy.)

So I kept writing, and I waited.

Which brings us up to the present, and the big news:  yes, there are going to be more Alex Verus books after Taken!  Sales have been good, enough so that Orbit and Ace have offered me a contract for two more books, Alex Verus #4 and #5.  (No, they don’t have titles yet.)  Right now I’m working on Alex Verus #4, and the first draft is about 85% – 90% done.  The bad news is that the provisional release date is September 2013 – yeah, I know, it’s a long time, but honestly, this is a fairly normal delay for this type of book.  The gap between my handing in the final draft of Fated and its publication was more like two or three years.  The good news is that at my current rate it takes me about nine months to write an Alex Verus novel, so the wait times should average out to less than a year rather than more . . .

. . . assuming there are enough Alex Verus novels, which is still to be determined.  :)  On the positive side, one thing I can tell you is that I’ve got absolutely no intention of stopping.  I love the Alex Verus setting and I love writing its characters and right now, as far as I’m concerned, I’m going to keep writing these books as long as I can keep selling them.  Alex Verus #4 and Alex Verus #5 are contracted for – after that, we’ll see.

One consequence of all this is that I can start to lay out some longer-term plans.  There is a long-term plot in the Alex Verus series, and from now on it’s going to start coming into the open.  Much of it is going to come out in Alex Verus #4, though observant readers will probably be able to predict the theme – there was always a natural direction for the story to go.

A question I occasionally get asked is how many Alex Verus books there are going to be.  There’ll definitely be an end – I’ve never planned to write one of those series that goes on and on forever – but it’s still far in the future.  If I had to pull a number out of the air I’d say something like 10-12, but that’s a wild guess, so don’t go treating it as gospel (not to mention that it depends on the books continuing to sell).

And that’s it!  Thanks to all of you who’ve been supporting the Alex Verus series by buying the books.  If all goes the way I’d like it to, I’ll be carrying on writing them for a long time!

Taken Reviews

Here’s the first batch of reviews for Taken!

Review from The Bookbag, by Ani Johnson

Review from SF Site, by Katherine Petersen

Review from All Things Urban Fantasy, by Kristina

And one from Under the Covers(requires a clickthrough).

There’s also an interview with Jessica Strider from the World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto – they did a nice display too!

Finally, I’ll be doing an announcement about the future of the Alex Verus series on Friday, so check in then!

Ask Luna #4

From: Hugh Lorrie

Hi Luna

Do mages recognise any form if religion? Do they have their own or do they belong to normal religions?

Normal religions, as far as I know.  I’ve never asked our teachers about it but Anne’s Christian and Vari’s Sikh.  

Apparently the Light mages used to have some kind of religion of their own, back in the Precursor time.  It was covered in a couple of our classes.  I wasn’t paying that much attention, but I got the impression it used to be a big thing for them.  It’s kind of faded away now, but a lot of the language still gets used in our rituals and stuff.  

From: peter jay

Luna

What can death and life mages do?

Also do mages have gods?

I think I did life mages last time, and I’m pretty sure there’s an Encyclopaedia article on that, so I’ll pass.  

The way I understand it, death mages are the combat nuts of the mage world.  Absolutely every spell they have is designed either to kill someone or get into a position to kill someone or keep yourself alive so you can kill someone.  Lots of elementalists can do combat, but they have some utility as well.  Death mages don’t, they kill things and they don’t do ANYTHING else.  They have kind of a bad reputation and there are definitely some who deserve it, but I’ve met a couple of death apprentices who seemed like decent guys.  I kind of liked them, actually, though I wouldn’t want to get on their bad side.  

Not sure what you mean about the gods thing.  If you mean are mages religious then yes, some of them.  If you mean do they have actual real gods that they talk to, then I hope not.  

From: Joe

Does the ability to work magic have any relation to ‘dark matter’?

I have no idea what dark matter is.  Okay, according to Wikipedia it’s “a type of matter in astronomy and cosmology hypothesised to account for a large part of the total mass in the universe”.  Okay then.

Honestly, I have no clue how that would relate to magic.  I’m going to say maybe?  

From: Lucy Kohan

Dear Luna,

Is life magic a part of living magic?

Also what are some other kinds of universal magic?? 

Yup, it’s a part of living magic.  Life and mind are the two really well-known ones

Other kinds of universal magic – divination, chance, space, and time are the ones that usually get named.  Force sometimes gets called universal but I think it’s supposed to be elemental.  I’m pretty sure gravity and magnetism are in there too, and there are a couple of light- and illusion-related ones.  Those are just the ones I know, though, there are dozens, but they start getting really obscure and there are some that are so rare that there are probably about six people in the whole world who can use them.  

From: Orion

Dear Luna,

What is a matter mage? And what are the limits on shapeshifting, does there have to be an equivalent of size when shapeshifting and can a mage transform into non biological things or mythical creatures?

Your name sounds kind of familiar.  Have you written in before?

Matter mages are supposed to be able to mess around with nonliving physical objects, but I’m not sure if they’re actually a type or if it’s a kind of subfamily.  I’ve heard people talk about ‘matter magic’ but all of the apprentices I’ve met who go in for it called themselves earth mages, not matter mages (I think there was one guy who was supposed to be a metal mage, whatever that is, but I never got the chance to talk to him).   

Shapeshifters are really rare and I’ve never met one – there are supposed to be some mental issues with keeping your identity.  I’ve never heard of them turning into giant dragons or anything like that so I guess there probably is some sort of size limit on it.  

Taken UK release!

And it’s finally here!  The UK edition of Taken is available for sale as of today, September 6th.

As always, you can buy it via this website, and the first chapter has been available for free for a month or two now.  A bunch of reviews have been going up too – I’ll collect a few for next week!

Finally, I’ve got a big announcement coming up about the future of the Alex Verus series, but I’ll wait to post that until next week, on Friday the 14th.  :)

Encyclopaedia Arcana #31: Mind Magic

Mind magic gives dominion over thoughts and memories.  It overlaps with charm magic, but while charm mages focus on feeling and emotion, mind mages specialise in controlling and interpreting conscious mental activity.  Mind mages are quite common and their magic is one of the more well-known and extensively studied of all the magic types.

All in the Mind

Mind spells are enormously varied.  Information-wise, mind magic can be used to read the surface thoughts of a subject, detect sentient creatures at a distance by sensing their consciousness, and even probe someone’s memories.  Other mind mages specialise in enhancement, boosting the cleverness, memory, or thinking speed of a subject.  More advanced spells are designed to enhance a person’s aptitude for a specific subject – in theory it’s possible to boost (for example) a person’s mathematical ability, though it’s always questionable how well it really works in the long term.  Mind magic can even be used for combat, stunning a target by overloading their senses or flooding their minds with pain, or even inflicting fatal injury through strokes or cerebral haemorrhages.

Perhaps the most feared ability of mind mages is their ability not to read minds, but control them.  A mind mage able to overcome the mental defences of a subject can suggest courses of action to them or even dominate them entirely, manipulating them like a puppet.  Some mind mages go one step further and possess another conscious creature, transplanting themselves into the target’s head while their victim watches helplessly.

However, while there have been mind mages who can do all of these things collectively, there’s probably never been a mind mage who can do all of them himself.  Mind is among the most diverse of all the magic types and it’s very common for two mind mages to have little to no overlap in their abilities.  As always, the types of spells a mind mage can use is tied to their personality:  those with a more perceptive bent tend to learn to sense and read thoughts, the more domineering ones focus on controlling them, and the academic types use their abilities for enhancement and cognitive research.

Mind Games

The abilities of mind mages tend to produce an understandable paranoia in those first told about them.  The prospect of someone who can not only read your thoughts but possess you outright is frightening, and many new apprentice fear mind mages as a result.  However, for all its power, mind magic has several limitations.

Firstly, the more strongly a mind mage influences somebody, the easier that influence is to detect.  Like charm magic, mind magic has no visual elements to give away when it’s being used, but unlike charm magic it can be easily picked up by magical senses.  This tends to make the more extreme uses of mind magic (such as domination and reprogramming) a bad idea for any mind mage who cares about being subtle:  such influence is obvious to the most casual scan, even without the major psychological side effects this kind of brutal treatment usually causes.

Secondly, while the more perceptive uses of mind magic are reliable, the suggestive uses aren’t.  Targets can resist mind-influencing magic with mental defence techniques, by getting out of the mind mage’s range, or simply by being strong-willed enough.

Finally, mind magic is generally inferior to other types in direct combat.  Yes, a mind mage can theoretically dominate another person or knock them unconscious, but anyone with quick enough reflexes can probably just shoot them first.  While this is rarely put to the test, it does mean that mind mages have to be much more careful than elementalists do.

Honest Politicians

Mind mages dominate mage politics in general and Light politics in particular.  Their ability to read thoughts gives them an enormous advantage in any social setting, and even without it they tend to have a good enough control over their own emotions that they give very little away that they don’t want to.  The commonly accepted wisdom in magical society is that when it comes to politics no-one can match a mind mage except a charm mage, and as a result other mages often find themselves forced to rely on enchanters and enchantresses as a counterbalance to mind mages even if they don’t particularly trust them either.

In personality mind mages vary widely, but tend to be both social and analytical.  They’re good with other people (at least when they want to be) but have a tendency to view them as tools rather than equals – the abilities of mind mages give an ever-present temptation to manipulate and control those around them rather than dealing with them honestly.  Some resist it, but many don’t, and the ones that don’t have given mind mages in magical society a similar reputation to that of politicians, lawyers, and used car salesmen in the mundane world.

Taken is released in the US today!

It feels like only a little while ago that Fated was coming out, but now book 3 in the Alex Verus series, Taken, is out in the US!

As always, you can read more about it here on the website and there’s an extract up too.

With Taken now out, we’re finally getting to the point where we’re almost up to date – I finished the last changes on Taken only a few months ago (whereas when Fated was released I hadn’t touched the thing for a year or more).  Right now I’m spending all my time on Alex Verus #4, but more on that later!