Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 79

Guide to the Tiger’s Palace

I’ve got a new piece up at All Things Urban Fantasy, as part of their Deadly Destinations series:  it’s a travel guide to the Tiger’s Palace, which features in the third Alex Verus novel, Taken (which comes out this week).  They’re doing a giveaway of Taken too, so go take a look!

Encyclopaedia Arcana #30: Force Magic

Force magic is the magic of direct physical movement.  While force spells are often referred to as constructions of kinetic energy, they are better understood in terms of momentum.  Force mages can redirect and alter the momentum of objects and creatures, allowing them to be moved, protected, or damaged.

There has been a long-standing argument among mages as to which family force magic should be classified under.  Momentum is a sufficiently abstract concept to suggest the universal family, and like other universal magic force spells are invisible to normal sight.  However, the shielding and attack spells that force mages employ have much more in common with elemental magic than the relatively indirect effects of universalists.  Perhaps the best way to resolve the issue is to realise that the family system by which mages classify magic types is essentially arbitrary – at the moment force magic is considered elemental, but there’s always the chance that mages will change their minds.

Use the Force, Luke

The most basic use of force magic is ranged telekinesis, manipulating or moving things at a distance.  Most force mages start off practicing by lifting small objects, but it doesn’t take them long to move onto bigger ones.  At this point force mages tend to diverge into one of two paths.  Those with a utilitarian bent refine their telekinesis and learn to imbue themselves with surges of momentum, allowing them to leap great distances.  They also pick up the ability to create walls of force, invisible planes that redirect the momentum of anything that touches them into a nearby object.

Force mages with more aggressive tendencies specialise in combat.  Force magic is very, very good at breaking things, and over the centuries force mages have developed a wide variety of spells designed to shred, punch, crush, fling, bend, fold, and mutilate.  Like most elementalists force mages can also create shields, and unlike some types of elemental magic their barriers work just fine against mundane attacks, too.

Style-wise, force magic occupies an odd halfway house between the universal and elemental families.  Unusually for an elemental type, force magic leaves no visual trace – its spells and effects show up in a mage’s sight, but are invisible to the normal eye.  In terms of results, however, force magic is about as blatant as you can get.  The telekinetic spells of force mages use might be invisible, but when heavy objects are being thrown around like baseballs even the most magically clueless normal can tell that something strange is going on.  It doesn’t help that while force mages have plenty of raw power, their fine control is notoriously bad – they have a reputation for breaking things and for general bull-in-a-china-shop behaviour.  The result is that while force magic has the potential to be subtle, it usually doesn’t work that way in practice.

Nature and Demeanour

Personality-wise, force mages tend to be direct, energetic, and domineering, hard to persuade and hard to turn aside.  They have a reputation for determination and once they’ve set their mind on something it’s very hard to get them to stop.  If they have a weakness, it’s that they tend not to be very self-aware:  they’re good at getting things done, but they very rarely stop and question whether what they’re trying to get done is actually a good idea.

Force mages in both Light and Dark society often rise to positions of authority, though usually not the very top positions.  Their power and confidence draw people to follow them, but they have trouble with the subtleties of politics and their persistence tends to lead them into great successes and spectacular failures with equal frequency.  Those force mages who can overcome these weaknesses can accomplish a great deal, though whether their accomplishments are good or bad is usually up for debate.  One thing’s for sure – they’re never boring.

One Week To Taken! (Or two if you’re in the UK.)

The third book in the Alex Verus series, Taken, is released in the US next week, on the 28th of August!  As usual, UK readers will have to wait a little longer until the UK release on September 6th.

Cursed Review Sunday

I know Taken’s coming out soon, but we’ve just gotten two lengthy and detailed reviews of Cursed, one by Mihir Wanchoo of Fantasy Book Critic and the other by Paul Wiseall of Fantasy Faction.  Both are worth a look!

In other news, Fantasy Faction’s High Fantasy Night at Blackwell’s was lots of fun – got to re-meet all the guys that I originally met at the SFX Weekender.  I’m going to be at Fantasy Con next month too, so hopefully should be seeing them again soon!

Ask Luna #3

From: Orion

Hi, I was interested in the abilities that space mages and life mages have? Also, do mages have an increased lifespan compared to humans? 

Life mages are healers.  They can fix just about anything that’s wrong with a body, and they can fiddle around with its systems too – changing how fast their hair grows, when they wake up and fall asleep, hold their breath for longer, that sort of thing.  They’re sort of the all-purpose doctors of the magical world.  For some reason a lot of other mages seem to be a bit suspicious of them, but I’m not sure why.  

Space mages, see below.  They seem to be flavour of the week.  

As far as I know mages don’t live any longer than normal people do.  They do get access to life magic treatments and pretty good medical care, so they live a long time, but sooner or later they die of old age, same as anyone else.  Some of them don’t like that, so they use magic to do something about it.   

Life extension seems to be a touchy subject for mages – it kills a conversation pretty fast if you bring it up.  It’s one of those areas they don’t like to talk about, and after the last guy I saw who went in for life extension I can see why.  

From: Orion

Hi, I was wondering what Alex Verus’s real name is and why he changed it? Also, is it possible for a mage to be a hybrid of two different families of magic? For instance a wind mage who can use some mind magic etc.

Uh, as far as I know Alex’s real name is Alex.  Why do you think he changed it?

As I understand it there are lots and lots of mages who can use different types of magic, but they aren’t really hybrids, it’s just the way their magic works.  All the magic types are just names.  Like you could say that someone’s an air mage who could use mind magic, or you could just say that affecting minds is part of air magic and it’s the air mages who can’t use mind magic who are the ‘hybrids’.  

From: Kate

Hey, Luna

How do you know if you’re a sensitive? It’s hard to tell genuinely oogie-boogie feelings from a general morass of modern anxiety, but every now and then something really strong comes through and it’s a bit of a shocker.

I’d be the first to be sceptical, to be honest, so how to tell a truly sensitive reaction from perfectly normal paranoia and stress? Just ‘cos you can’t see ‘em doesn’t mean they aren’t after you…

It’s a good question, I don’t really know.  I used to be pretty much the same as you – I’d get the odd weird feeling but I’d never pay attention and pretty soon I’d forget about it.  Sometimes I wonder if all kids are sensitive, they just grow out of it.   

With me what made the difference was when I was told about my curse.  I’d been kind of half-aware of it but I’d never really let myself think about it, but once I absolutely knew that it was real and couldn’t pretend anymore then it changed things.  It’s like when someone shows you the difference between a real and a fake – you only need it to happen once and then you can’t help noticing it even if you don’t want to.  From then on I could tell the difference too.  Wasn’t much consolation at the time.  

From: Flora

Dear Luna,

What are ‘space mages’ (I think Alex mentioned them) and what is it that they can do?

According to the teacher who covered it in class a while back, space mages are supposed to be all about transportation and remote viewing, and they can do weird Star-Trek stuff like warping space to make it longer or shorter.  Their magic isn’t supposed to be offensive at all, just designed for movement and storing objects and stuff.  

The one space mage I’ve actually MET was completely crazy and trying to kill all of us, so I wasn’t exactly taking notes.  He could blink around with some sort of instant teleportation thing and do this freaky distorting spell which shredded everything inside it, which according to that idiot teacher wasn’t supposed to be possible.  Next time someone tells me a magic type “isn’t offensive” I’m not listening.  

Blackwells High Fantasy Night

Just a quick note that I’m going to be at Blackwells High Fantasy Night this Friday, August 17th, along with the Fantasy Faction guys.  Might see some of you there!

Encyclopaedia Arcana #29: Life Magic

Life magic grants power over the biological systems of living beings, affecting their health, growth, and physiology.  Life mages can both sense and affect other living creatures, and do so extremely effectively.  They tend to be treated with respect or with fear, and often both.  Unusually for mages, the active effects of life magic are limited to touch range.

Sensing and Changing

Life mages typically get their start by learning to sense the presence of other living things.  At lower levels of skill a life mage can simply tell whether there are other people around or not, but as they grow more proficient they can pick up an incredible amount of biological information simply by looking at someone – everything from a person’s general health and physical condition to their fitness level, number of existing injuries, blood pressure, presence or absence of disease, and what sort of food they’ve been eating lately.  A skilled life mage can learn as much with one minute’s study as a team of doctors can learn with a twenty-four-hour medical checkup.

Once they’ve learned to analyse biological systems life mages learn to control them, usually starting with their own bodies.  They can’t completely redesign or transform living systems – that’s the domain of shapeshifting – but they can monitor and adjust their own biological processes, and to a lesser degree those of others.  A life mage falls asleep or wakes up whenever she wants to, and can accelerate or decelerate her internal systems, direct the buildup and breakdown of muscle and fat, alter the growth rate of skin and hair, and perform a variety of other useful tricks.

Medic!

Healing is one of the two iconic abilities of life mages, and they’re very, very good at it.  By strengthening and accelerating the natural regenerative processes of living systems life mages can repair almost any injury – they don’t really do anything that a living body can’t do on its own, but they give it an enormous boost.  It’s very rare for a patient being treated by a life mage to die from their wounds.

The main drawback to healing is that it consumes significant amounts of biological energy.  The more severe the wound, the greater the energy needed – a life mage can heal papercuts all day, but treating serious injuries is draining.  The energy can come from either the life mage or the patient, but the more injured the patient the less they’re likely to have to spare, and life mages who specialise in healing quickly learn to pace themselves to avoid burning themselves out.

All of this probably makes life mages sound quite selfless, but there’s a catch.  While life magic is very good at healing, it’s just as good at doing the opposite.

Don’t Touch Me

When wielded as a weapon against other living beings, life is probably the single most deadly type of magic in existence.  A life mage able to touch a subject can do almost anything she wants to them – everything from putting them to sleep to paralysing them to shutting down their internal organs.  The most feared ability of life mages is their death touch:  a life mage can drain the life essence of another living creature, literally pulling the life energy out of the target’s body and into their own.  Doing so inflicts horrific amounts of damage and is extremely difficult to stop:  while another life mage can counter the spell, for most people the only real defence is to stay out of reach.

The lethality of life magic makes other mages understandably wary of getting close to them.  Life mages are the best healers in the world, but anyone else allowing a life mage to heal them is also placed in an extremely vulnerable position.  Most mages exist in a position of power:  they live privileged lifestyles, and having that power suddenly taken away is not something they enjoy.  Life mages also have a (slightly unfair) reputation for being prone to turn psychopathic, and there are several extremely well-publicised stories about life mages who turned out to be serial killers.

As a result, while life mages are appreciated, it’s rare for them to be entirely welcome anywhere, and their presence tends to make other mages uncomfortable.

Second printing of Fated and Cursed!

Just got the news that Fated and Cursed have been reprinted in the UK.  First time I’ve ever gotten a reprint, so it’s pretty exciting!

And another review of Taken has come in, this one from SFRevu!

Encyclopaedia Arcana #28: Gate Spells

Gating is a particular magical technique that revolves around transporting objects or people from place to place.  It’s a general spell, used primarily by elemental mages, though a few other magic types (such as death and space) have access to it as well.

How It Works

Although there are several methods of opening a gate, by far the most common technique does so by creating a similarity between points in space.  The spell creates a two-dimensional portal linking the points, enabling the caster to step through them, as if space had been folded to bring the two locations adjacent to each other.  Upon completing the spell the gate collapses and vanishes.

The distance between the two points of a gate spell is irrelevant:  creating a gate is to travel ten feet is just as difficult as creating a gate to travel a thousand miles.  What is relevant is how familiar the caster is with the locations.  Typically, gating between locations requires that the caster know both places very well.  Getting familiar with a location isn’t difficult but does take time, and gate spells are also relatively slow to cast, taking upwards of a minute.

Taking Risks

It’s possible to accelerate the casting of gate spells, or to use them to travel to or from unfamiliar locations, and it’s even possible to cast them across dimensions or to go to locations the caster hasn’t seen at all.  However, doing so is dangerous.  Gating is one of the more difficult magical techniques, and using it under anything but ideal conditions is a lot like drunk driving:  you probably won’t kill yourself, but it’s still a really bad idea.  The more complicating factors involved in a gate spell then the higher the probability that the spell will go wrong, and gate spells that go wrong can be very, very messy.  There are a variety of possible consequences for a botched gate spell, but the most common is for the gate to suddenly and unexpectedly collapse.  If someone happens to be stepping through the gate at the time, they’re unlikely to survive the experience.

The limitations of gate spells make them effective in situations where the caster has a little breathing room, but unreliable in emergencies.  The problem with using a gate in an emergency is that they work best if you’re in a familiar area and have a minute or two to cast the spell.  If you’re in serious danger, however, odds are you’re not in a familiar area, and in that kind of situation a one minute casting time is probably fifty-nine seconds longer than you can afford.

Gates, Gates Everywhere

Despite its drawbacks gate magic is incredibly widespread.  Being able to transport yourself anywhere on the planet is a handy ability to have, and for many elemental apprentices learning to gate is similar to passing their driving test, opening up a whole new world of options.  There are a common set of safety procedures for gating which all elemental apprentices are taught, and as long as they’re followed gating is relatively safe.  Of course there’s always the one guy who doesn’t follow the safety procedures – gate accidents amongst mages are almost as common as transport accidents amongst normals, and happen for exactly the same reasons.

Given the popularity of gate magic it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a thriving industry in counter-gate magic.  Mages have (understandable) issues with unannounced visitors teleporting into their bedrooms at night, and it’s a rare mage who doesn’t take the effort to have his home and workplace warded against gates.  Gate wards can take various forms:  the more benign ones redirect gate spells to a designated arrival platform or simply block them, while nastier versions change the gate’s destination to somewhere hazardous or cause the gate to fail spectacularly as soon as something goes through it.  For these reasons it’s generally considered advisable to check an area for wards before attempting to gate into it, particularly if said area is used by other mages.

FantasyCon 2012

Just a quick note that I’m going to be at FantasyCon 2012!  It’s being held in Brighton from 27-30th September, and I ought to be on a couple of the panels.  Hope to see some of you guys there!