Benedict Jacka's Blog, page 83

Encyclopaedia Arcana #17: A Mage’s Name

Newcomers to the magical world have a lot of questions.  One question that everyone asks sooner or later is “How come mages have such weird names?”

It’s a fair point.  For every mage who calls themselves Alex or Anne, there are two or three more who go by names like Cinder, Deleo, Sagash, Levistus, Caldera, and others that are equally hard to imagine a parent giving a baby.  The reason’s simple:  in most cases, the name an adult mage goes by isn’t the same name he was born with.

What’s In A Name?

An adult mage has two names – their birth name and their mage name.  They go by their birth name as a child and continue to use it when they enter a master’s service and become an apprentice.  At some point in their apprenticeship they pick their mage name, and when they graduate to the status of a journeyman mage they take it as their own.

An apprentice’s choice of name is serious business.  It’s considered a rite of passage, marking the transition from childhood to adulthood.  Socially, a mage who doesn’t have their name yet isn’t really considered a mage at all – they’re still treated like a kid, even if they’re twenty years old.  Interestingly, this is one subject that Light and Dark mages don’t disagree about.  Both consider a mage’s name equally important, and for the same reasons.

Picking and Choosing

Apprentices choose their names personally.  It’s one of the few areas of the master-apprentice relationship where the master doesn’t have the last word – even attempting to dictate an apprentice’s name is considered a major breach of etiquette.

Methods of choice vary.  Often an apprentice will pick a name related to their magic type:  geological or mineralogical names for an earth mage, combustion- or heat-related words for a fire mage, and so on.  Another common choice is to take the name of a historical mage who the apprentice identifies with or wants to emulate.  Some make up a new name, using etymology or just picking something they like the sound of, and some masters even encourage apprentices to treat the choice of their name as a full-on quest, consulting magical creatures or seeking visions.

In every case, a mage’s name tells you something about them.  It’s the identity they’ve chosen, and it’s how they’ve decided to define themselves in their dealings with the magical world.

Child to Adult

Once a mage has become a journeyman, her mage name becomes her ‘official’ name.  If another mage approaches her or if she’s referred to in any formal way, they’ll use her mage name:  in magical society, her mage name is the one that’ll identify her from that moment until the day she dies.

A mage’s name can be a touchy subject.  It’s usually best to avoid the use of a mage’s birth name unless you’re very familiar with them (and sometimes not even then).  Some mages continue to use their birth names, especially with close friends and family, but others abandon them completely.  As a general rule, the more distant a mage is from their non-magical life, the less happy they’ll be about being addressed by their birth name.  Independent mages tend to be the most likely to keep their birth name, while Dark mages often treat the use of their birth name as a fairly serious insult.

Copies of Cursed just came in!

Not into the shops – through my letterbox.  Sorry!  But they look VERY nice.  Here’s a picture of the UK cover!

I’ve been really lucky with the covers for the Alex Verus series – both my UK and my US publishers have done an excellent job.  Looking forward to Cursed’s release in June!

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Encyclopaedia Arcana #16: Council Factions (Part Three)

This entry finishes up our guide to the political factions of the Light Council by looking at the Weissians and the Unity Bloc.

Weissians

The Weissian movement takes its name from the writings of the nineteenth-century mage Kolman Weiss.  Weiss incorporated elements from the existing Transcendence and Klaussian movements to form a new political faction which has been slowly growing ever since.

Weissians believe that magic represents the next major step in human potential, and they want to see the human race embrace it.  They want a world where mages have a place in normal society, practising their magic openly, with magic taught in schools side by side with maths and science.  In the long term they’d like to see magic spread more widely:  their ultimate goal is a world where every human is a mage.

The Weissians’ plan is obviously incompatible with keeping magic a secret, which places the Weissians squarely at odds with everyone who supports the Concord.  For their plan to be approved they’d need to get enough of a majority to get the Concord amended, which at the moment seems pretty unlikely:  the Centrists, the Directors, and especially the Isolationists hate the Weissians’ proposals and have gone out of their way to block them.  Even if the Weissians could overcome this opposition they would have to deal with two other problems:  first, the normals that the Weissians want to uplift think magic is a joke, and second, no-one has any idea how this ‘uplifting’ thing is supposed to work anyway (though the Weissians are doing their best to figure it out).

The Weissians don’t have many friends.  Some of the Guardian faction are sympathetic to them, and that’s about it.  Oddly enough the Weissians’ most frequent allies are the Crusaders, partly because they’re the only two factions opposed to the Concord (although for different reasons) and partly because they’re both pariahs disliked by everyone else.

Note:  ‘Weiss’ is pronounced ‘vice’, as in ‘vice squad’.

Unity Bloc

The Unity Bloc is the newest and currently the smallest of the Council factions, though it’s probably more accurate to say that their faction isn’t new but cyclical:  the idea has been around ever since the Dark Wars and it’s waxed and waned over the centuries.  The Unity Bloc want Light and Dark mages to unite.  They see Light and Dark philosophy as two sides of the same coin rather than violent opposites, and they’re frustrated by the endless infighting.   They want mages everywhere to co-operate and work together as a single brotherhood, as legend has it they once did long ago, and they hope that by doing so magic will enter a new golden age.

Needless to say, the Unity Bloc has a lot of opposition.  The Crusaders hate them and the Guardians don’t like them much either – both of them consider the Unity Bloc fools at best and fifth columnists at worst.  On top of that, most of the Dark mages that the Unity Bloc wants to help aren’t particularly grateful for the offer and in fact are seriously insulted by the implication that they need ‘helping’ in the first place.  But some Dark groups see potential in the Unity Bloc, and as a result the Unity Bloc has by far the best relations with Dark mages out of any Council faction (not to mention a small but significant number of Dark members).

As the newest faction, the Unity Bloc hasn’t had time to develop many alliances.  At present they’re making overtures to the Directors and the Isolationists, arguing that a unified Light and Dark council would serve their own interests, and in the long term the Unity Bloc are hoping to bring the Centrists round to their way of thinking.  Centrists are supposed to want peace, after all.

A member of the Unity Bloc is called a Unitarian (as well as several less complimentary names).

None of the Above

Dark mages and relations with normals aren’t the only issues in Light politics:  there are plenty of others, such as magical creatures, culture, and religion.  However, these tend to be more spread out over the factions:  none of the groups has a monopoly on religious members, for example.

Even when it comes to the main ‘axes’, the faction a Light mage belongs to doesn’t tell you everything about them.  A mage might join the Guardian faction because he sees normal humans as equals, worthy of respect;  such a mage would probably be very sympathetic to the Weissians but would dislike the Directors for their habit of manipulating mundane society.  Another Guardian might see normals as below them, to be protected and guided;  that Guardian would think the Weissians were idiots and that the Directors had the right idea.  A third Guardian might defend normals not out of any particular empathy but out of a belief that reducing the number of magical predations in the world protects mages in the long run by reducing belief in the supernatural;  his closest allies would be the Isolationists.  All three would want to stop monsters from harming normals, but for different reasons.

Finally there are a fair number of Light mages who don’t permanently ally themselves with any of the factions.  These mages tend to get lumped in with one faction or another, but it’s more accurate to call them independent agents.

PW Starred Review for Cursed

Fated got a starred review from Publishers’ Weekly back in January, and now Cursed has got one too!  It’s my favourite review so far and I suspect it’ll stay that way for a while:  a really compact summary and captures the essence of the book nicely.

Jacka follows his urban fantasy debut, Fated, with an even more impressive tale of gunplay and spellcraft in present-day London. In a culture dominated by battle mages, Alex Verus’s best offense is a good defense: he can see all possible futures, and he aims straight at the ones where he doesn’t die. Both Light and Dark mages keep trying to hire him, but he just wants to run his magical trinket shop and teach his friend Luna how to manage her family curse. This dream is disrupted when a new friend of Luna’s claims he can destroy the curse with a dangerous wish-granting artifact, and Alex learns that some unhinged mages want to steal life energy from the dwindling population of magical creatures—including one of Alex’s few friends, the charming room-sized spider Arachne. Jacka keeps the emotional tension high with a series of wakeup calls for Alex regarding his relationship with Luna, his place in London’s magical social circles, and his image of himself. Readers will savor this tasty blend of magic, explosions, and moral complexity. 

Cursed will be coming out on May 29th in the US, and on 7th June in the UK.

Encyclopaedia Arcana #15: Council Factions (Part Two)

Part One of this article introduced the Isolationist and Guardian factions:  this part will cover Crusaders, Centrists, and Directors.

Crusaders

The Crusaders are the most militaristic amongst the Light Council.  Very few Light mages are completely comfortable with Dark ones, but the Crusaders want to go further:  they want the Council to be actively opposed to the activities of Dark mages and take the initiative in stopping them.  ‘Taking the initiative’ can mean anything from police work to starting a war, depending on the individual Crusader’s beliefs.

Almost no-one on the Light Council likes the Crusaders, but the Crusaders don’t care.  They think Dark mages are evil and need to be stopped, and they aren’t going to accept Dark behaviour just because the rest of the Council does.  Most Crusaders believe that the Concord is just a paper peace and can’t possibly last – sooner or later war’s going to break out again, and the Crusaders are going to be ready when it does.

As the most militant and the second-most radical faction, the Crusaders have a lot of enemies.  Isolationists don’t like them because Isolationists think the normals are the real problem, Centrists don’t like them because Centrists want peace, Directors don’t like them because blatant magical battles really mess up the Directors’ attempts at subtle political control, and you can probably guess how well Crusaders get on with the Unity Bloc.  The only faction the Crusaders like are the Guardians:  they’re the only other group who aren’t willing to turn a blind eye to the kind of things Dark mages do in their free time.

Note:  Crusaders don’t call themselves ‘Crusaders’.  They think of themselves as proactive Guardians.  ‘Crusaders’ is a label stuck on them by other factions, meant as an insult.

Centrists

The current version of the Centrist faction evolved in the aftermath of the Gate Rune War, although the opinions they subscribe to have been around since more-or-less forever.  What Centrists really want is stability.  They don’t want war with the Dark, but they don’t have any grand plans to reconcile with them either.  They don’t see normals as a threat to be avoided, but neither do they want to get particularly close to them.  What they want is peace, and for things to stay mostly the same.

The Centrists are probably the biggest faction, but their size is a bit misleading.  ‘Centrist’ can mean that a mage is actively committed to balance and peace, but just as often mages get lumped in with the Centrists simply because the Centrists are the most moderate of the factions.  While the Centrists have a lot of political power, they tend to accumulate it just for the sake of it rather than because there’s anything in particular they want to do with it, and as a result they can be swayed more easily than the other groups.

The Centrists are usually aligned with the more reactive factions (the Isolationists, the Directors, and the Guardians) and usually opposed to the more radical ones (Crusaders, Weissians, and the Unity Bloc), but they’ve been both with and against every faction at one point or another.

Directors

Directors want to guide and control normal society, for varying reasons.  Some do it because they think that normals are potentially dangerous and need to be closely monitored, some do it because control of national political, economic, and military institutions is a valuable asset, and some just do it for wealth and power.  Most of the Light Council’s influence over the government of the United Kingdom is due to the centuries of patient and methodical work done by the Director faction.

Although Directors don’t always see eye to eye with Isolationists, they agree with them on one thing:  it’s normals who really matter, not Dark mages.  Dark mages are a tiny minority who spend most of their time on infighting, while normals number in the billions.  Normals have wealth, power, industry, an entire global civilisation . . . and because of their ignorance of magic they’re so very easy to control.  Why waste your time fighting Dark mages when there’s an entire world out there waiting to be taken?

Of course, just because Directors don’t like to bother themselves with fighting doesn’t mean they can’t arrange it – they have a lot more power and influence in the mundane world than other mages and they’re quite capable of sending SWAT teams to kick down the doors of people they don’t like.  As a result, while the more old-fashioned mages may sneer at Directors for the amount of time they spend on their ‘pets’, they usually do it outside of Directors’ hearing.

Directors get on well with Centrists and have a love-hate relationship with the Isolationists – Directors and Isolationists usually agree on end goals (mages safe and powerful, normals kept ignorant) but have completely different ideas about how to achieve them.  Directors strongly dislike the Weissians:  they don’t want to be equal with normals, they want to be above them, and it’s a lot easier to stay in control if most people don’t believe you exist.

Six Weeks from Fated, Six Weeks to Cursed

Well, Fated has been out there on the shelves for six weeks now.  I’m really grateful for the amount of exposure it’s received – for a new author, it’s gotten a LOT more attention than I was expecting, thanks both to the publicity departments of my publishers and also to the number of reviewers who’ve been willing to take a chance on trying someone new.  Thanks to everyone who’s helped, whether by reviewing it, mentioning it, or taking the time to write to me – it’s very much appreciated!

And it’s also only six weeks until Cursed is released in the US!  (UK readers will have to wait an extra week – sorry!)  To mark the occasion I’ve updated the US and UK pages, and I’ve also posted the first chapter of Cursed in the Extracts section.  For those of you who’ve got the US edition of Fated, this is the full first chapter, not the shortened version  in the back of Fated‘s US copy.

Cursed is coming out only three months after Fated, but it was written much earlier – two years earlier, in fact.  When I started Fated I had absolutely no idea of what the story was going to turn into, and wasn’t particularly expecting Alex Verus to turn into a series.  Actually, if I’m being honest, I wasn’t all that hopeful that it was even going to get published.  I’d just come off a long string of rejections and my hopes were low.

By the time I sat down to start work on Cursed, things were very different.  I had the contract with Orbit and Fated had benefited from all the work that the Orbit editors had done on it.  The setting and world were much more clearly developed, and the book felt quite different to write than Fated had.  I’m curious to see whether you guys find it different to read – but I’ll have to wait a while to find out!

Encyclopaedia Arcana #14: Council Factions (Part One)

Mages are an individualistic lot and the Light Council is divided into many political factions.  The two big questions in Light politics are:

• How should the Council deal with Dark mages?

• What sort of relationship should mages have with normal society?

The way a mage answers these questions determines who he’ll be aligned with.  At last count there were seven major factions within the Light Council, and these factions will be covered in the three parts of this article as follows:

Part 1:  Isolationists and Guardians

Part 2:  Crusaders, Centrists, and Directors

Part 3:  Weissians and the Unity Bloc.

Factions or Parties?

The Light factions are closer to systems of belief than they are to political parties, though they’ve got things in common with both.  Since mage society is relatively small most of the participants in Light politics know each other, and as a result there isn’t any need for the large-scale campaigning and publicity work that the parties in a mass democracy have to do.

Individual mages don’t belong to a party in the manner of an American congressman or a British MP – they’re likely to have one faction that they identify with and consider themselves members of, but this is usually informal.  ‘Informal’, however, does not mean ‘unimportant’, and at the higher levels a mage’s choice of which factions to associate with is very serious business.

The edges of Light factions are blurry and it’s not always easy to say exactly which faction a mage is a member of: the Guardians and Crusaders in particular have a big overlap and the Centrists have something in common with just about everyone.  For this reason it’s hard to get an exact count on their numbers, although it’s generally agreed that the biggest faction is the Centrists.

Isolationists

The Isolationist faction of the Council want to have as little to do with normals as possible.  It’s an old faction, dating back to the bad old days of the mage/normal wars, and it hasn’t changed much.  Humans have always been dangerous, but now with the rapidly advancing pace of modern technology they’re more of a threat than they’ve ever been, and Isolationists fear that normals (given the chance) will inevitably end up resenting mages and trying to destroy them.  The Isolationists’ solution to this is to make sure normals never have any reason to suspect that mages exist in the first place.  Mages should stay as far off the radar of normal society as possible.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Isolationists are the strongest supporters of the secrecy clauses of the Concord.  In fact they don’t think the Concord goes far enough; if they had their way they’d institute a full-on suppression program with punishments for any mage who draws publicity.  The Isolationists’ other goals vary from mage to mage and come a very distant second in priority.  Secrecy is everything.

The Isolationists’ closest allies are the Centrists.  Just like the Centrists, the Isolationists want peace with Dark mages, but for a different reason:  the Isolationists think that normals are the real threat and squabbles with Dark mages risk drawing attention.  Isolationists are suspicious of the Directors – they’ll grudgingly admit that control over normals is useful, but they’re always afraid that the Directors will screw up and the normals will figure out that they’re being used.  However, the faction the Isolationists really hate are the Weissians.  They’re absolutely convinced that the Weissians’ grand plans will end in disaster and that the only hope for the Light Council is to make sure they’re blocked.  So far, they’ve succeeded in doing just that.

Guardians

The Guardian faction harks back to the original Treaty of Light signed by the very first Council.  Those who signed the Treaty swore to protect all humans both from monstrous creatures and from the Dark, and the Guardians carry on that legacy to this day.  They believe that the highest calling of mages is to protect the human race from supernatural threats.

In the past Guardians would hunt down Dark mages and monsters, but these days they’re generally reactive rather than proactive:  they won’t target anyone unless they believe them to be a clear threat to humans.  Guardians used to be the dominant faction of the Council but with the decline of magical creatures there are fewer obvious threats for them to mobilise against and much of their support has gradually drifted away.  Nowadays most threats to humans come from other humans and mages are less keen to take action against their own species.

The Guardians generally get on fairly well with the rest of the Council.  They’re often called militant or idealistic or out-of-touch, but all the same they get a certain grudging respect for the fact that whenever something really horrible shows up it’s the Guardians who’ll be the first to step up to face it.  (It also helps that the Guardians are usually practical enough to get the support of the other factions before they go kill something.)  The only group with whom the Guardians have much friction are the Unity Bloc, as the Guardians dislike the Unity Bloc’s willingness to look the other way when it comes to Dark activities.

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Fated: The Good Reviews Strike Back

Yet more good reviews for Fated!  I should probably stop collecting these quite so enthusiastically but the novelty factor hasn’t worn off yet.  I’ll probably get jaded about good (and bad) reviews eventually but for now I still really enjoy reading them.

An Embarrassment of Riches

Night Owl Reviews

Drying Ink

More than a Reading Journal

Whodunit

And finally, I’ve got an ‘Irreverent Questions’ interview up at BookThing – thanks to Grete for hosting it!

Encyclopaedia Arcana #13: Learning Spells

Before a mage can practise a spell he has to learn it, which is easier said than done.  There are two main ways for a mage to learn a new spell – they can be taught it by another mage, or they can develop it themselves.

Copy Cat

Learning a spell from another mage can be very easy or infuriatingly difficult, depending on the relationship between their types of magic.  If the capabilities of the two mages are very similar, it's easy:  the second mage just has to watch the first mage casting the spell and then copy it.  There'll always be adjustments to make and it still takes practice to get really good, but it's basically straightforward.

The more differences there are between the mages' styles of magic, the more difficult the process gets – the student will have to adapt the spell more and more heavily.  If the two styles are really different the process is almost guaranteed to fail, because the two systems work on completely different principles – it's like trying to install a Windows program on an Apple computer.  Unfortunately, there's no reliable way to know if it's possible to learn a spell from a particular mage without trying.

Spell Research

Mages who can't find a good teacher (or any teacher at all) must develop spells on their own.  This is much harder, since the mage has to do the equivalent of reinventing the wheel.  If the mage is smart they'll build on the work of others wherever they can, stealing bits and pieces from other spells in order to minimise the amount of original research they have to do themselves, but even so the process can take weeks, months, or even years.

All the same, many mages enjoy research.  Researching a spell is creative work, much like writing a song or a poem or making a new piece of design, and most mages find the process satisfying.  It also has side benefits – a mage who researches a spell himself will generally understand its principles much better than if he'd copied it off someone else, and he'll have had more opportunity to customise it to his preferences.

Scarcity of Knowledge

The rarer a mage's magic type, the more difficult it is for them to find a teacher they can easily learn from and the more likely it is that they'll have to develop spells on their own.  Elemental mages are the most common family and and also tend to have the most similarities amongst themselves, and for this reason elemental mages find it relatively easy to learn new spells.

Universal mages have it much harder.  They're rare enough that there may be only a dozen or so of each particular type in an entire country, and there's no guarantee that any of them will be willing or able to teach a novice.  Living mages are somewhere in between – they don't have the easy access of elemental mages but benefit from more of a community than universalists.

As a result, elemental mages tend to be quick starters and universal mages slow ones.  A new elementalist can pick up lots of spells rapidly, quickly outpacing a universal mage.  However, over the years, the universalist can catch up with the elemental mage and even overtake him.  Being able to copy spells is a nice shortcut but sooner or later you have to master the theory.

Fated: Revenge of the Good Reviews

Another week of good reviews – here are the links!

Tynga from Tynga's Reviews is first up.  This is in addition to the short story she's hosting as part of her Paranormal April Fools, so take a look at that too if you haven't seen it!

Two more nice reviews from Debbie's Book Bag and Under the Covers – you'll have to click through a warning screen as the sites have some NSFW content, but the pages linked to don't.

Bookswarm has a 150-word speed date with Alex, and finally, RT Book Reviews has made their review of Fated freely available too.  Thanks to all!

 

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