OmegaMom

“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”

In the world of fantasy, magic is a mainstay.  Ya gots yer elves, dwarves, wizards, Deep Ancient Evils, warriors, nice nerdy dudes or dudettes who were just living their lives being sucked into a vortex of terror and history, yadda yadda yadda.  And laced through everything is magic.

On the whole–except for elven realms–the magic sets the magic-wielder apart, separates him or her from the mainstream of his culture.  Great power brings great responsibility.  Small power brings mischief.  The Joe Sixpacks of the fantasy worlds eye magicians and wizards askance, probably imbued with the feeling that, hey, if I had magic, I’d use to do give Glenna-down-the-street a whoppin’ case of warts and fleas…so surely–surely–Mr. High-And-Mighty Magician is gonna Do Me Wrong if given half a chance.

In most fantasies, magicians and wizards and suchlike are just plain born that way.  It’s a talent.  Like playing the piano.  Or making artwork.  Or being able to get on a podium and have 50,000 people chanting “Yes, we can!”  You’ve either got it, or you don’t, but if you’ve got it, you’ve got to train it.

These are the norms.

I’ve recently read two fantasies that explore the question of “what if the Price Of Magic were outrageously great?”, and the repercussions of the price.  One went the expected way:  the Price Of Magic is searingly tragic, forever exiling you from mortal humanity, turning you into a snobby elitist who regards mortals as something akin to mayflies.  The other went a totally different path:  Magic is a tool of…something (gods?)…that uses you, and you are physically transformed into something that makes you an object of scorn and pity in your native milieu.

Feast of Souls, by C.S. Friedman, is the first, and the first of the Magister Trilogy.  To work magic, you burn up your life force.  If you’re a nice person who has compassion for the world, you use up your life force and *boom* you die.  If you’re not a nice person, or you have an infinite hunger to keep living, you’ll start using other people’s life force.  (Not a spoiler, since the review on Amazon says this already.)  You become cold, aloof, willing to play with mortal’s lives, countries, history as if it were a toy to amuse you.  You can’t let anyone know what your source of power is, because they’d hunt you down and kill you like a…well…a serial killer.

But, really.  Yeah, yeah, it’s a mighty moral dilemma and all that, and C.S. Friedman does her usual amazing job at telling a bang-up story that grabs you and drags you along.  But, in all honesty:  it’s a price that lots of people would see as tragic but worthy.  You mean I could do magic forever, live forever, so long as I’m some sort of weird psychic vampire that never sees his victim?  Ya sure!  Okay, maybe it’s not as easy as all that, but it’s still monumental, tragic, and in a weird way, empowering.

Then you have the central premise of the Soldier Son Trilogy, by Robin Hobb, which is totally different.  First off, you don’t get to choose to be a magic wielder–the Magic chooses you.  And if you don’t do what It wants, It lays waste to your life, separating you from everything you love, pushing you into paths that It wants.  So first off, you lose your volition.  You don’t get to play around with the magic and become a mysterious, all-knowing figure that wanders the world, solving problems for mere mortals, providing solemn wizardly advice or sage wizardly protection to those who can afford your fees.

If that weren’t bad enough, it makes you fat.  Not a little bit.  A lot.  Because the Magic requires a lot of fuel.  And you find yourself loving food, glorying in the sensuous textures, frantic for food.  But in your world (just like in ours), it’s quite socially acceptable–in fact, almost required–to be scornful of those who are fat, judging them as wastrels, gourmands, gluttons, lazy folk who aren’t willing to take the time and effort and responsibility to keep themselves in trim condition.

We’re talking being the butt of everyone’s jokes, scorned, harassed by your family, dumped by your fiance, outcast, seen as an ineffectual fool by the world at large–all the while you’re coming to grips with being yanked away from your life.

This approach is not seen as tragic but worthy.  In fact, the reviews of the Soldier Son Trilogy are pretty dismal, which I found an interesting reflection of our culture.  My supposition is that not only do the characters in the book find the fat hero worthy of scorn, but so do the readers.

It is a slow series.  There are no “right” people, no “wrong” people.  There’s a clash of cultures, neither of which is wholly admirable (it is a twist on the European colonists marching across the Americas and driving away or killing or assimilating the natives).  The hero is–understandably–pretty obsessive about the whole thing and frequently wildly depressed, because he, too, considers being outrageously fat as being worth less.

I’m eagerly waiting for the second book of Friedman’s trilogy (I love her writing), and waiting–almost grimly–for the third Soldier Son book to come out in paperback.  I just thought it was interesting how they approached the question of paying for the power in such wildly different ways.

(As an aside, it makes me wonder why the idea that “magic has a price” is so ingrained in our culture, and, so far as I can tell, in others as well.)