Chalker doesn’t get name-checked often, but when I was a fat kid with a Commodore 64 and a tendency to wear glasses the size of the moon, I ate his books up. All in all, a logical system that requires the protagonist to actually study and learn and think critically about the magic, instead of waking up one morning with the ability to turn people into newts or something. For example, Wizardry is the discipline that summons demons, and it has two rules: the Law of Ubiquity, which states that flame permeates all (making it a gateway between worlds), and the Law of Dichotomy, which states that once a demon is summoned it must either dominate the summoner or be dominated.
Each form of magic has a clear set of rules that govern how it works. He imagines a universe that has (initially) five magical disciplines: Thaumaturgy, Alchemy, Magic, Sorcery, and Wizardry. I read this book as a kid, and the magic system Hardy creates remains one of the more interesting and entertaining ones out there. Master of the Five Magics by Lyndon Hardy. I can recall a couple that really made an impression on me: I learned to love a good magic system when I was a kid reading sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks. Like every good author, I steal little and I steal big. Were they really disasters, those wars and terrorist plots? Or were they shadowy magicians requiring blood for their spells? This simultaneously gives my characters a difficulty rating and also casts a new shadow on a number of historical events. In We Are Not Good People, I created a magic system that requires blood sacrifice: the more blood, the more powerful the spell. Magic in your book is an excellent opportunity for world-building and characterization: What does magic cost? How does it work? Power and its use should cost your characters something. I hate The One because there are no damn rules. Or, Never explain how he manages to go from country bumpkin to Amazing Super Wizard Version 5.1 in just under forty thousand words. Or, Give your hero amazing magical powers for no reason whatsoever. Like, Make your hero The One because he fits the details of a prophecy. You know The One - he’s the guy or girl in a story who is fated to save the universe by dint of prophecy or lineage or genetics, or a giant plot-generating box the author hooked up to the electrical grid in his neighborhood which demands a fresh sacrifice every few minutes before disgorging awful storytelling advice. We dared to ask him his thoughts about the use of magic in the fantasy genre, and this is what he told us. As Off The Shelf recently learned, he’s also wonderfully and hilariously opinionated. He’s written prolifically since then, and his next book is We Are Not Good People, due out October 2014. His story “Ringing the Changes” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2006, and his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight. Jeff Somers sold his first novel at age 16.
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