Thoughts on Flex
Mar. 17th, 2015 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackFlex is theferrett's novel. I'm always excited when someone I read online has a traditional novel published.
The central characters: the protagonist Paul Tsabo, an ex-cop insurance investigator who loves methodical paperwork, his reserved young daughter, his ex-wife are very movingly painted, and much more involved with the main character and the plot than most families in urban fantasy. I was really moved by his description of how paperwork makes civilisation.
In the acknowledgements at the end, he describes specific improvements to the novel people suggested, not just that they helped a lot, that was really interesting.
He does what I always try to do, to make a magic system that's dramatic and cool and full of cool ideas (make something from a videogame! make anything from paperwork!) but also clear what's going on so it's clear when the hero has an instant-win button and when he doesn't. Not out of arbitrary pedantry, but so there's actually any form of tension in the story whatsoever. Ferrett describes why this usually makes a better story very very well here: Avoiding Doctor Strange Syndrome. And he does it much better than most books. Although, unfortunately, I felt he didn't succeed as well as I'd hoped: in the vast majority of scenes, it was clear what the possibilities were, what was easy, what was possible with a cost etc, so naturally you didn't even think about it. But some of the big "this is how the magic system works" moments I felt relied too much on "some sense of fairness drawn from the practitioner's subconscious", when honestly, it could have been made up either way and made as much sense.
Did other people post reviews yet?
The central characters: the protagonist Paul Tsabo, an ex-cop insurance investigator who loves methodical paperwork, his reserved young daughter, his ex-wife are very movingly painted, and much more involved with the main character and the plot than most families in urban fantasy. I was really moved by his description of how paperwork makes civilisation.
In the acknowledgements at the end, he describes specific improvements to the novel people suggested, not just that they helped a lot, that was really interesting.
He does what I always try to do, to make a magic system that's dramatic and cool and full of cool ideas (make something from a videogame! make anything from paperwork!) but also clear what's going on so it's clear when the hero has an instant-win button and when he doesn't. Not out of arbitrary pedantry, but so there's actually any form of tension in the story whatsoever. Ferrett describes why this usually makes a better story very very well here: Avoiding Doctor Strange Syndrome. And he does it much better than most books. Although, unfortunately, I felt he didn't succeed as well as I'd hoped: in the vast majority of scenes, it was clear what the possibilities were, what was easy, what was possible with a cost etc, so naturally you didn't even think about it. But some of the big "this is how the magic system works" moments I felt relied too much on "some sense of fairness drawn from the practitioner's subconscious", when honestly, it could have been made up either way and made as much sense.
Did other people post reviews yet?
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Date: 2015-03-17 05:37 pm (UTC)Hmmm. Personally I sympathise a lot with this viewpoint, and even go beyond it. I agree that understanding when your characters are in what manner of peril is important to the story, but also, I just like having a good enough understanding of a magic system to be able to play with it in my own imagination – wandering back over the plot we're given and doing what-ifs ("why didn't they just use the foo spell to defeat the gribbly in chapter 7? Oh, yes, because the gribbly was wearing metal armour / not technically alive anyway / that spell doesn't work on Tuesdays / etc"), or imagining what else you could do with the same system in circumstances that never come up in the plot.
The contrary point of view is that making your magic system too well explained turns it into basically a funny kind of science: one very different in character from actual science (in that, as I've said before, real science treats particles and forces as first-class concepts and big things like humans and emotions and danger and life as emergent consequences of them, whereas most magic systems have to give first-class status to a load of things in latter category in order not to be forever getting bogged down in neurons and biology and suchlike faff), but even so, one in which you can build up so much understanding that it might as well be science for all the mystery there is left. To call something magic, you want it to be, well, magical, not so much in the sense of "impossible" (though of course impossibility by our usual physics is one of the things that makes it fun to imagine) but in the sense of being mystic, weird, something to wonder at.
And although I have much more sympathy for the former point of view, I can see the merit in the latter as well. So I wonder, are there any really good examples of magic systems that manage a good mix of the two? Is mystery and wonder in your magic inherently opposed to permitting the reader to do thought experiments, or can you find a way to get both?
(Since I'm saying this in the comments of a book review, I should say that on the one hand I haven't read Flex, but on the other hand I won't worry about spoilers.)
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Date: 2015-03-17 10:37 pm (UTC)Firstly, I think "not having holes" isn't just about magic. In something like Sharpe, you can see him educating the reader about napoleonic tactics, when cavalry beat infantry, when infantry can form square and hold them off, when artillery and cavalry are a killer combination, etc. And most of the time it's so seamless you don't _notice_, but occasionally the seams show and he says something is impossible and you think "that's because it's going to be subverted in the next page".
But it's particularly evident in magic because the author has to invent a whole system from scratch, make it seem natural, and usually, have something dramatic happen in it later on without it seeming contrived...
I think well-built magic systems are often ones we don't notice, where they fit into the plot so well we don't even think to say "hang on, what if"...
And now I think about it, I'm not sure if having a magic system with specific rules is actually related to that. Obviously if it's REALLY specific, like, you have a gizmo that has clearly-specified physical effects, then it's automatically possible for the reader to extrapolate what's possible -- but it's equally possible to screw it up in that case by the author not making the obvious extrapolations. And conversely, even if your magic system is numinous and magical, it can be clearly specified in terms of "we've never tried this, we just have to ask the spirits and hope, but the reader has a clear idea if this is LIKELY to work or not".
Can you have a magic system which is both extrapolat-able and numinous? I'm not sure -- I'd LIKE to think so, but I think a lot of the numinous comes from discovery and mystery, so it's possible only by balancing on the edge -- usually too much understanding undermines the magical-ness, even though I like both. Examples that spring to mind are Name of the Wind, which rather cheats by having a mechanistic magic system, and beyond that, a magical magic system...
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Date: 2015-03-19 07:40 am (UTC)Yes. In fact some of my favourite cases of books that achieve this are done with a well explained magic system – and the dramatic extra bit is basically a puzzle, in that there turns out to be a loophole in the presented rules that you can get some really good effects through, so the implicit challenge to a reader that way inclined is the puzzle game 'Can you spot the way to beat this system before I reveal it 3/4 of the way through the book?'. Not that you always have all the facts, but you usually feel as if you could at least have spotted the possibility of a loophole in this area. (Or better still, you actually did spot it, and then get to feel smug.)
With a not-explained system, if you want a magician character to go beyond some previous apparent limit without it looking like blatant plot-bodging, you tend to have to fall back on some other way of making the reader expect that they've got more power. For example, they just had a close encounter with a very powerful entity and absorbed some extra magicalnessness, or they've spent the last year on another planet getting extra tuition from super-elves, or they died and an archangel resurrected them with more welly, or whatever. You don't just get to say 'and then they had a really neat idea, aha!', because unlike the puzzly case above, if the author doesn't have to explain the idea then that's clearly a plot device they can whip out any time it happens to be needed, so it's unsportingly easy.