No not sleight of hand or modern witchcraft, but Fantasy magic for the Speculative genre. In fact, for this discussion, we can expand the idea of magic in fiction to include the shapeshifting of were-creatures, living dead, time travel, and anything else we don’t actually see in real life.

The point is to examine what level of the fantastical we can suspend disbelief to accept in a story before the impossibility factor completely throws us out of the imaginary world.

Some stories offer a lot of explanation about the magic involved while others simply expect the reader to accept magic beyond their understanding. Gandalf, for example, in The Lord of the Rings performs acts of magic that are never explained. Looking at it through the primary characters’ eyes, the old wizard has always been an enigma who entertains the hobbits with fireworks. The reader is never told how the magic works or what the extent of Gandalf’s power may be, so we know only as much as the hobbits as we follow them through their adventure.

Contrast this with some of the more modern Fantasy series, Lightbringer by Brent Weeks for example, and the magic is given a structure so meticulous that you can imagine the author sitting down with something like a character sheet to work it all out. In this example, colours define different powers in a way you can imagine a computer game might work and the main character begins with some knowledge of these and will discover more detail as he goes along. Ironically, J.R.R. Tolkien actually did work out the details of his world far beyond what the casual reader ever sees.

The difference between the above two examples is what the leading characters know. When the MC is studying magic, they have to address how it works and why sometimes it doesn’t.

Some stories can have confusing magic, where different groups of characters don’t know how another group’s magic works. This can actually be done rather well, as in the Empire of Ruin series by David Green where different factions and their respective magics have to learn over the arc of the series plot about magics not their own.

Then we have things like talking or psychic dragons, which push the physics of possibility a bit further. How does a dragon’s mouth form words? Well, we have talking birds in real life, so why not?

Time travel is one of the more interesting Speculative tropes, as there will usually be some sort of attempt to explain how it works, if only that a machine is involved. Actually, the best explanation I’ve seen of time travel is in the Time Shifters Chronicles by Shanna Lauffey. The beauty of it is that instead of an info dump, the series trickles information to the reader while the main character seeks to understand her people and why they can shift through time at will.

Shapeshifters have always been one of the more difficult stories to reconcile with any version of reality. I love a good werewolf story and grew up with low special effects movies where all you had to imagine was sudden facial hair growth that fell out once the change was over. When the stories progressed to people shifting into animals, the physics got significantly more dodgy.

However, these stories are fictional and require the reader to suspend disbelief to enjoy them as intended. The only trope I have difficulty with is a dragon shifting into a man for the convenience of a Romance story, but then I’m not generally a Romance reader. These stories are actually very popular with their target audience.

For the writer, the main thing is to establish the rules of magic in their world and to be consistent. There have to be limits, or things will be too easy for the magic wielding characters.

This is the appeal of the Fantasy genre as well as some subgenres of Science Fiction and Horror. It allows us to stretch our imagination, whether we prefer touchy-feely magic or meticulously explained magical worlds.

Do you have magic in your stories? With the holidays rushing towards us, what kind of magical stories will you be reading this year?

Jaq D Hawkins

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