Lyndon Hardy

As a youth, I liked stories about knights in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress. At that time there was relatively little fantasy around compared to science fiction, so I read that too. In comparing the two, I came to realize that, in science fiction, once the setting was established, everything that happened followed logically. There were no rabbits pulled out of a hat at the last minute.

In fantasy, on the other hand, if there was an element of magic, most of the time it was diffuse and not crisply defined. At the last minute, some hitherto undisclosed spell could save the day. Perhaps the encounter with the unknown is an essential element of truly engrossing fantasy, but I, for one, found it a tiny bit dissatisfying.

There is fantastic invention in science fiction too, of course, but once postulated, the tales evolved from there. Isaac Asimov, in his classic robot stories, started with the positronic brain and three laws of robotics, and from this small premise developed a treasure trove of short stories and novels.

In college, I decided that I too wanted to write a story in which the problems that drove it came from basic laws of nature. I wanted to write a story such that, when the protagonist got in a jam, the reader realized that he really was in a jam. And I wanted it to be a fantasy, not science fiction.

But I had no idea how to proceed. If I created laws for fantasy out of whole cloth, how different was that from just coming up with negatronic brains or some such? This puzzle lurked in my head for many years. I went to graduate school, got a job, married and had a family.

One day one thought surfaced along with another -- suppose, just suppose, that these laws of magic were not just arbitrary constructs but had some ‘basis in fact’? What if the laws of magic were indeed true throughout the universe, but as civilizations on different worlds advanced and matured, some, like ours on earth, followed the natural laws and abandoned pursuit of the magical ones, whereas others followed the magical instead?

Now, I do not believe for one minute that the laws of magic in my books are in any way true, but in the spirit of the supposition, if they were, even though our civilization is science-based, there would be bits of folklore and myth that hinted at what these other laws might be. For the most part, we have just abandoned them.

Perhaps if I spent some time examining this folklore I might detect some clues on how to formulate these laws. Then hopefully, as a story based on them was read, the reader would pause from time to time and think ‘Oh, yeah. I remember Aunt Suzie saying something about that when she was a little girl.’ The laws of magic would not be arbitrary but would have at least a faint ring of ‘truth’ to them.

So for the next few years off and on, I read about magic, constructed straw man laws, put them away for a while, came back later to them many times, and iterated on what a consistent set might be.