Magic and incompetence

[nancylebov]

I just linked to a piece about common, highly trained misconceptions about knife-fighting, and my mind drifted to it being used for writers, then to that yhlee, who posted it, is a fantasy writer....

Has there been any fantasy about people generally being stupid about magic? Not some institutional error or restriction which could be changed at its source, but a fairly intractable "what fools these mortals be, and the immortals aren't any better" sort of situation.

From the real world, or at least the edge of it: I've heard a claim that a disaster was partly caused by occultists who were trying to fend it off but didn't know what they were doing. Sorry, no further details available, but it does seem to me that's the sort of thing which should happen more often in fiction.

rachelcaine's Weather Warden series has some institutionally wrong-headed magic.

Comments

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

The first thing that comes to mind is Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" et seq, which is a straight parallel to real-world exhaustion of critical finite resources without adequate planning for what happens when the supply runs out.

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

Something from those stories that might be a better fit -- a group of wizards considered literally drawing down the moon to augment the world's supply of mana (the "power source" of magic). IIRC, they learned just in time to abort the proceedure what would happen (it would have had the same results as bringing the moon into contact with the earth according to real-world physics).

[madfilkentist]

In Terry Goodkind's novels, the Wizard's First Rule is "People are stupid."

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Hollie Lisle's Vincalis the Agitator is about a well meaning hero whose completely praiseworthy attempts to overthrow a mind bogglingly evil tyranny (which tyranny enjoys nearly complete support among the general populace) results in the destruction of civilization, including the deaths of over a billion people.

In Lawrence Watt-Evans The Sword of Bhelu a dialog among the secret magical cabal goes roughly:
Wizard 1: I move we save the world.
Wizard 2: Objection. That is new business, and we lack a quorum.
Eventually they do try to save the world, and fail. So does the main hero of the series, but he doesn't do anything really stupid after the his first mistake, which sets the (pre-destined) destruction of the work in train. Obviously Garth the Overman (the hero) never played role playing games. Consider the scene:

Garth: Mysterious Prophetic Witches who won't be appearing again, how can I make my name live forever?
MPP: No mortal man may do such a thing. There is a way a to make your name known until the end of the world, but trust us, you don't want to do that.
Garth: That is EXACTLY what I want. By the power of the author debt you owe my family, tell me how to make my name
known until the end of the world.
MPP: You REALLY don't want your name known until the end of the world, trust us.
Garth: Tell!

So they do, with the obvious consequence.


Almost all of Barbara Hambly's books involve a Church that hates magic for no good reason at all. They oppose it even after it becomes clear that the civilization is going to fall to Lovecraftian horrors without magical aid.
I regard that as stupid.

[holzman.livejournal.com]

A certain nine Kings of Men, Seven Dwarven Lords, and three Elves who thought they were clever come immmediately to mind. Um... come to think of it, Sauron didn't think things through so well, either. Nor did Saruman. Or Denethor. Hm. Maybe it would be a shorter list if we just looked at who was smart about magic in Lord of the Rings?

So does Adron's Disaster from Brust's Phoenix Guards novels and Lord Kevin from The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. The entire Guild of Mages "losing their hats" en masse in Hambly's Darwath saga. Every botched demonic or necromantic summoning anywhere.

(Here be spoilers)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

The holders of the Rings fell for a con man. They weren't making a stupid mistake about the world, nor did they misunderstand the nature of magic -- except maybe that they didn't realize it was possible that their rings would be subject to his, and at that the Elven rings weren't (he never touched them or had anything to do with them).

Saruman knew what Sauron was up to, and maybe he should have known better than to think he could beat him. He certainly shouldn't have tried to subvert Gandalf by offering to share power. Gandalf's response -- that (only one person at a time can wear a ring and that therefore) the One Ring's power can't, and won't let itself, be shared -- should have been obvious to Saruman. Gandalf and Galadriel were also smart enough not to let the Ring close enough to tempt them.

Adron's Disaster counts only if you think Adron should have expected Tortaalik to be killed by somebody else just as his spell was working. I think that's too much to expect.

I don't know the Covenant or Darwath series.

A botch is not the same as stupidity. In some collection of official AD&D fics there's a story called "A Stone's Throw Away", IIRC, in which a summoning fails, catastrophically for the summoner, because of interference from an unexpected source; you might or might not say the summoner should have anticipated that possibility. I've written a song which I link to with the teaser "Whoso would command a greater power had better be damn sure of the rules"; that's a matter of stupidity, or failing to "Check your assumptions... at the door" (thank you, Lois Bujold).

Re: (Here be spoilers)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Gandalf is scared of the One Ring because he thinks the wearer can't control it. Saruman and Galadriel, however, both think they could replace Sauron using the One Ring.

Who's right? Who knows? Point is, Saruman and Galadriel might have been *right*, and Gandalf wrong. Galadriel didn't want to chance it because of the downside of being right. Saruman *totally* wanted to chance it, and never got the opportunity.

Re: (Here be spoilers)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Gandalf is scared of the One Ring because he knows

a. it will try to control the wearer, and it is strong as Hell
b. it will inevitably corrupt the wearer -- unlike the Palantír, which Aragorn has the right to use if he is strong enough to wrest it from Sauron's control
c. the stronger the wearer, the more danger to Middle-earth, and Gandalf's mission is to protect Middle-earth by opposing Sauron, not to replace him

Galadriel knows the same. She is tempted but resists successfully. Go back and reread their conversations when Frodo offers it to them.

Re: (Here be spoilers)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'll accept your superior knowledge of the text, here, because not even a fun internet argument could make me subject myself to Tolkien's prose again when I'm not feeling masochistic.

The point I was trying to make was that Galadriel and Saruman both feel that with the One Ring they *could* defeat Sauron and complete the Barbie Dream Home Playset. Gandalf seems to think he *couldn't* do that.

Either way, Gandalf doesn't want the Ring because with the Ring he would destroy the world as Sauron's servant.

Galadriel doesn't want the Ring because with the Ring she would destroy the world as Sauron's *replacement*.

Saruman wants the Ring because with it he would destroy the world as Sauron's replacement, and he's totally okay with that.

Re: (Here be spoilers)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

OK, I mostly agree with you there. I don't think Galadriel believes she could succeed at overthrowing Sauron. She recognizes what she's feeling, including the visions of success, as the temptations of the Ring "whispering in her ear" as it were: she's speaking the thought but rejecting it. Like Sam's vision, when he puts it on, of overthrowing Sauron and remaking Mordor as a land of gardens.

Re: (Here be spoilers)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I agree that a botch isn't the same as stupidity, and what goes wrong with magic in LOTR is pretty much botches.

That's a good song.

Re: (Here be spoilers)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

(bow)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Interesting point about Tolkien. I'm not sure whether it's just a matter of tone that his version of incompetence is tragic while the stuff about knife-fighting is funny if you aren't empathizing with the worst consequences at the moment.

[captain-button.livejournal.com]

Lord Kevin's mistake was giving way to despair, not stupidity.

High Lord Elena, however, tries something really stupid based on nothing but wishful thinking, with disastrous results it takes 4 more books to fix.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

All of Greek Myth.

Seriously - all of the Gods and Titans and Heroes are *total dicks* who fuck up on basic comprehension of magic at every turn. The Gods just mostly get away with it, being deities.

[avram]

Isn't this a common fantastic trope? Aren't there, like, billions of stories about the guy who gets access to some magical thingamajig, and it comes with a warning about how not to use it, but he ignores the warning and suffers for it? Like The Monkey's Paw, or Gremlins, or who knows how many Twilight Zone episodes?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I think I'm looking for something a little more subtle than the monkey's paw and deals with the devil. Those are set in a universe where magic is essentially not safe for humans to use. (For an especially chilling version, see Rebecca Ore's _Slow Funeral_.)

The sort of incompetence I'm talking about would apply in a universe where people can use magic, but greed and wishful thinking (and possibly bad policy if we want to throw in a government)combine so that a lot of people get magic wrong, sometimes with serious effects.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Well, I think Vincalis the Agitator mentioned above might qualify.

Spoilers .......









The government primary policy is to meet the magical energy needs of the populace. For about 1000 years they have been using human sacrifice to do so. They can't safely sacrifice enough victims anymore, and they can't even admit they have been doing human sacrifice. Then a magician finds a way to extract even more magical energy by the sacrifices by destroying not just the body, but the soul as well. They are all convinced this will provide enough extra energy to meet projected needs for a couple of hundred years. The question of 'what then' is never raised, and the morality of doing so is quickly dismissed ("If we take the evil(*) souls of the vicitims and use them to support the good that is the empire, we have in effect turned evil into good").

(*) Well no. While some political prisoners and illegal immigrants are used in the sacrifices, the vast majority of the victims are descendants of previous sacrificial victims, who have lived their entire lives in a drugged stupor. This is favorably regarded by the heads of the empire as a 'renewable energy source'.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Sounds quite interesting. I may well look it up.

[zenlizard]

One of the central tenents of Discordianism is that we pray only very seldom, and even then, only very carefully.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

J. Gregory Keyes' Newton's Cannon is set in one of those universes where magic is in some respects a stand in for science. An alchemist figures out how to bomb London by attracting an asteroid down onto it. This comes close to precipitating nuclear winter - the alchemist had no real understanding of the magnitude of the forces he used.

The discussion afterwards, from memory:
"Didn't you check your math?
"I did! The numbers were so large they made no sense!"
"Didn't it occur to you that if the numbers were inconceivable so too might be the result!"

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

It's also a recurring theme in Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy Investigates and its sequels, that nearly all of the villain magicians trip up because they've learned how to use magic, but they don't really understand it on a fundamental theoretical level, so they make mistakes that somebody who understood it better wouldn't make. It's also a recurring theme that even in a world that's had widespread use of magic by licensed professional magicians for hundreds of years, most non-magicians still don't understand the limits of what magicians can and can't do, can and can't get away with.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

Slightly OT, in Lois Bujold's Curse of Chalion an inquisitor for a deity who will grant death wishes on occasion comments "We found fraudulent attempts to pretend that a death miracle had been granted. Usually poisoning, but occasionally we had to explain to someone that the god never kills someone with a dirk, nor does he bludgeon his victims to death."

[captain-button.livejournal.com]

In the sequel, The Paladin of Souls, the central problem of the story is the result of a desperate magical attempt to stave off the inevitable, if I'm recalling it right.

And the third book deals with the problems coming from shortsighted "deal with the devil" magical stuff back in the past.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

"In the sequel, The Paladin of Souls, the central problem of the story is the result of a desperate magical attempt to stave off the inevitable, if I'm recalling it right."

Catti ("Lovely girl, but I swear if you held a candle up her ear I could blow it out through the other") is trying to do so. Our heroine and POV figure, Ista, is trying to make the best of the situation she's been handed.

"And the third book deals with the problems coming from shortsighted "deal with the devil" magical stuff back in the past."

Yes, but not our heroes' magical stuff: laid on them by others.

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

There is also evidence in the Darcyverse that successful attempts to do things without the use of magic were being ignored by the magicians and the aristocracy. For example, one psychic healer comments disdainfully about hedge witches who claim to heal illnesses with a substance made from moldy bread. Since this makes no use of the magical laws of similarity or contagion, the cures are obviously coincidental, if they happened at all.