Hard and Soft Magic Systems

Put me down as well for liking both, done well – either separately or together.

I enjoy Sanderson’s detailed systems (though I’m pretty sceptical of his attempts to roll them into a metasystem covering all his books–too much post facto fudgery there for me). I always liked Master of the Five Magics, too – one of the classic US pulp fantasy novels of rules-based hard magic, an influence on not a few American fantasy writers of my generation.

But I also enjoy the mythopoeic magic that can’t be controlled or systematized – the powers of a world beyond our ken interacting with our mundane little lives. This is more vulnerable to plot holes, but that doesn’t have to spoil it. Another classic that I just finished reading my sons, Alan Garner’s Elidor, is a great example of this style.

And I enjoy combinations, where the “shallows” of hard magic that can be grasped and spelled out in detail suddenly deepen into magic that can only be “soft” because it’s beyond description or comprehension. Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence has done this well a few times now. But sci fi also offers a lot of examples. Iain Banks tried to do it several times in his Culture novels, with varying degrees of success (Excession didn’t work for me, but it did for a lot of people.) And as “hard” an author as Liu Cixin repeatedly hits points where his books are essentially running on soft magic, because we’ve gone so far into the realms of higher-dimensional cosmos-shaping (and wrecking) entities. He’s taken us past the point of rules and systems, and it’s as jaw-dropping as some of the best mythic soft magic fantasy.

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