Science Fiction: A Bit of Magic Isn’t Always Enough

by
This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Two thingsthe best modern fantasies have are a distinctive setting and a defined and preferably novel technology of magic. In Robert Jackson Bennett’s “Foundryside” . . . the magic tech is “scriving”—controlling the world by means of sigils, or inscriptions. As for the setting, it is unusual both in being industrial and in being post-medieval. Mr. Bennett’s city of Tevanne is like something from Renaissance Italy, with merchant clans preserving an uneasy balance from their fortified campos.

The balance is upset by Sancia the thief. She steals an object, which turns out to be a sentient key called Clef. Clef can open any lock, and Sancia can sense scrivings. Between them they can defeat almost any security system. In the background are whisperings of even greater masters who created the Clef by experiments now forbidden. If ordinary scriving speaks the “language of reality,” the old scrivers were fringing on “God’s coded commands,” to alter reality.

Dark history returning, a Thing of Power, a waif entrusted with it: so far, so Tolkien. Not a bit. Sancia is more tormented and more streetwise than any hobbit, and Clef builds a rapport with her, unlike Bilbo’s Ring. She too, it turns out, is a left-over experiment with much to avenge, and her street-companions seem sometimes oddly modern and hacker-like. As the story unfolds, so do both the potentials and the limitations of scriving technology.

. . . .

The heroine of Jennifer Estep’s “Kill the Queen” . . . the first installment in a new series, is a princess sure enough. But she’s only 17th in line for the throne, and worse, in a magic-dominated society, poor Everleigh is just a “mutt” who can’t do magic at all. At the start she’s baking pies in the palace kitchen. That and dancing are her only known talents.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Click to Tweet/Email/Share This Post

11 thoughts on “Science Fiction: A Bit of Magic Isn’t Always Enough”

  1. Sounds like magic-urban-fantasy from the description. A genre that was huge a year or two ago, but has probably passed its peak.

    Well, at least I hope it tapers off into gradual oblivion so its authors can find another niche. Unlike steampunk, which was huge… and then went away almost overnight, leaving its authors wondering what happened. (I don’t know either… maybe despite the push, people weren’t actually buying much of it and the PR money finally ran out?)

    • Novelty wears off.

      Steampunk is a fantasy milieu and too many of the early stories played off the same high fantasy tropes, just replacing magic systems with anachronistic tech.

      The genre will remain (strictly speaking it predates the recent wave) but working it will require more work to craft a story that *requires* that kind of setting.

  2. “As for the setting, it is unusual both in being industrial and in being post-medieval.”

    I am torn between wondering if the writer of this article has never heard of steampunk, and trying to imagine a setting that is both industrial and medieval.

  3. The stories sound interesting enough but not at those prices.

    Plenty of good reads at a quarter of those prices.

    • Felix,

      Amazon randomly hides e-books on Amazon.com from UK visitors and also – I think – includes 20% VAT when it does show them so I’m not sure of the size of the prices you are complaining about. However, whilst “Foundryside” is priced at a typical trad publisher level in the UK (i.e. an amount I’d only pay for one of my wife’s favourite authors, and I’d be gritting my teeth when I did so) I was pleasantly surprised by “Kill The Queen”.

      At £5.99 including VAT (say $6.50 excluding tax) it’s not cheap but for Harper Voyager it’s showing signs that they actually hope to sell e-book versions as it’s £4 cheaper than the (VAT-free) paperback price. Indie titles will still typically be cheaper but the ratio is not so bad especially as many of the latter will be distinctly shorter.

      • UK tradpub ebook prices are known to be generally lower than the same book US prices. (Via Mobileread’s UK contingent.) It’s the US Agency part Deux at work.
        It’s not Amazon.
        It’s the randy Penguin looking to screw readers and prop up print.

        The cited ebooks are $11 and $14 dollars over here.
        Comparable fantasies like THE QUEEN’S POISONER and its sequels run $2-5.(I can get the entire six-volumes of THE KINGSFOUNTAIN series for $1 more than KILL THE QUEEN and $2 less than FOUNDRYSIDE alone. Mr Wheeler would be getting a bigger cut of my money than the other authors.)

        One wants creative authors to be properly rewarded but not at the expense of feeding reader-hostile multinationals.

        • Felix, currently the 6 books of the Kingsfountain series are £5.94 in the UK so less than the £5.99 for “Kill the Queen”, though you really need to add another £3.78 for the “Poisoner’s Enemy” prequel (and the total is still less than the £9.99 they want for “Foundryside”). A much, much better deal than either of the two trad published books.

          However, this comparison is a little unfair as this is a £0.99 per book special deal which presumably will not last. A very good deal in fact and I advise anyone whose not got the Kingsfountain series to buy now.

          I got book 1 for free (another special deal) but paid £3.98 for each of the others so the whole 7 book series cost me nearly £24.00 (about £12 to Mr Wheeler I think), so “Foundryside” at current prices is about three times as expensive as what I paid for the Amazon publications.

          If I decide I want Foundryside – and it does sound interesting – I’ll put it on eReaderIQ and wait for a big price drop and when it arrives I’ll have forgotten why the book interested me.

          • Like I said: different pricing on both sides of the pond.

            Your pricing does me no good; I deal with what I have to work with and what I face is a set of colluding multinationals over-pricing ebooks, trying to prop up print economics at the expense of their authors and readers. I refuse to play that game and I haven’t since 2010.

            And note that under the current Agency deals on this side, publishers (and their authors) get less than 70% on books over $10. My guessing is that at $14 they get 50% so they see no more revenue at $14 than they would at $10. They just want to force readers to cough up bigger “reader spend”.

            I am not paying $14 for an ebook to help subsidize polluting dead tree pulp products. Not when equally good or better reads are routinely available at $3-5 and often on sale for even less.

            The only way to deal with that kind of business is not to deal with them.

            I can live just fine without their books.

Comments are closed.