Dire Contingencies: Exploring the Consequences of Magic in Modern Fantasy

Season 2 of Arcane, released on Netflix last November, begins with two inciting incidents. Number one: a psychologically disturbed inventor/gang enforcer blows up the ruling council of oligarchs with a rocket, upsetting nascent negotiations between the “upper” and “lower” cities that could have led to greater political self-determination for the exploited lower classes. Number two: a pair of inventors/scientists discover some suspicious schmutz on the leaves of their local tree. With apologies, we’re going to discuss the objectively less dramatic of these two story beats, certainly what you would expect to be the less consequential of the pair, and spend several hundred words digging into the implications of the schmutzy leaf. (It’s a pretty gingko leaf, if that helps draw you in.)

But I maintain that the leaf—or rather, the larger tree that has been polluted by the reckless experiments of a couple of up-jumped baby mages—reflects how the fantasy genre, which has traditionally been preoccupied with tales of individual heroic psychology and adventure, has come to increasingly embrace stories about systems, especially in how it deploys the most ubiquitous fantasy feature, magic.

Much ink has been spilled on how to write satisfying limitations into fictional magic systems, most notably by the likes of Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson. These rules are pitched for writers as a semi-prescriptive set of criteria for worldbuilding, though they are often also adopted by readers as a lens through which to deconstruct the magic systems they’re presented with. (I maintain that the latter practice is bound to be less successful, but that’s not the pet opinion we’re here to discuss at the moment.) Rather, I want to focus on the ways that authors, especially contemporary fantasy authors such as Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, and Robert Jackson Bennett, having bounded their magic systems’ limits in either “hard” or “soft” terms, thematically explore its consequences—though as we’ll touch on, this thematic focus is hardly a recent innovation; it’s woven through the work of classic big-name fantasy authors like Le Guin, Jordan, and Tolkien. And how could it not be? For while the limits on magic pertain really only to the magical practitioners in a story, the consequences of its existence and use cast their shadows on everyone, big and small. Now go off with the wizard, Bilbo, I’m sure you’re in perfectly safe hands…

Arcane is broadly focused on themes involving power dynamics, be it between siblings, societies, etc. It’s surprising heady for a show based on a video game, and it gets a great deal of mileage out of braiding the squirrelly fantasy concept of magic with the real-world history of the Industrial Revolution. The show’s art design draws heavily on Art Deco and Art Nouveau posters from the first half of the 20^th century, resulting in some very beautiful animation that rhymes with a historical period when technological advancements—and two World Wars—changed the global economic and social landscape. The parallel catalytic event in Arcane’s universe is also technological, but that technology is developed around a magical energy source which promises to solve the cities’ issues with environmental pollutants that were the biproducts of previous stages of industrial development. Think the 1920s minus all the smog; just champagne, wild parties, and vast economic and social inequality, baby! Sure, the children of the lower classes keep dying in industrial accidents, police raids, gang wars, and also regular war (I know this sounds glib, but fair warning: this show is not shy about depicting violence against children), but no one’s getting soot on their coat, and the sky is quite blue. Cheers, lads, you did it!

Or at least, the audience and characters are led to believe the magic will be clean and consequence free… enter our suspicious schmutzy gingko leaf.

That seductive promise of magic as a source of clean, renewable energy is, either explicitly or implicitly, common to fantasy genre magic, a product of the entanglement between our ideas about magic with our conceptions of “naturalness.” That is: fantasy magic tends to come in one of two flavors. It is either presented as deeply natural, drawing on innate capacities and earth-y resources (consider the public perception of Wicca—not so much the real religion as the version popularized by the various teen witches of ’90s TV), or else are deeply unnatural, perverting organic processes, physical laws, and social norms.   

There is generally a bit of both occurring at the same time, but the narrative framing will tend to push in one direction. And indeed, because the boundary between natural and unnatural is so deeply artificial, writers and other creatives may take advantage of a great deal of leeway when deciding where they personally wish to draw that line to take control of how acts of magic are perceived by their audience. The oft-resurrected Wicked Witch of West can offer us a useful case study here. When the Margaret Hamilton incarnation flies about on her broomstick, does that feel coded as a natural or unnatural activity? What about when Elphaba of Wicked does it?

In both instances, the framing is even pretty aggressive. Consider how each film presents the first time we see the Wicked Witch take broom-flight: In Wicked—which, show of hands, we’ve all seen by now, yes? Several times?—Elphaba’s magical powers are constantly and explicitly stated to be innate and manifest from early childhood. She was born this way, in both ways; magical and green. And while her greenness is looked down upon as inexplicable and unnatural, sorcery is quotidian enough in Oz that students may apply to study it at school, and Elphaba’s power is seized on as something to be celebrated and cultivated. The first time she flies, furthermore, during the curtain-dropping number “Defying Gravity” at the end of the first act, it’s presented as a moment of spiritual discovery, a triumphant culmination. In both the Broadway show and recent movie, the fateful lift-off occurs as Elphaba belts, “It’s meeeeeeeee!” a subtle gesture to the idea that in this moment, taking flight, our heroine is coming into her own.

But The Wizard of Oz does not begin in the titular fantasy land. It is told from the perspective of Dorothy Gale of Kansas, where the only magicians are obvious, if well-meaning, hucksters, and everything there is to see looms up out of the flat land in muted shades of brown. Magic, under this framing, which seems to animate most of what’s going on in Oz, takes on an altogether different tint. It’s weird, and it makes this world less coherent to us and to poor Dorothy, who arrives via falling house and is immediately celebrated by the locals for committing accidental manslaughter. And what in fact is the first glimpse we and Dorothy are granted of this cheerfully violent magical other-world? The most cinematically famous moment is of course when Dorothy crosses the threshold from her sepia-toned house into vibrant, technicolor Oz, but while that is the most dramatic transition, we do actually catch a small glimpse of Oz before that: when Dorothy is trapped in the center of the cyclone, she has a vision of her officious neighbor Miss Gulch transforming into the Wicked Witch, flying on her broomstick, thumbing for a hitch—punctuated by the witch’s ominous musical leitmotif. And that’s how we know we’re not in Kansas anymore.

In either case, whether accidentally or on purpose, such depictions of magic are always ricocheting off our concepts of “naturalness.” Unsurprisingly, then, contemporary authors living under the looming specter of climate change have used that magical-natural connection to explore the topic of environmental pollution, the destruction by a few of the habitat shared by all.

It would be misleading to try and pass off this late trend as entirely novel, since nature has been a major thematic concern of the fantasy genre essentially from the start. One of the most significant constituent elements of Tolkien’s fantasy ethos is of course its romanticization of both the natural world and pre-modern agrarian societies. That sunny portrayal may not be one-hundred percent uniform; the spiders of Mirkwood and Old Man Willow both come to mind as nature-based entities that antagonize our favorite hobbits; but the spiders, who are after all the children of Ungoliant, ally of Morgoth, outside of God’s sight and by consequence outside of His love, etc., feel more like a concession to the common aesthetic outlook that “spiders are gross and spooky” than a knock against nature’s majestic variety writ large.

And Old Man Willow is a rarity as one of the few Bad Trees in Middle-earth, but whose malice, Tom Bombadil explains, is the product of his ancient resentment “of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning.” Tolkien did not consider Old Man Willow evil, in an existential sense. In a letter complaining of a BBC dramatization of his books that depicted the willow as an ally of Mordor, Tolkien protested: “Cannot people imagine things hostile to men and hobbits who prey on them without being in league with the Devil!” So perhaps we should really leave off calling the Willow a Bad Tree. More precise at least to say he is Not Kindly Disposed.

Indeed, much of the anti-industrial rhetoric woven throughout his trilogy involves Tolkien’s specific aesthetic appreciation for trees. Saruman’s depredation of Fangorn Forest rouse the sleepy Ents to fight against him, with Treebeard testifying that the wizard “has a mind of metal and wheels; he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.” The specific nature of the cruel machines of Saruman’s Isengard receives less focus than the fact that he has plundered the trees in order to fuel them. So too in the “Scouring of the Shire” does Saruman, under the alias “Sharkey,” cut down the local trees to build shacks and houses and mills for his occupying force of ruffians, this loss of greenery that made up so many of the familiar landmarks of home proving the greatest emotional blow to the returning hobbits:

Again, Tolkien’s focus is on the loss of beauty and society rather than what we might now consider to be the primary evil of environmental pollution and destruction, namely the threats posed to human and ecological health. He expresses the same attitude most personally and explicitly in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” wherein he details his “disgust” for the electric streetlamp and other like products of the “Robot Age,” “that combines elaboration and ingenuity of means with ugliness, and (often) with inferiority of result.” He can never entirely disambiguate his aesthetic distaste from his moral argument.  

But to return to our topic, when it comes to the relationship between fantasy magic and pollution or environmental degradation, it is notable that the primary industrialist figure of the Lord of the Rings is a wizard, raising the question of whether Saruman, who possesses significant innate magic power, resorts to mechanical means because his magic is insufficient to the goals he set himself or whether, more fundamentally, we’re meant to imagine that the powers of the Istari are somehow anathema to his poisonous ends. Put another way, is Tolkien’s wizard magic simply too Good and aligned with the natural world to be used for defilement?  

The answer to that is unequivocally “no,” and Tolkien reflects in another of his letters that he considers there to be some moral overlap between magic and technology, in that they should be viewed as good or bad in light of their ends, but that the means themselves may exert a seductive, corrupting influence:

Still, speaking from my own perspective as a reader, I feel that Saruman’s portrayal leaves a stronger impression than perhaps Tolkien intended. His intemperance is expressed primarily through his use of industrial machinery, his “mind of metal and wheels,” which makes his industrial ends feel like an abdication of his pure wizardly origins, epitomized in Gandalf as his foil. When Saruman changes his white wizard’s robes for all-color robes that “shimmered and changed hue” with his movements, one gets the feeling we are meant to picture the shifting rainbow sheen of nothing other than an oil slick (and not, as I naively pictured when a read the books as a tween, a fun colorful serape).  

Regardless, it is important to Tolkien that magic is a fairly limited resource in his world, as he is suspicious that its convenience, like the conveniences of machines, will pave an easy road to evil. He appears to characterize this attitude as a personal moral wickedness rather than, as might seem more likely to some, a naïve byproduct of carelessness. But we could allow that perhaps, to a victim, say, whose perfectly respectable sister was crushed by a tornado-battered falling house, the difference might look mostly immaterial.  

But in post-Tolkien fantasies where intrinsic magic is a more commonplace capacity, which I would estimate is most of them, writers and other creatives seem to feel a pressing need to address somehow why mages in this world don’t run amok—or else explore the consequences when they do.  

Consider Ursula Le Guin and Robert Jordan, two of Tolkien’s nearest genre neighbors both of whom adapt principles of Taoist duality into a Tolkienesque fantasy landscape. Both authors imagine magic-infused societies where the misuse of magic is disciplined against, mainly in the form of some central school/institution that impresses a sense of responsibility on its members. But it wouldn’t be a very dramatic story if everyone followed the rules all the time, and Le Guin and Jordan both delve into the impacts of magical misbehavior in their realms.

In Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, a previous age of advancement was destroyed when the well of male magical power is poisoned, driving all male “channelers” mad, causing them to destroy much of the world in a massive rampage. The whole madness business softens considerably any sense that magic was per se to blame for the “Breaking of the World.” But even taking into account the extenuating circumstances, Jordan’s apocalypse still invokes Tolkien’s warning about the problem of magic’s “immediacy” enabling great acts of destruction on the part of the unscrupulous or insane.

Le Guin treats the issue of the large-scale effects of accessible and convenient magic with a lighter, more philosophical touch in A Wizard of Earthsea. Her hero, Ged, is greatly consternated when his first wizardry teacher, Ogion, declines to stop the rain from falling on them as they travel the countryside, controlling the weather being a basic function of wizards in Earthsea. It is not uncommon upon the archipelago to see a rain cloud ping-ponging across the sky as it is deflected by a series of mages. Ged, who is so eager to acquire and use power, can’t understand why Ogion won’t do what any able wizard would to grant himself (and his longsuffering apprentice) a little comfort. “Because you haven’t found out what I’m teaching,” replies the mage.

Of course, Ogion is not being merely quirkily ascetic, not bowing to abstract virtues of denial and restraint. He simply understands the greater good of letting nature’s various cycles proceed—up to a reasonable point, anyway. Ogion will stop an earthquake, but he lets the rain fall where it may. His wisdom, the species of wisdom Ged spends the novel struggling to appreciate and obtain, involves understanding things apart from trying to instrumentalize them. “Power” as Ged and most of the world conceives of it is about having the command and use of things, while Ogion proposed that this is sort of a paltry way of seeing and interpreting the world. “What, after all, is the use of you?” he asks.

Tolkien, Jordan, and Le Guin all reflect on the problem of magic’s convenience, but while they theorize the bigger social and environmental impacts, their focus is often more on the personal psychological costs. The written word as a medium is well-suited to psychological drama, so understandably the power problem that they all identify is viewed largely through the lens of Frodo and Rand and Ged’s personal struggles with it. FitzChivalry Farseer also fits the archetype; Fitz’s magic doesn’t have so much catastrophic potential but he still gets his share of delicious torment (of both the social stigma and mental distress varieties). Heroic torment over the burden of power and responsibility—or magic power and cosmic responsibility—is an extremely tried and true formula.

Brandon Sanderson, in the second of his three famous laws for writing magic, advises balancing the fantastical abilities of magic in worldbuilding with some cost that will keep the magic from undercutting tension in the story by solving too many problems too easily. Whether or not we’ve encountered Sanderson’s dicta before, we’re all probably intuitively familiar with this two-step: PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER!!! Itty bitty living space. But in most of the examples Sanderson lays out, those magical powers are wielded by and taxed to individuals (this epitomizing the “intrinsic” style of magic in fantasy literature).

The interest in protagonists’ personal perspectives and woes is not going anywhere in a hurry, particularly not in the fantasy genre; but some recent fatigue with the hero’s journey as a structure and the aforementioned real-world concern with climate catastrophe appears to have motivated authors to embrace a more comprehensive accounting of the fallout of recklessly wielded power.

Nnedi Okorafor’s 2007 novel The Shadow Speaker offers us one example, imagining an alternate-future earth in which a nuclear war is countered by “juju bombs” that alter the nature of much of the earth’s living occupants, flora and fauna, as well as disrupting the globe’s spatial logic (people will suddenly appear in the wrong place). This has personal implications for protagonist Ejii, whom the great change makes into a shadow speaker (works exactly the way it sounds), but has much more far-reaching consequences for the whole world, which has acquired a new set of political neighbors: a host of magical worlds that are not enthused about all the carbon emissions earth’s combustion technologies keep introducing to their biomes.  

Robert Jackson Bennett’s recent fantasy detective story, The Tainted Cup, explores a similar theme on opposite terms. Bennett’s worldbuilding centers on an empire built upon a tremendous magical/alchemical capacity to alter organic matter, with the applications ranging from simple house construction to changing a person’s physical abilities—to meticulously planned murder, naturally. This is a murder mystery after all. Rather than a nice little garden, however, these organic augmentations often turn out to operate more like an invasive species, overwhelming rather than integrating with their environment. Ana and Din, our intrepid investigators, must go delving a swamp of bureaucratic corruption and scientific negligence to catch their killer. Bennett makes great use of the structure of a detective story, which is more accustomed to focusing on cross-sections of society than particular heroes, in exploring how his fantasy premise could go so terribly wrong.

But perhaps the totemic example of this trend comes in the form of N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo-winning-est Broken Earth trilogy, which turns one of fantasy’s most popular tropes on its head: in a reversal of something like Jordan or Le Guin’s college of enlightened mages guiding society with wondrous powers, Jemisin’s earth-shaping orogenes are stigmatized and enslaved, their powers and bodies instrumentalized in casually horrifying fashion. Indeed, Jemisin’s world seems almost to give reply to Ogion’s question, “What is the use of you?” As if society could not invent a horrific, dehumanizing answer to that question.

Arcane embraces the narrative of magic’s societal consequences in turn. Ekko and Heimerdinger, the occupants of that fine gingko tree, confront Jayce, the broad-chested inventor of “hextech,” the show’s magic-technology amalgam, to diagnose what might have gone wrong. Jayce takes them to a fail-safe structure sunken in the ground, intended to contain any blowback if his creation were to somehow malfunction. A scientist and a humanist, Jayce is trying to avoid the missteps of his genre predecessors—and on a non-meta level, of the other members of his social class and profession—but in the fashion of Greek tragedy, his efforts backfire. His fail-safe is sunken among the undercity’s water and air ducts, introducing a novel pollutant into their homes. It’s a cautionary tale about carelessness, to be sure, but also of good intentions being thwarted by the structures that preexist you.

There is perhaps something a little bit small-c conservative about the reflex to stick hard consequences and limitations on our fictional magics, whether they be innate to the magic itself, “can’t do x,” or result from external confounding factors—like society’s tendency to go in for some good old fashion human exploitation should it prove convenient. Isn’t the promise of magic, after all, that it empowers us to think anything could be possible? Molly Templeton on this site has recently reflected on the concept of “escapism” in literature, and if you have felt that reviewing these few examples of fantasy magic’s dire contingencies has been a bit of a downer, it may be balancing to revisit Tolkien’s comments on escapism, in which I have found there to be a useful kind of optimism.

For one of the reasons Tolkien so detested the Robot Age was the sales pitch: “‘Electric lamps have come to stay,’ they say. Long ago Chesterton truly remarked that, as soon as he heard that anything ‘had come to stay,’ he knew that it would be very soon replaced.” We may agree or disagree with Tolkien on the appeal of lamps or any other discreet technology (I’m pro-lamp, to be transparent), but I think there is something useful to be drawn from his formulation here. Rather than an “All Possible,” he proposes a “Not Inevitable.” It is an aspect of escapism that does not reject the existence of problems and complications, but it declines despair. The protagonists keep going. The solution just might not be as easy as magic.