Author’s Afterward

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED in paperback by Del Rey Books in 1980, Master of the Five Magics was my first fantasy novel. As such, there was insufficient room for any personal ramblings by an unknown author. This publication gives me the chance to add a few additional notes.

 

The motivation

 

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 in this book 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.

 

‘Discovery’ of the five magics

 

There was no flash of encompassing insight from a single afternoon’s thought that resulted in the laws of magic in this book. Instead, the process, with some blind alleys not mentioned, went something like the following.

The literature on magic is vast and contradictory, and as I read, I soon realized that I had no hope of coming up with a concept of magic as a unified field of endeavor. My hope instead became one of being able to divide magic into orthogonal disciplines, each with its own peculiarities and elements of mastery.

First on my list of disciplines, or magical ‘crafts’ as I began to think of them, was alchemy. Practically everyone knows about alchemy: the transmutation of base metals into gold, the elixir of life, the universal solvent … It is what eventually evolved here on earth, of course, into the science of chemistry.

Alchemy then led to astrology. Everyone knows about it too. That eventually evolved into Astronomy, but from the perspective of magic it deals with divination and prophecy.

Then in my reading, another candidate jumped out — what anthropologists and others call primitive magic. Time after time and place after place, in many primitive cultures there are beliefs like that of wiping a rag against a wart and then burying it so that it will rot and make the wart go away. Or the beliefs of folk magic practitioners who get a hair or nail clipping from an intended victim that they affix to a doll effigy and then stick pins in it. This working of miracles would become my thaumaturgy: the manipulation of objects and the analog of physics on the earth.

I thought about our fairy tales and myths involving magic. These almost always involve magical objects: magic rings, magic swords, magic mirrors … What was characteristic about these objects is that they were very dear. One did not on a slow day just go into the back room that had a furnace and whip up rings of power. And if a sword were kept at the bottom of a lake, it would not rust but be as good as new when next needed. Magical objects were hard to make, and when they were, they were everlasting.

Another item associated with the word magic is ‘square’. A magic square is in some way considered perfect. The sums of each row, column, diagonal, and in some cases even more subsets, equals the same value. This leads to thinking about mathematics and then its practitioners, mathematicians.

The word ‘enchantment’ immediately brings into focus the mental side of folklore magic: the evil eye, putting someone under your spell … Enchantment has the same root as chant, a recital that puts one under control.

Next, I thought about witches and warlocks, their covens and interaction with the devil. This lead to necromancy: divination via communicating with the deceased. By the time I got to necromancy I had several different candidates, but then had to halt. I was surprised to learn that necromancy was just one of many, many distinct techniques of divination.

There were many other ways, other -mancys. Magical lore was even richer than I thought. I could not cover it all. I was just going to have to stop somewhere. Today with the internet, if you go to:

 

Wiktionary -mancy

 

and click on show terms derived from -mancy, you will see that there are 80 different ones listed! Too many for each to have its own laws and be the underpinning of a novel.

So I decided to get rid of all of the -mancys. And to get rid of astrology too. It was of the same ilk. If I moved the art of divination to sorcery since it also dealt with matters of the mind, I was left with five magics to work with. That felt right. No more research. Five was the right number. The next task was to flesh them out — detailing the laws and the rest of the background.

 

The laws of magic

 

The laws for thaumaturgy are not my invention. They were formulated by the anthropologists who noticed the similarities of the magic of many primitive cultures. I also found the law for alchemy in my reading.

But after that, I was on my own. I did not find any more laws explicitly stated. For magic, sorcery, and wizardry I had to come up with something that fit with the folklore of the craft and that just sounded right.

First, I tackled wizardry. I had come to like the parallel structure of there being masters of each craft, and witches and warlocks did not seem to fit that model well. And I wanted to expand the scope of the interaction with ‘elsewhere’ to include imps, sprites, and other demons. That led to a thinking about a contest of wills with the denizens of this other realm and the concept of dominance or submission.

Next was magic. Central to it was the production of perfect everlasting objects. So, I combined the two terms into the law that perfection was eternal.

Sorcery was last, and chanting was part of it to be sure. But what was it about chanting that was important? Coming up with the answer became a struggle. I finally settled on using the saying that ‘the third time is charm’ to be the folklore rendering of the Rule of Three and select ‘charm’ as spell performed by a sorcerer.

At this point, I had a basic law for each craft and two for thaumaturgy. Symmetry would demand that I go back and come up with a second law for the other four, but after some struggle, I decided that that was not going to happen. But I did not want to abandon either one of the laws for thaumaturgy either. After all, both were excellent for what I wanted to do. Finally, I decided that I would add a second law to wizardry — to provide a crude ‘bookend’ symmetry to the set — seven laws for the five crafts.

What was the second law of wizardry to be? I was stumped about this for some time, until I happened to remember that as a small child I was fascinated with the flames in a fireplace, mysteriously dancing about, hypnotizing, and beckoning to be touched. And just like that, flame became the portal to the realm of demons — the obvious second law for wizardry.

A statement of all of the laws can be found on the page immediately following the Table of Contents.

 

 

The rest of the background

 

With the laws settling down to towards their final form, I could now start adding details to the background — the color of robes, what was the specific name of a spell for each of the five magics, and how each one interacted with the overall culture and society … I also knew that there had to be constraints for each of the crafts. Without them then there could be omnipotent spells that plopped us right back into being able to pull rabbits out of hats. For these constraints, except for the idea that there was a limit to how powerful a demon one could control, I found nothing to guide me. Finally, even though I wanted to have everything have an echo in our folklore, I was just going to have to use some whole cloth after all. And so I did.

 

The constraints for the five magics are:

 

Thaumaturgy - energy has to be conserved.

Alchemy - probability of success is lower the higher is the formula’s potency.

Magic - making a magic object takes years, perhaps even generations.

Sorcery - each charm takes away some of the life force of the sorcerer. Use it all up and you are through.

Wizardry - the more powerful the demon, the harder it is to achieve control.

 

Plot and characters

 

Compared to the effort to get the laws of magic right and all that went with it, I spent far less coming up with the plot and characters. Master of the Five Magics is a simple adventure story — the hero’s quest that ends up with the world being saved and with a little romance on the side. This story has been told many times in many ways. But for Master of the Five Magics it seemed to me to be the right story to tell.

 

Getting published

 

Back in the ’70s, an author sent a printed copy of an unsolicited manuscript to a publisher’s slush pile and crossed his fingers. If return postage were included, about three months later it would come back with a brief rejection note. Then the process would be repeated with the next publisher to try. My first choice for a publisher was Ballantine. It was duly rejected, and I moved on to the next. My list to try was a short one — four publishers in all. In about a year, they all had said no.

About the same time as the fourth rejection, I found out that Lester del Rey, the renowned science fiction writer had just joined Ballantine as the fantasy editor. Having nothing to lose, I sent the manuscript back to Ballantine directed explicitly to him and with no mention of my previous submittal. After the usual several month period, he wrote back with a single spaced three-page letter that said in part:

 

“You’ve got the damnedest combination of good material and very bad material in your novel that I’ve ever come across.”

 

He went on to say that if I were willing to follow his editorial direction, then perhaps something marketable could be made of things. He was concerned about dealing with a writer for whom every word was sacred and could not be changed.

At the time, I was working at an aerospace company and had experienced many times the process of getting a proposal document for a contract whipped into shape for submission to the government. A rule of thumb was that if you got as much as ten percent of your original draft in the final proposal, you were doing quite well. So sure, revising was no problem.

I signed a contract and anxiously waited for del Rey to get back to me with his detailed editorial comments. Three more months went by with no word from him. I wrote what I hoped was a polite letter asking him about progress on his end of things. Three more months went by with no answer. I got up the nerve to call him directly and he said that he had not gotten to the task yet, and that I should be patient. Three more months passed, and out of desperation, I decided to put myself in ‘proposal mode’ and to read again his original three-page letter that broadly outlined the basic flaws of the manuscript.

Over the next few months, I edited the original draft according to his hints and send the revision to him. That did the trick. I had improved things sufficiently that he now had something he could work with, something upon which he could make detailed comments. A relatively short time later del Rey sent another letter, this time with a list of some 120 one line detailed comments — things like not having Alodar take the disk from Cynthia’s wrist while she slept but have her give it to him; a hero just would not steal.

The next hurdle was the title. My original one was Quest for the Fair Lady. With an eye on marketing, del Rey asked that I submit some alternatives. Reluctantly, I sent him five more. The last of the five was Master of the Five Magics. I did not like it. It added an element of confusion. Magic was one of the five arts. In the text, none of the other four was referred to as a ‘magic’. Besides, the plot line was simple enough already; didn’t that title just really give away whatever mystery remained? But del Rey insisted, and Master of the Five Magics it became.

Almost another year passed in the production phase — a final del Rey edit to cut down the size, a copy editing to clean up the grammar, type setting, galley proof reading, and so on. Finally, some seven and half years after starting, the book appeared on the shelves.

 

Changes in the second edition

 

Eventually the book went out of print and the rights reverted to me. For several decades I did nothing about this until just recently when I decided to make Master of the Five Magics available again.

There have been a few small changes made. The original chapters all contained two or three individual scenes. These I have split out into separate chapters. There is a small amount of additional background material at the beginning, and the climax has been extended as well. I have added a glossary and this afterward.

I hope that those of you reading Master of the Five Magics for the first time enjoy its return.