Sherry Chandler » Even Magic Has Limits
Even Magic Has Limits
If you use magic in fiction, the first thing you have to do is put barriers up. There must be limits to magic. If you can snap your fingers and make anything hapen, where’s the fun in that? …The story really starts when you put limits on magic. Where fantasy gets a bad name is when anything can happen because a wizard snaps his fingers. Magic has to come with a cost, probably a much bigger cost than when things are done by what is usually called “the hard way.”
— Terry Pratchett from The Wand in the Word, Conversations with Writers of Fantasy (Candlewick Press, 2006), edited by Leonard S. Marcus
I feel this way about the current crop of fantasy and action movies done with computer animation. When the characters can “perform” any kind of physical stunt, the film becomes a cartoon without the laughs.
Pratchett continues:
In A Hat Full of Sky, …I have [Tiffany] learning what might be called “the hard end” of witchcraft, which is being a combination of village midwife, wise woman, and nurse. It means that you are giving all the time, that other people are taking, and that you don’t get much rest, and it isn’t what you think witchcraft is going to be when you set out. There’s an awful lot of dirt and bandaging and looking after people, and not very much broomstick. Disc world is amagical place, but very little actual magic happens. When Tiffany magically turns someone into a frog, it turns out to be a very horrifying moment because of the law of the conservation of mass. You get about two ounces of frog and all the matter that’s left over takes the form of this kind of big pink balloon floating up against the ceiling, making “gloop, gloop” noises. It’s all very messy.
This is why I love reading Disc world novels.
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