by Larry Niven
Since the end of the real magicians, since the day of the swordsmen began, billions of meteorites have sifted their dust over the earth. Mana inheres in meteorites…and in murder. Spells should have power in Barringer Grater, and Belsen, and Reverend Jones’s part of Guiana (but not Hiroshima nor Nagasaki nor Dresden).
Hitler and Manson and Marilyn Monroe and the Rolling Stones and Che Guevara—dictators and bandits and movie stars—have displayed suspiciously high surges of charisma. Consider the almost violent increase in Man’s abilities in this century: there must be magic involved.
The magic is returning. By the ’80’s, we may see colts (or goats?) born with spiral horns in their foreheads.
Themes
There are main themes for the series to date. In addition, each Niven story had its own theme.
“Not Long Before the End” will be published as the first story in The Magic May Return. It opens the main theme: a worldwide civilization, loosely linked and rich in variety, is dying because a natural resource is running out.
If magic ever worked, then magic was not a rare phenomenon, occasionally found but preferably avoided by such as Conan the Cimmerian. Magic was the basis of civilization.
And if magic no longer works today, there must be some reason. De Camp has offered a good one: that overuse of iron in our culture has ended the age of magic.
I choose another explanation. Mana, the power behind magic, can be depleted as easily as present-day oil reserves, and with similar results.
The theme of “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” was pacifism. I attempted to show that it can’t be made to work, not even with magic.
In The Magic Goes Away, I tried to show the basis for new civilizations already forming, even while the remnants of the Sorcerer’s Guild tried to restore the glories of the past.
Hypothesis: This is not an alternate timeline; it is our own past. We must deal with a recurring question. Why can’t we find the evidence of magic-using civilizations in our past?
(Again: it’s a game. You may choose to play it, or not.)
When dragons die, and in general when any beast whose metabolism is based more on magic than on chemistry, dies (“goes mythical”), its bones tend to turn to terribly aged stone. Flesh too, if it isn’t eaten. Dinosaur relics are evidence of dragons.
Buildings raised by magic tend to fall to rubble when the magic goes away.
Tales of 14,000 years ago have mutated drastically.
We find cities which were once underwater, and we conclude that the sea must have risen. Might these old cities not be the ancient homes of merpeople? The fired clay bowls and metal tools were made by humans and traded for fish.
Et cetera. Remember: whatever you put into your story, our own time found no evidence of it, or misinterpreted that evidence. You are invited to show how.
What of your own themes? I can’t be much help. If I weren’t nearly out of ideas, I’d be writing these myself. You’re on your own. But if I might make some diffident suggestions…?
The fans keep telling me that the mana resources of the Moon, Mars, Alpha C, the earth’s core, etc., are untapped. If true, then the dawning era of space travel is going to take us right back to the age of magic. Experiments with Moon rocks may have been missing the point. Note also that our present attempts to find life on Mars have concentrated on chemically-based life: life run by slow-burning fire, not by mana. The ecology of (for instance) Burrough’s Mars must be magical; it doesn’t make sense otherwise. Bradbury’s Martians were always magical. Our astronauts could meet any of these, or the God of War himself.
Jim Baen’s suggestions: (a) All of the planets once developed magical life, which used up their mana supply and thus died out; (b) astrology takes advantage of whatever mana is left to these bodies; (c) Earth happened to be in the liquid-water zone for the sun.
Magic then would work weakly on many other planets, and most strongly on those bodies where life died soonest. (Meteor dust falling after life died out.) We’ll assume that the Moon and Mars were inhabited past E. R. Burroughs’ time; their mana is low. (And Venus? Refrigerated by magic? Swamps rich with strange, deadly life?) Uranus and Neptune and Pluto have no influence on horoscopes because meteors are scarce that far from the sun, or their magic obeys an inverse-square or inverse-cubed law.
14,000 years have passed since the Warlock’s age. Suppose that mana is replenished with the 25,000-year cycle of the Zodiac? Or the constant rain of meteor dust? Magic today would be uncontrolled, wild. All the old lore has been forgotten. We get cultural oddities like the subcivilization of Hollywood, the rise of strange cults and stranger politics in California (site where tons of gold were freshly mined, remember?), and tens of millions of people taking their beliefs and lifestyles from obvious idiots or charlatans. Where will it all end? With Blish’s Black Easter? Up to you, gang.
Returning to the past, consider: oaths were binding even as late as the Warlock’s time. It would take a magician of the Warlock’s class to break his oath. Treaties have real power. We may take the legends as accurate: in treaties between neighboring nations, as between man and demon, the phrasing counts for a great deal. There are loopholes, sometimes.
But as the magic goes away, so does the effective sanctity of a border…which is why barbarian armies are likely to rage across the oldest, most civilized of nations.
12,000 B.C. is an age of discovery. With the merpeople dead or returned to the deep places, fishing must be invented by men. The first approach might be a spell to keep fishermen alive underwater. What kind of man would build the first fishing pole? Or would the fish spear come first?
Medicine must be invented.
Construction techniques will begin to favor right angles, and pillars, and arches, and care for the solidity of the foundations. Earlier magical structures could have any shape whatever.
I’ve assumed writing already exists. But higher mathematics? Magic depends more on quality than quantity (doesn’t it?).
Consider another invention. Stage magic! What does a peasant do when confronted by a brawny swordsman, or an army? There are situations in which even a magician might want to show more power than he really has. Let (for instance) Clubfoot demonstrate some small magic like mind reading, then top the act by making a lady or a tiger disappear from a locked box. An invading army might be persuaded to go hastily away.
Then there’s the prayer wheel: a reversal of the Warlock’s Wheel. The Warlock’s Wheel used up the local mana. A prayer wheel is a paddlewheel or something similar, on which a magician imposes a weak spell to hold it motionless. The prayer wheel is turned by hand or by wind or by running water against the force of the spell. It thus generates and stores mana.
Settings
You’ll want to make your own, of course. But these are available:
Australia was colonized almost fifty years before The Magic Goes Away, probably a year or two after the Sorcerer’s Guild conference referred to in “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” Previously, the distant southern land mass had a bad reputation: infested with demons. We presume that the demons “went mythical” when the mana level dropped too low. Following the Guild conference, the magician Piranther led a migration of small black-skinned peoples to Australia. The mana level is high in Australia, and there are magical stones: black opals, concentrated mana sources, easily carried. Note that ostriches are assumed to be neotenous rocs (as in my Svetz time travel series). Note that today’s aborigines, with their pointing-bones that no longer work, are the descendants of Piranther’s band.
Rynildissen City is partly described in “What Good is a Glass Dagger?” There is an extensive werewolf section. Intelligent dragons used to visit, and the facilities for them still exist. The old city is too depleted of mana to be safe for them. There are shipyards and a bay, and a fishing industry which is now run by men. The underwater section of Rynildissen City has been deserted by the merpeople.
Prissthil is a smaller village, partly described in The Magic Goes
Away. Prissthil’s economy depended on magic and the sale of starstones—pieces of the meteorite that made Fistfall Crater. There’s no more of the Fist (though meteorite dust permeates the area, making spells easier) and Prissthil’s economy is like that of other villages.
Nordik territory is a collection of swordsman cultures in the Scandinavian countries. The Nordiks hold Frost Giant slaves; they have invented saunas, they think like swordsmen.
Characters
The Warlock and Wavyhill are dead.
Gang, I hope you’ll grant me this. I don’t kill major characters lightly. These two died in a region absolutely devoid of mana, and there ain’t no way to bring them back.
You might consider picking either of these characters up earlier in their careers. But consider: how does the Warlock series differ from standard sword-and-sorcery? Only in the depletion of mana. Set your story too early in this era, and nobody knows about mana depletion. It becomes just another S&S story.
You choose to prove me wrong? Be my guest.
Characters alive following The Magic Goes Away include:
Mirandee. She’s in her eighties and showing it. We left her in the company of Orolandes and Clubfoot. All three will be trying to survive on the side of a frigid and mana-depleted mountain. But Mirandee will also be looking for a mana source to restore her youth. I did not give her much of a history, but at some time the Warlock was her lover.
Clubfoot. Ancestor to present-day American Indian. His folk can still remember crossing the Pacific, fleeing an infestation of vampires. (Consult Chinese vampire legends, please.) One of his feet is clubbed; he will walk funny, and it will slow him down about as much as Mirandee’s age. His own age: fifty-odd.
Orolandes. Call him twenty-eight. Of the three, he alone is young, healthy, and unharmed save for bruises. He never knew magic anyway, and he isn’t mourning the loss of a lover (as Mirandee is) or teacher (as Clubfoot is). He’ll be protecting the other two. The sword he’s carrying must have been made magically; the magic is now gone from it. He can expect it to shatter the first time he uses it.
Aran. A sixty-year-old (at the end of “What Good is a Glass Dagger?”) rug merchant with some political power, Aran is a werewolf. He has just learned that werewolves are wolves altered by magic. When the magic goes away, his people will be dumb beasts forever. Aran has eight children. He is determined to use his political power to bar magicians from Rynildissen City. Magicians use up the mana.
Sharla was the Warlock’s wife and apprentice in “Not Long Before The End.” Details of the marriage contract were not given. When next we saw the Warlock, she was gone. If Sharla still lives, she may be a powerful witch. Or not. Whatever her career, she retains what she learned of magic.
Glirendree is quite dead, but there must be others of his ilk. Glirendree was a demon imprisoned in the form of a battlesword. The shape left him some scope for his malice. A single magician of the past (not named; but he had a bastard son named Jeery who came to a bad end) may have imprisoned a good many demons in other forms.
I’ve described Glirendree, and the guardian demon the Warlock kept imprisoned in a tattooed design on his back. Demons can take any form you like.
An imprisoned demon has a problem: the spell that keeps him in a bottle, or in a hampering shape, is wearing away no faster than the demon’s own life. I can see a demon in Glirendree’s position finally finding himself free, but so frail due to mana depletion that he can’t do much about it.
The contexts and the situations certainly imply characters. Some are human, some are not.
Nordiks and Frost Giants are well described in The Magic Goes Away. The Frost Giants are nonhuman, but low mana reduces their size, making them effectively human. They remain tall, pale of skin, and light-haired. Poul Anderson probably has Frost Giant ancestry.
Merpeople were not well described. Use any legend you like as “research.” In ancient times the merpeople held an absolute monopoly on the fishing industry, and very little sea travel could occur without their permission and/or aid. By the end of the Warlock’s lifetime, they would die near any populated coast, unless they’re carrying talismans. Remember, three-fourths of the world’s meteorites (starstone) are on the seabottom. The merpeople may trade starstone or fishing techniques for the same price they’ve been getting: tools, information, red meat. (Never plants! They’re carnivores.)
Cetaceans were something I never mentioned. Could dolphins and whales be the low-mana form of the sea people? Then we can expect the merpeople to come in all sizes up to a blue whale. “Were-whales.”
Centaurs exist but were not described. Found in Atlantis and the Greek isles.
Dragons got considerable attention. Lack of mana kills them; their bones become drastically aged rock. Low mana mutates dragons. We saw two such mutated dragons in “What Good is a Glass Dagger?”: a great placid beast of burden, nonsentient, and a sentient dragon in a huge snail shell: well protected, but not speedy. Other mutants may breed true, evolving to, say, crocodiles. The Komodo Dragon could be a recent throwback, more evidence that the magic is returning in the present time.
(What would happen if someone bred two Komodo Dragons in Arizona’s Meteor Crater? Or even two crocodiles? Or Vreedevort Crater in Africa—)
Vampires were merely mentioned. (Use legends appropriate to the locality, please.) Other creatures of horror and the night were not mentioned (though any of them may be present), with the following exceptions.
Trolls are humanity’s ancestor, raised from the long dead by magic, to be servants.
Werewolves were part of the culture.
Rocs survived; there was a good deal of mana left in the upper atmosphere, where magicians rarely went.
The Midgard Serpent was alive, though dormant and badly ended, up to the time of The Magic Goes Away. It died then. A good number of mountain chains comprise its corpse.
For all of the above, remember that civilization will have found accommodations with any prevalent danger, and that sentient beings, such as centaurs, will engage in the traditional pursuits of sentient beings: trade and treaty-making, as well as war. For some, only war will be possible. What accommodation could we find with vampires?
What tales would children hear? The original forms of some of our own legends. As children, we know that these are “just stories.” But these children will be hearing freshly made news. Death of the World-Worm. Werewolves turning bandit in France. Sorcerers’ Guild fees increased again; and cheating a sorcerer is dangerous. The Pied Piper story may be older than we think.
The Pied Piper. Let’s include him as a possible character. “Glamour” is a simple magic. Did the Pied Piper use glamour on rats, then on children? Would adults have seen through the illusion?
A Wandering Artist could be in a hell of a bind. His assignment from the local king: paint the king’s portrait, and do the Dorian Grey number on it. The king knows this used to be a standard technique. The artist knows that it hasn’t been possible for centuries. He may be killed if he fails. His solution?
1. Paint the picture, and use its power (in voodoo style) to alter the king’s attitude toward himself. But it might be impossible to walk away from such a situation. Exit Wandering Artist, enter Power Behind The Throne, with self-elected assistants to help him rule.
2. Less safe, but easier: paint the portrait a little older, and keep altering it. A vain man tends to think he doesn’t really look older. The spell isn’t 100 percent effective? Big deal. The king might even be relieved to look a bit more distinguished every year. And the portrait reflects every wrong: blood on hands after an unjust war, beastial snarl after the hanging of insurrectionists—
Magicians. Well, I always did favor magicians. In The Magic Goes Away, they were trying to soft-land the Moon. That attempt ended the Sorcerer’s Guild. We can expect future magicians to be far less ambitious.
By hypothesis, magicians make poor swordsmen. We would expect them to branch out with skill they already have. They would be
inventors, and painters, and singers, and tellers of tales, and teachers. A storyteller might use magic to show scenes from the tale he was telling: individualized movies.
Some would continue to practice magic, of course. Even when the energy expended in a spell is small, magic has this advantage: it is intensely personal. To a magician, the fingerprints of a thief are all that is needed to summon him straight to prison. Illusions can win battles.
Afterword
These notes on the Warlock’s Era resulted in two booksfull of stories, The Magic May Return and More Magic. Some of my suggestions did get used. Moreover, what I had hoped for did happen. The spate of new stories revived my own interest in the Warlock’s Era. With Dian Girard, I wrote “Talisman,” showing an unusual use for glamour; and I moved my favorite restaurant 14,000 years into the past to write “The Lion in His Attic.” There I was able to show the sea people and were-cetaceans.
Nonetheless, many of the stories I most wanted to read never appeared. The misguided attempts to use the wild magic in gold, with madness following. An attempt at commercial dealings with East Asian vampires. A near-powerless sorcerer waging war with illusions and bluff. The Wandering Artist who learns to restrict an evil king. The Magician-Storyteller.
I didn’t like being an editor.
Jim Baen had offered as follows: “You be the editor. I’ll do all the work, you take all the credit.” It didn’t work out that way. Jim left Ace Books. I’d sent all the advance money to the authors, figuring the books would have to earn out twice before I had to compute royalties. Well, The Magic May Return has done so, and Marilyn is computing the royalties, thank God; but I don’t think I want to be an editor again.
Think of these Notes, then, as an aid to daydreaming. If you like the Warlock’s Era, here’s a map.