Science or Magic - how important are rules to you?

Obviously this question applies mainly to sci fi, fantasy, and supernatural genres.

Without rules or laws, the author is free to dream anything at all up. I find it unsatisfying when the characters (or the story itself) overcomes an obstacle by a sudden new magic (or a new technology invented on the spot).

Personally, I have to understand a technology or a magic well enough to grasp how it works, to write about it. I see it as part of world-building, just operating at a level below the social, historical, or geographical aspects of the world.

As an example, I had to stop for a couple of days this January to invent how the memory alteration technology would work in my latest book, at least enough to be plausible. I needed to understand how it could be deployed inside a brain, and how it could alter something stored as complex patterns in a neuronal network.

So, I thought the need for rules might be an interesting topic.

I also wonder how one decides the right rule(s), that strengthen and enrich the story? How to decide the right level of detail and rigour? How do rules affect tension, plot, engagement with the characters...?

Are invented rules important to you in your writing, or not important? How do rules affect stories?

Good topic!

As a reader, the rules are very important - although not explicitly via exposition! What I want most of all is consistency. If you require your magic to have ingredients or chanting then establish that early in the story and then don't change it. No matter how much peril the hero's in, they don't get to invent new magics. It is built into the world at a fundamental level. This also applies to sequels, new books in the same world don't mean new magics.

Technology obviously can be invented but it's more restricted in that it has to conform to known limits, have at least a basic understanding of momentum, energy conservation, and forces.

You're free to create whatever limits you want with magic - but if you don't create any then you need to think of very good reasons why the heroine doesn't just magic away any problem they encounter. And again consistency is vital, just because they heroine is in peril doesn't allow them to bypass limits that have been previously established. Equally it applies to all characters including antagonists.

It's not always a deal breaker for me, bad books can have good magic/technology and vise versa, and while I may carry on reading without good adherence to the above, I'd never rate something 5* or recommend it.

I'm one that thinks that anything extraordinary needs some kind of believable or sellable explanation. As long as you can convince the reader's mind that the thing is plausible, or not needing further investigation, then they can enjoy whatever comes from it. Sometimes that involves less a scientific or detailed explanation, rather than a character testimonial or distraction.
Sometimes it's just trickery.
There's lots of methods. But yeah, I prefer the idea of rules to govern extraordinary elements. Even if it's slight of hand.

Brandon Sanderson has spoken to this a lot, and had some good recommendations. It boils down to, the more your plot will depend upon magic as the be-all-end-all solution to your conflict(s), the more clear you need to be about how it works.

In Tolkien, it can all be hand-waved: don't need to know how Gandalf does what he does, how much exactly he can do, etc. But in a Sanderson novel you need all the nuts and bolts laid out. Harry Potter lies somewhere in between.

If a reader could jump in here . . .

Books of these genres need to have their own internal logic and consistency. Otherwise, it's what someone described as a "game without rules", and the reader has no frame of reference, gets frustrated, and throws the book against a wall (generally metaphorically, but sometimes literally).

As a reader, though, I don't need to know all the mechanics of the magic. The author does, however, so that she doesn't make the wizard do something on page 132 that wasn't within his powers on page 79 (unless she explains the change).

Agree with >4 Cecrow: and Sanderson is certainly one of the more inventive creators of well thought through magic systems. Hetley has done well in an urban-fantasy setting linking it through to bodymass and energy, and canavan also well conserves the energy of her religious magic powers by requiring them to be efficient without excess light/heat/sound except as intended.

This is obviously easier to explain in a magic school type book where you can have the students contrast the teachers, and classroom exposition to set the limits. It is possibly relevant/restrictive/interesting to authors that magic nearly always needs to be explicitly taught with severe consequences for just for those discovering the hard limits of the rules for themselves.

>5 lilithcat: yes.

I agree with all those points above. I also feel that when the author hasn't worked out the rules, it removes agency from the characters, and that makes it harder for me to believe in the characters because they feel manipulated (by the author).
I've also read a handful of horror stories in which the characters' suffering just seemed endless, and no matter what they did the world conspired against them. That distanced me from the characters because the author's hand felt too heavy, even though it was making things harder for the characters rather than easier.

ljkendall everything you said. :)

I admire well-written rational fantasy, where there is a coherent rationale for "supernatural" happenings.

My own fantasy WIP is a dream-vision, where the "rules" are rather relaxed by design.

I wrote a blog post on this topic. I'll re-post it below:

Returning to Roots

When I was growing up, my father would read or make up science fiction stories when I went to bed. As I got older, I began to read short story anthologies and novels from some of the pioneers of science fiction writing. I was filled with wonder at the fantastic visions of the future. Just like a child’s imagination is unfettered by boundaries, these writers were able to make the unknown their own.

I grew with the writers, following the up and comers with their new approaches, styles, and understandings. More discoveries made for more scientifically accurate writing, and gave the next generation of authors the opportunity to stretch the boundaries of belief even farther. The advances in science however, revealed the folly in some of the earlier ideas that were put forward, making some of the stories that I was so fond of just a little more absurd. While the new technical knowledge gave credibility and possibility to the stories, I missed the early days when any idea was considered fair game.

I decided to write a series of short stories in the style of the early years of science fiction, where scientific knowledge wasn’t king and imagination drove the author to create something that a young boy could read and dream about travelling to the stars and having fantastical adventures, while falling asleep to the voice of his father…

>9 paradoxosalpha:
I think normally I would be standing in line with everyone saying "Yes! Rules!"

But I've been thinking about this and if rules are so important, why is Alice in Wonderland so wildly popular? (I've seen Alice references in Japanese comic books, and Korean soap operas.) And what about Magic Realism, isn't that an entire genre built around magic that doesn't have rules?

So maybe rules aren't as necessary as I always thought.

Or maybe dream logic and magic realism have their own rules, they are just a wildly different kind of rules than the traditional fantasy rules of the sort mentioned by >6 reading_fox: ?

As >4 Cecrow: says, we don't really have a clue what rules Gandalf works under.

But then again, as other people said, consistency seems pretty vital.

Alice in Wonderland is very consistently strange.

So the rules seem relaxed... but are they really?

For the world that Cantata and Pavane are set in, I was trying to build a "fairytale magic" magic system. It was very different from any magic system I'd come up with before, because the rules weren't based on physics at all, they were based on the inner minds of people: conflict and character and association and obligation and stuff like that.

I suspect that dream logic and magic realism have their own form of consistency, and a sat of "rules" that are more about what feels correct because it's a story and stories work like that, than what can be measured or analyzed out in the real world.

@paradoxalpha, what do you think?

>10 LeonStevens:
Hey, cool! Two of the books I am hoping to publish next year (assuming I can stay reasonably healthy this year) are my tribute to exactly that experience. I grew up with my older sister reading me E.E. Doc Smith, Eric Frank Russel, and the Telzey stories and etc. (Also Retief and the Hoka.)

(I once encountered a meme that was "How many of the Science Fiction books published the year you were born have you read?" I bombed on my birth-year, but when I jumped back in time to 20 years before I was born, I did pretty good.)

So I decided to write a pulptastic romp of a Campbell era tribute.

Only this rule thingy, see...

Campbell had this bee in his brain about psionics. So by rights I ought to have included some in the story, but the furthest down that path I could convince myself to get was a character who is an empath.

I mean, I have already published a story set in this universe in a hard science fiction anthology that won an award for "Science Writing" for eeps' sake!

What about you, Leon? What rules did your stories end up breaking in order to maintain the look and feel of those stories you remember?

>11 LShelby: I suspect that dream logic and magic realism have their own form of consistency, and a sat of "rules" that are more about what feels correct because it's a story and stories work like that, than what can be measured or analyzed out in the real world.

Oh, I concur. When I said my "rules are rather relaxed by design," that takes for granted a "design" that allows events to cohere in ways that make narrative sense. But the violation of quotidian rules--rather than the importation of "fantasy" staples and fetishes--is what supplies the flavor of the fantastic. So, okay: lights with no evident sources, people that materialize in midair and float down to start a conversation, objective voices silently articulating in the protagonist's mind, stuff like that. Am I concerned about the mechanisms driving these phenomena in the fictional setting? Nope.

Edited to add: One of the best articulations of the supernatural I've encountered in fiction was in Tanith Lee's Volkhavaar. The magic in that book is both tightly integrated on the narrative level and credibly intelligible on the mechanical one.

>11 LShelby: "What rules did your stories end up breaking in order to maintain the look and feel of those stories you remember?" Ummm, all of them. When I write I don't think about whether this is possible or not. If it fits into the story, it's in. Maybe you would like to read one...
>12 paradoxosalpha: I just finished reading Lee for the first time (I think). I thought that she ties in mysticism, sensuality, and technology quite well.

>11 LShelby:, I think in all circumstances (except perhaps childrens' fiction) it should be understood that rules are involved behind how magic is used. The degree that's important to measure is, to what extent you share these rules with the reader? Then I'd refer back to what I said above, >4 Cecrow:; it depends on how much your conflict resolution requires the reader to understand them, so that you avoid the deux ex machina impression.

>12 paradoxosalpha:
I've read some Tanith Lee, but not that one. I'll have to look it up.

"lights with no evident sources, people that materialize in midair and float down to start a conversation, objective voices silently articulating in the protagonist's mind, stuff like that. Am I concerned about the mechanisms driving these phenomena in the fictional setting? Nope."

I would have to be concerned. It's sad, but my brain works like that. I approach reality in the same way. I have read so many people talking about children's unanswerable questions, I had 6 children who constantly asked questions, "Why is the sky blue, How do birds fly" etc, etc, etc. I answered those questions. (I'm very glad, however, that none of them ever asked me how the refrigerator works, because my grasp of refrigeration is too vague to articulate clearly.) I'm sure it's a family trait, my father, a structural engineer, used to explain the physics behind mopping floors, cutting cheese and breaking a banana in half without squishing any of it.

But I think that the point is well made that the underlying mechanisms can be largely irrelevant to the story. Since when did we need to explain combustion engines and climatology in order to write contemporary romances where people drive cars and walk on beaches?

>14 Cecrow: points out that it usually depends on wither or not the resolution requires the reader to understand it. I would like to submit a second case, when the pov character is required to learn it over the course of the story.

The story reason for the magic school as >6 reading_fox: mentions may be to explain things to the reader, but within the story world, it exists to explain magic to the characters. It needs to be there, and as readers we probably ought to be allowed to see the teaching happening at least some of the time or it would feel odd to have something so important to the characters pass by unrevealed. (Too much though, and it gets tedious. If school was as interesting as fiction I wouldn't have kept getting in trouble for reading novels in class.)

...
I've just realized something: If the magic is insufficiently important to the plot of the story that I will neither need to teach it to a character, nor will be involving it in the climax, I tend to leave it out completely. This is how I ended up with my fantasy world without magic: it grew out of plots that didn't need magic. How very engineer-like of me.