Earth, Wind, Fire and Magic
Solving the climate crisis one spell at a time
Well, it’s been a while. Things have been getting in the way of writing. Things like life and work and did I mention life? I’ve begun that difficult step into what’s known as the sandwich generation, where caring responsibilities descend from all directions. And whilst I’ve been happy to take a more significant role in Pgogy Webstuff, the combination of everything has meant that the sequel to A Quartz Storm is being rather slow to come together. Scrivener, which is my main drafting tool, has this wonderful little function that shows you how many days you’ve managed to get some words down on the page. In October, that was a grand total of three days. Whoops. November has shaped up to be a fair bit better than that, but I’m still not meeting my targets. But December is notoriously quiet and not at all disjointed, so I’m sure I’ll be back on track in no time…
Still, things could be worse. Here in the UK we’ve been having some weird weather over the past month. An indoor event I ran at the beginning of November could have easily been held outdoors. The washing is hanging on the line in the garden today. Yet in between we’ve had some early snow, just in time for the kids to decide that we will definitely be having a White Christmas, and a storm that dumped a month’s worth of rain in a weekend, most of it in one of my favourite Welsh valleys. People died. A coal pile slid down into a village. And warnings came mere moments before the flooding.
And it’s not just the UK; we’re seeing these events happen at greater frequency around the world. The talented Ksenia Chmutina has a wonderful podcast, Disasters Deconstructed, exploring the inequalities and injustices that contribute to global disasters. My own take away from her work is that people suck, and mismanagement, poor governance, and greed do far more harm than the planet would ever do on its own. That got me thinking about how different things would be in a world where there are magical solutions to anything and everything.
It’s a well known dilemma in fantasy writing. If you can wave a (figurative or literal) wand and make a problem go away, where’s the conflict? If a city could be shielded from storms and floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, why would anyone have a fear of the environment?
You’re cold? There’s a spell for that.
Hungry? Let me whip up a magical feast, complete with singing crockery.
Asteroid heading straight for earth? Let’s conjure up a giant trampoline to bounce that rock right back into space.
As a result, there’s not much fantasy writing that uses magic without limits. There’s rules. Spoken or unspoken. Perhaps the magic is elemental, so a person could control water, or plant growth, or fire, but never more than one. Magic usually has a cost: draining the user’s life force; having temporary effects; or a limited source. Sometimes Faustian pacts are made to access higher powers. Because if there’s no limits to the power an individual has, why would there ever be death and famine and poverty? If someone had billions of dollars sitting in a bank account - ahem - I mean, if someone truly had the power to change the lives of millions, just by waving that magic wand, why would they ever focus their attention on sowing discord, promoting hatred and creating bizarre, poorly engineered conveyances?
So, if we lived in a world with magical solutions, would we still have people losing all their belongings in a hurricane? Would children starve because their families' crops failed? Would rising sea temperatures kill off thousands of species? Or would the powerful mages of that world come together to work in harmony to find a solution?
No prizes for guessing my view on that particular matter.
Power corrupts. Whether that power stems from political influence, mass wealth, or magical ability. In my view, this is where the conflict comes from in some of the best fantasy works. We enjoy watching the journey of someone fighting to defeat that evil. Or the cosy reassurance of someone carving out a corner of happiness despite the wars and misery in the wider world. Because we want to believe that we can have that victory for ourselves and our loved ones. And if we can’t have it for ourselves, at least we can read a beautifully crafted tale with a happy ever after.