Any Sufficiently Advanced Magick Is Indistinguishable from Magic

Arthur Clarke is dead, there was a LiveJournal strike, the Hugo nominations have just been announced, it’s Holy Saturday, the US Democratic primary is starting to get genuinely ugly, and the best cheese in the world turns out to have poison in it. So naturally what’s on my mind is the proper spelling of the word magic: with or without a k?

When this came up on the SFReader Forums I barked out my usual Pavlovian reaction:

“Magicking” is fine with me, but “magick” drives me crazy for some reason. It has a “Ye Olde” preciousness about it that makes me bite clean through my elbow.


Then I got to thinking. (Is this ever less trouble than it’s worth?) Magick(e) was fine in the English Renaissance: Shakespeare used it, Marlowe used it. But spelling hadn’t been regularized then, even for names. Marlowe sometimes signed his name as “Marley” or even, apparently, as “Merlin.” (You can bet that, as a teenaged fantasy-reader and addict of Marlovian bombast, I tried to make something out of that. Fortunately the world will never know how badly that story sucked and will simply have to take my word for it.)

And magick is clearly a back-formation. It comes from Latin magicus, which derives in turn from Greek μαγικός “Magi-like, Magian.” The k that appears in some forms (like magicking, magicked) is just to prevent the softening of the c to an s sound (like the k in mimicking, mimicked) and was misinterpreted as being part of the stem of the word. We don’t write mimick in standard English and we shouldn’t write magick either.

So: that was then; this is now. Magick(e) and its byforms was okay before the 18th Century, and if people want to use it nowadays in or referring to occult religious observances it’s no skin off my walrus. But it’s clearly not to be used in a fantasy novel written in standard English. Not to be used in any fantasy novel written within the last century. Certainly not in any 20th Century classic of the fantasy genre. (No. Stop it. I’m not listening!)

Oh, well: there it is in Chapter VIII of Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros. And it doesn’t bother me a bit, though why it doesn’t bother did bother me, if you see what I mean. Then I looked a little closer at the context:

And were he so fortunate as scape these mantycores, yet cowlde bee never climbe up the gret crages of yce and rocke on Koschtre Beloorn, for none is so stronge as to scale them but by art magicall, and such is the vertue of that mowntayne that no magick avayleth there, but onlie strength and wisdome alone, and as I seye these woulde not avayl to climbe those cliffes and yce ryvers.

This is from one of the 2 or 3 densest passages of the book where Eddison actually inflicts on the reader a fair imitation of Renaissance English without the benefit of kindly editing. So this isn’t really a 20th century example. It’s a sixteenth century example, which just happens to have been written in the 20th C. I hold no brief for Eddison’s social opinions (he seems to have been been pretty antidemocratic) but stylistically he was no quack.

And that’s what bothers me when fantasists drop fake-archaisms like magick into their text to create atmosphere. It’s just quackery, like vendors at a Renaissance Faire who screech “melord! melady!” in fake-Cockney (I’ve-seen-Benny-Hill-I-know-what-English-people-sound-like) accents. The “atmosphere” created is ersatz: Shannara, not Middle-Earth.

Should fantasy novels be written in standard English, though? Why not move away from the standard–change the standard?

Well, aim high, I say. But asking people to learn a new dialect of English so that they can read your book is maybe asking a little too much. Burgess might have been able to get people to do it, but most people won’t have similar success. And I’d add that the greatest of all sf/f stylists, Ursula Le Guin, achieves her effects with very plain language. So you don’t need to mash up words to impress people. All you need is genius.

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Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit

Arthur Clarke is dead, it seems. Behind every man alive now stands one more ghost.

[Seen at jimvanpelt‘s LiveJournal.]

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Yesterday’s Dystopia: Tomorrow’s News

Today it’s Belle Rêve but tomorrow it’ll be Belly Rave

This never bothered me before, but it seems like Belle Rêve is a solecism; it should be Beau Rêve, according to the infallible penguin who wrote my French dictionary. Oh well: Pohl & Kornbluth probably liked the sound-devolution of belle into belly. Or maybe they’re making a point: bad linguistics leads to bad city planning. (Or maybe they talked to a different penguin, the same one Tennessee Williams used to hang out with.)

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Hmm…

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Savage Tales of Sword-Slinging Garfish!

Okay, okay–maybe I’m going a little overboard on the garfish. But today is (a.) the Ides of March, when a bunch of Julius Caesar’s close personal friends (some of them garfish or pipefish for all we know) stood around him and put holes in him until he stopped moving, and (b.) the official release date of The Return of the Sword (available directly from Flashing Swords Press or Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc).

The Return of the Sword started out, you may remember, as an attempt to recover from oblivion the stories in the briefly-available Flashing Swords E-Zine Annual, lost in the web-wrack and e-foam when Pitch-Black Publishing foundered with all hands. Some of the stories weren’t available, and some new ones were added. I was sorry, for instance, to see Steve Goble’s Spider John story didn’t make the crossing to the new anthology–but instead we have the first story in his series about the Faceless Sons, and it is, in a word, a riot. (How can you dislike a story with the line, “The man in the bloodstained white mask contemplated the impaled head”?) So the new anthology is undoubtedly bigger and better than the one it was designed to replace.

eeknight has a rundown of the contents and contributors here. The editor plans a sort of virtual book-tour in the blogosphere: it’ll be interesting to watch (and be a part of). So expect more noise and base self-promotion in this space.

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There’s No Translation Like No Translation

This afternoon, in an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid useful work, I was reading the Gospel of Luke and I came across this familiar line:

εὐκοπώτερον γάρ ἐστιν κάμηλον διὰ τρήματος βελόνης εἰσελθεῖν ἢ πλούσιον εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ εἰσελθεῖν.

–Luke 18:24

usually translated

“It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

You waste more time if you look everything up, so I was interested to find that τρῆμα (the word usually translated as “eye”) can mean “orifice”, and βελόνη (the word usually translated as “needle”) can refer to a pipefish or garfish.

So maybe what Jesus was actually saying was, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the yinyang of a pipefish…” This doesn’t add any moral or spiritual meaning that I can detect, but it is funnier, sort of like the lion jumping straight through the crocodile in Baron Munchausen.

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The Emperor Has No Club

In the wake of the now-bountifully-bipartisan sex scandals afflicting American politicians, one has to assume there is an inevitable link between intense moralism (as opposed to morality), the drive to seek public office in the US, and the compulsion to purchase sex.

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Another Myth Shattered

Apparently, in the shockingly corrupt world we live in, not even a man’s suffering from entomological dysplasia is sacred.

The NYT broke the story:

In a scandal that’s sending shock waves through both the publishing industry and academia, the author Franz Kafka has been revealed to be a fraud.

” ‘The Metamorphosis’–purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach–is actually non-fiction,” according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.

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Squirrel Nut Zippers!

I hear these guys have reformed and are touring. The odds that they’ll show up anywhere near the Black Swamp seem a little slim, but you never know…

I’m not sure Katharine Whalen can act even by the lowish standards of music video, and I’m not even sure she sings that well–her voice is sometimes a little ragged in live performance–but I love the big cartoony verve with which she tackles a song.

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And Because Synchronicity Can Happen At Any Time…

I was just thinking about Janet Kagan’s Mirabile today because of a line in Gail Collins’ NYT column, which is a sort of FAQ about the Texas and Ohio primaries:

While we’re at it, would you please explain the Texas primaucus?

The primaucus is a large, featherless bird that feeds on roadkill and ethanol.

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