Sewing Oats, Page 3 is up. Make with the reading.
In today’s page, we have the first mention of “magicwerks”, which is the element what makes me mention “fantasy” and “gaslamp” (among other things) when people ask me what kind of story this is. But I really didn’t want to do a traditional high fantasy story with frickin’ elves and magic and stuff, because those are almost always trite and derivative. So I tried to imagine a situation where magic was literally a science and it was studied by scientists and practiced by engineers. It’s as if the creator of the universe decided to make a small edit here and there to the way things just are. You’ll learn more as we go along.
Allen Rausch, a PC editor at IGN/GameSpy, has written a book called “Sufficiently Advanced Magic” that’s along these lines. I’ve read the first few chapters – good stuff. Looking forward to more of yours, too!
It kind of turns Clarkes phrase about technology on its head and has science and magic competing against one another in the same world.
I think he’s in the process of shopping it to publishers.
Interesting. I’ll have to shoot him an e-mail about that. I didn’t know he wrote fiction.
My idea isn’t really that magic and science are in competition. Science isn’t really a THING. It’s an approach –a way of examining, classifying, and predicting the world. Physics (and thus other sciences that build on it, like chemestry, biology, etc.) ultimately boil down to “that’s just the way things are.” Why does an electron emit so much energy when it moves from one state to another? It just does. That’s the way whoever put the universe together decided it should work.
In the world of Sewing Oats, the same thing applies, it’s just that God cobbled this universe together with a set of rules that are a little different. In Sewing Oats, there aren’t magicians. There are scientists and Engineers who apply the science of magicwerks to do stuff the same way we would apply the sciences of physics, chemestry, etc.
And so there are NO frickin’ elves.