Over at Alyssa Rosenberg’s they’re reading through Perdido Street Station, and some of the conversation’s turned around rules of magic, and to what extent they should be clear in a fantasy.

This has me thinking about knowledge and power.  Lots of modern fantasies, especially of the epic genre, are about the hero learning the ropes of some magical system — going to school, as it were.  In some cases (Harry Potter) the kid has lots of teachers and a structured curriculum; in some cases (Wheel of Time) the main character is mostly self-taught or home schooled, with the occasional tutor.  Still, their power scales directly with their knowledge of the rules.

Modern education’s a lot like this.  I had the time as a child to develop language skills, writing style, physical skills, even a bit of computer knowledge.  Then, in college, I had more time to figure out (poorly) how this fit into history, politics, economics.

Now, lots of this stuff I could have learned with a good public library and a lot of free time.  I wrote so much more on my own than I ever did for school.  But having that much free time, and parents & a community who respected it, is a mark of privilege.  My parents were both prep school teachers, which meant that we didn’t have much money, but our living conditions were stable and we had a lot of free time — never underestimate that.

In my fantasy writing now, I’m trying to write stories with a broader, more democratic range of central characters.  However, the Craft, which is how people talk about magic in this world, is very much like the practice of law in our universe.  Like law, it requires practical knowledge passed on through universities and professional training.  This builds a class element into the world’s structure, and three-quarters of the way through the second book I’m still working out the consequences of that.

In Three Parts Dead, the first novel in this sequence, my main character was a Craftswoman; even though she was born into a lower-middle-class landed farming family, she’s still a member of a privileged sorcerer class by virtue of the education she received.  The central character in the new book is not a Craftsman, coming as he did from an activist family which had a very troubled relationship with the Craft and its practitioners; in his career he’s surrounded by Craft but doesn’t quite understand it, which makes this novel much closer to horror than the previous one, given his lack of control.  Still, his family had a good bit of privilege under the old order, before the rise of Craftsmen.  I don’t think I’ve made my position much better.

There’s a longer essay here.  Still, I like the project of exploring a fantastic world and thinking about class & politics.  At the very least, self-critical reflection might expose preconceptions I don’t want to have, and help me reshape them.  Let’s see.