You will never achieve the greatness which your talent
merits. Lack of ability is the smallest
of the obstacles you face. Of greater
importance are the number of hours in the day and the number of years in a
life. You will spend a third of your
life asleep and most of eternity rotting in a pine box. Your ability to shape the world is determined
primarily by your ability to enlist other people as a force multiplier in
pursuit of your goals.
In recruiting others, you have two primary options: force and persuasion. You can make people DO what you want, or you
can make people WANT what you want. The
third method of enlisting others—economic contract—is essentially a combination of
the two; you persuade the other party to engage you economically, and entry
into the contract enables you to stake a legally enforceable claim to their
labor.
Almost every historical figure of importance has been
exceptionally skilled at either persuasion, or compulsion, or both. My life has been spent teaching teenagers to argue, so the
persuasion/compulsion dilemma is central to my thinking, and informs a great
deal of what I write.
Magic is the great literary work-around where the persuasion/compulsion dilemma
is concerned. Magic radically empowers
the individual to pursue his or her goals without help. I suspect that’s why we’re so enamored of it
as readers—we long for that kind of independence, for the ability to reshape reality without having to be bothered with what other people think. Magic is a free lunch. It offers us something for nothing.
“Wizards Die By Stages,” currently available to readers at NewMyths.com,
is an attempt to turn this literary trope on its head. The story envisions a world in which even
magic obeys the central rules of economic interaction—a world in which magic is
derived from the labor of intangible, sentient entities, and in which their labor is compelled.
In most economic systems, those riding high on the hog have no real incentive to question the nature of the system from which they benefit, and I see no reason to imagine that magicians would be any different. It goes without saying, of course, that those who point to the oppression inherent in such systems run into resistance from entrenched interests. But it only takes one persuasive voice to change the world. And while compulsion may be the easiest, most cost-free way to control others, persuasion can prove more enduring...
In most economic systems, those riding high on the hog have no real incentive to question the nature of the system from which they benefit, and I see no reason to imagine that magicians would be any different. It goes without saying, of course, that those who point to the oppression inherent in such systems run into resistance from entrenched interests. But it only takes one persuasive voice to change the world. And while compulsion may be the easiest, most cost-free way to control others, persuasion can prove more enduring...
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