This week has been stressful because of the amount of work I had to do in the office, but other than that it hasn’t been that bad (for me). Still, I tend to have “Oh no, what if I have covid?” panics at least once a day. So that’s fun.
NaNoWriMo’s still kicking my butt, thanks for asking.
Anyway, let’s talk about Powder Mage mothercluckers.
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Powder Mage is Brilliant, Go Read It
The fantasy genre has a bit of a weird relationship with gunpowder.
People tend to equate the fantasy genre with the middle ages, and with a pre-gunpowder world. And that’s not an unfair assumption to make in many cases. Mainstream fantasy tends to shun firearms. It’s not true of all fantasy, obviously--the dwarves have it in Warcraft, there’s more niche stuff like the Soldier Son Trilogy, and the Fable sequels have it--but overall, it’s not very common. When it does appear, like in The Two Towers, or Kung Fu Panda 2, it’s a foreign concept to most characters in the setting. And that’s fine! I’m not bashing those stories.
It gets a bit weird when you have things like urban fantasy though, where guns are almost nowhere to be seen for… Reasons. I recently reread Rick Riordan’s The Burning Maze, which is the third book in his Trials of Apollo series, and there are some comments about how guns don’t work around demigods or something (but no other combustive technology, like car engines have the same problem), which is never even hinted at, and somewhat contradicts what we see in the previous twelve books. Methinks Rick has been talking to Cassandra Clare again; she also has a similar rule in Mortal Instruments on why Shadowhunters don’t use guns, but again doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t affect any other forms of combustion or projectile technology.
In any case, a lot of fantasy doesn’t want to deal with guns. Because that takes out the sword fights, I think. And this misses that there was a long time when guns weren’t really that reliable and hadn’t quite replaced the sword. That a fantasy setting not unlike the Enlightenment of our world would be a really interesting place to tell stories.
Brian McClellan apparently agreed.
Hence: The Powder Mage Trilogy. A trilogy of rather thick novels set in a fantasy world that is currently going through something like our Age of Revolutions. The story begins with the country of Adro’s Field Marshal, Tamas, leading a coup to overthrow the monarchy and the chaos that follows from that. What makes this setting interesting is its magic system.
See, for a while there were two kinds of magic users in the world (well three if we’re counting bone-eyes, and a couple other things, but we’re not getting into that now): Knacked and Privileged. Knacked basically have one superpower, or a Knack, and that’s it. Not needing to sleep, or perfect memory, or detecting mages, or healing, or whatever. Usually not very powerful.
Privileged, as you can imagine, are much more powerful. They have more traditional magic, based on the elements, though they have to wear special gloves in order to control that power they can throw around. They can also see in the Else, which is like the Third Eye for detecting magic and seeing other mages and such. They tend to get gathered up into Royal Cabals that nations maintain for guarding the royal families and leading military expeditions.
But recently in this setting, in the past hundred years or so, after the widespread use of flintlock firearms in the military, another kind of mage has evolved into being, one that Privileged can’t see in the Else, although they can see them right back: Powder Mages, who have magic connected to gunpowder. They can snort it to go into a powder trance and become more powerful, and are all amazing marksmen. But they also have complete control of combustion, and can use up and redirect gunpowder without pulling triggers, reloading, or even using a gun. At one point Tamas makes a barrage by throwing a bunch of musket balls into the air and firing them off (though it’s not very accurate, it deals with a large group well enough). It’s pointed out several times that pointing guns at Powder Mages is really dumb, because they’re just prevent the powder from igniting. And Vlora makes a cask of gunpowder explode by will.
It’s an interesting idea, because this kind of mage, that deals specifically with gunpowder, obviously hasn’t existed forever. It’s fairly new (though not THAT new by the time the story starts). And it made me think about what McClellan is doing with this idea.
The Powder Mage Trilogy is about change. A lot of fantasy stories are. Changes to the characters, changes to the world, change to society, changes to warfare, and changes to religion. Those are all very common things. But this trilogy shows how the world is adapting and evolving by displaying how the magic itself is evolving. And no one really gets how or why. We see that Powder Mages are a new type of magic that evolved and nobody really knew how to deal with it at first. And we see magic evolving more, with things like Privileged who don’t need to use gloves, or Powder Mages pushing past the normal limits of their abilities. And it doesn’t feel like McClellan’s breaking the rules, because it’s not so common or overdone that he’s throwing the rules out the window. But he does it in a way, mostly with characters who aren’t the main ones, to show that the world is changing, and no one really knows how or where it’s going.
And that’s… pretty heavy. I mean the series starts with imagery very reminiscent of the French Revolution--the king and his family are overthrown, the nobles are guillotined, their property is seized (but it turns out that the royal bank account is empty anyway), and Adro now has to fight off foreign powers that are trying to take advantage of the chaos and prevent them for starting a republic. Obviously, other book series deal with social upheaval and societal change--A Song of Ice and Fire is the famous one, but it’s in so many stories like Wheel of Time and The Dragon Lords and The Obsidian Trilogy.
But it’s not always tied to magic like that. In Wheel of Time and The Obsidian Trilogy, it’s more that old forgotten forms of magic are being rediscovered (NOTE: I say this without having yet finished Wheel of Time). With this, it isn’t one aspect of the world that’s changing--it’s everything. And the characters can’t hold on to anything too tightly because that might be pulled out from under them too. They’re not trying to make things the way they were, because they can’t go back to that way--it doesn’t exist anymore.
Everything is changing. Nothing’s the same anymore. And that’s not a risk a lot of fantasy stories take. It’s not one most fantasy stories need to take, I think. But it’s something I didn’t expect. And I think it’s worth looking into the series for.
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