Researching fantasy fiction
While I make my money writing about tech, I have a fiction project going as well. It’s called The Magic Battery. The starting point was some questions about how magic worked in a friend’s story. Magic always has to be limited in some way, or anything becomes possible with a wave of the wand. But if there are limitations, there will be ways of overcoming them. My comment was “Whoever invents the magic battery will make a fortune!” That was my starting point.
The story is set in 16th century Saxony, and I’m striving to make it as realistic as possible except for the existence of magic. Sorcerers are tradesmen with special skills. They make a nice living because they can do things no one else can, but they aren’t super-powerful. As one of the characters puts it, “Magic isn’t magic.” It has serious limits, one of the most important being the sorcerer’s capacity to draw on the “World Behind.” But what if they could draw on this power and save it for later use? What if they could sell their stored spells to people with no magical talent? That would change the world.
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What if the Reconquista hadn’t happened and the Iberian peninsula remained primarily in Muslim hands? What if Al-Andalus, rather than Christian Spain, had sent explorers and colonists into the New World? What if its people had colonized what we call Manhattan, mixing heavily with people from other cultures? This alternate history forms the basis of a series of mystery novels by Roberta Rogow. I’ve read the six that have come out so far and enjoyed them. The island is called “Manatas” in this version of history. Each book is presents one or more murders whose investigation falls to Halvar, a North European employed by the Sultan. The books so far are: