Writing historical fantasy means I can't change the world. Not too much, anyway. That fundamental decision has consequences for the way magic works, what it's used for, and perhaps most importantly, what it can't be used for. It means that the way I think about magic and the way I write about magic is largely about what it does in the infrastructure, how it's woven into daily life.
I write about Albion, the magical community of Great Britain, currently between the 1880s and 1950. (Ireland is doing its own thing, magically.) There’s a tremendous amount of change in that time, in terms of medical advances, technology, communication options, and how people live their lives. At the same time, I don’t actually want to change history. Inserting magic into the landscape means thinking about what will and won’t be affected.
When I started writing, I knew I wanted to write about a magical community with a range of magical options. Just like with most other skills, I wanted what someone could do magically to depend on a combination of factors. For magic in my writing, that's a combination of talent (how easy it is for them to learn something), strength (how much they can accomplish with their magic), and knowledge (what they have learned about how to use magic). Someone with less strength but enough knowledge can still be incredibly effective, and someone with raw strength but no training has some definite limits.
For me, this approach was an easy decision: it felt most like our real world. I look around me, at my friends and colleagues, and see a tremendous range of skills, interests, talents, and inclinations. I wanted to write about a world where magic was one thread among many that played into the weaving of someone’s life, important, but not the only thing. And I wanted to write about a world where magic had a wide range of uses, from the quotidian domestic tasks to the ones that save lives in all the ways that’s possible.
This decision means that there are absolutely massively potent magical resources available, both for some individuals and for the community. Magical healing can do a great deal to handle infection, especially prior to widespread use of antibiotics, but curing cancer takes a great deal of focused attention - and Healers (or their magic) aren’t an infinite resource. Other magical skills can prevent a bomb in the Blitz on London (in World War 2) that lands too near an alchemy lab from contaminating everything around it, but only if highly skilled people can get on site to help. Plenty of people have the skills, training, and resources to do some healing or some apothecary or alchemy work, but not to solve those specific urgent and complex problems.
All of this means there is a range of how much magic people use routinely in their day to day lives, with some people using very little and some people immersed in using highly specialised magical skills basically all the time. I tend to write more about the latter - they’re far more likely to be in the middle of a story plot - but they’re a minority in the population.
In my writing about Albion, people with magic need to hide it from people without it due to underlying agreements and oaths around magic. That by itself means magic is necessarily in the background for anyone who doesn't live in an entirely magical community. A friend down the street probably won't notice that this household has less milk or cream go bad. That other neighbour, they're just lucky, that scratch didn't get infected, their salves always work surprisingly well. And over there, her house is always clean and well-kept. But she also has time to help out others, she's so kind to keep an eye on the neighbouring children when everyone else is struggling to get everything done on laundry day.
That's one part of magic being in the infrastructure. In Albion, most people in the magical community don't have particularly strong magic. They have more options for heating food or preserving it. Their herbal preparations are more effective, thanks to simple healing magics. There are charms to remove some of the more onerous parts of cleaning or laundry. Using magic still makes them tired, often as tired as they would be if they'd done the thing physically. But it reduces wear and tear on their bodies, their clothes, and their homes. There's time to sit down and have a cuppa with a friend or help a neighbour in less physical ways.
Of course, having magic in the mix changes other things. Magical travel - anything that reduces travel time - obviously changes a number of aspects of daily life. Even if someone isn't travelling themselves, the mail is a great deal more efficient. With a magical portal connecting the two, a letter could get from the tip of Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands in a matter of minutes, rather than days or even weeks. Magical journals - allowing direct one-to-one communication - provide a tremendous benefit, especially in times of war or natural disaster. But that same wartime setting presents other challenges, like making sure people don't share information that could get others killed or alert the enemy.
At the same time, it's destabilising if those portals - or those journals - become too easy to make. If everyone had one, that's a dramatic change in the world, with a huge variety of ripple effects. There's thankfully a realistic model for how to handle this. Looking at period infrastructure like railroads, ferries, ocean liners, horses, and eventually automobiles gives me a number of options.
Perhaps in this infrastructure, the magical transportation and communication only works point to point. If not everywhere has a portal, or it's a long way from where you are, there are times it might as well not be there. Perhaps there's an ongoing cost associated with using a portal, making it too expensive for routine transport or for heavy items. If it's not suitable for certain people or items to travel through a portal, there will still need to be a robust alternate system of transportation. Perhaps herding livestock through a portal often ends badly, so you need other ways to get them to market or a new farm.
Similarly, if journals are expensive to make - say, the equivalent of a car - some people will have them. Plenty of people here and now have cars, after all. But a lot of people won't, especially if cars are not yet common. If the price eventually comes down to a mid-range computer, a lot more people will have one and employers may provide them to certain classes of employees. Thinking through these variations and how they might change over time allows for more nuanced stories, for a range of possibilities for individual characters, and provides a more thoroughly developed world to anchor those stories.
Of course, not all infrastructure is personal. In any larger society, issues are going to come up that need larger answers and professionals to handle the issues. Sometimes what we need are engineers, to maintain and manage that infrastructure. That might be railroad tracks, bridges, roads, or portals - the same basic concepts apply in fantasy as thoroughly as in our world. Budgets are tight, priorities shift, some people have more political power to make a change happen and other places get passed over. There are lots of possible story seeds in all of those, too, about the ordinary challenges of a workday or what a blip in the infrastructure can reveal about a community and the people in it.
But there are also larger questions. What happens if you have a magical community and your country is in the middle of a war? And what happens if the kind of war changes? In World War I, mostly the impact was overseas. But what does that mean for healers who are using every drop of their magic - and every bit they can get from anyone else - to try and keep a few more people alive, or mend a few more devastating injuries? When magic gives you a few more chances, who gets to benefit from those? The question of what happens if you drain that magical well dry, again and again, is an uncomfortable one, but just as much a key to the infrastructure as the engineer's evaluation of a bridge or a writer framing a story to gain public support for a much needed project.
Another larger question has to do with the court system. English-speaking readers are probably steeped in the impact of British common law. Even the places that are doing something different are often doing it in reaction to common law, deliberately chosen for new circumstances. But what happens when there's a fundamental underlying change to your justice system? If, for example, your community has reliable truth-telling magic, that changes the entire scope of what a trial means. Even if that magic has limits - it can only be managed by a few people, or in specific locations - it still changes the underlying possibilities. Instead of an adversarial system (people representing the interest of the plaintiff and of the state or defendant, for example), perhaps trials focus more on figuring out if any extenuating circumstances apply. Or perhaps you still need a way to get at uncomfortable aspects of the situation. Just because you can enforce truth-telling doesn't mean that people won't try and hide things. The effectiveness of the magic is going to be limited by human skill and application.
Of course, all these changes also have a personal implication. If - like me - you are writing romances, what happens when two people from different backgrounds fall for each other? Sometimes their magical training or even their oaths might be at odds in some ways. Some of Albion’s aristocratic families definitely matchmake for particular kinds of magical potential or strength of magic. Others turn their back on that idea, and find partners and lovers in whatever place makes sense to them. That allows me to explore a number of different aspects of class, education, profession - and yes, magic - when bringing characters together.
One of the not so secret themes of my writing is that encouraging people in the things they’re good at and love tends to work out better than forcing one particular mode. However, it’s also about the fact we do all have choices in our lives. We might start out with some specific skills, or our parents might encourage us (or expect us) to spend time developing some. But then we also choose which to continue to develop, and especially which directions to go and the ways we want to use our skills in the world. Magic - and strength of magic - makes those things more visible at times.
One final consideration - again, if we're talking about historical fantasy - is not changing the world too much. Alternate history is a delightful playground, when it’s looking at one particular pivot point where everything changes. And I have one of those in my world, back in 1484, when the magical community became hidden. It turns out, however, that I am more interested in the questions of historical fantasy, where magic adds a layer to the world, but doesn’t change the course of events, or a war, or even a personal historical disagreement with massive effects (any number of ruling family marriages, for example). This again encourages an approach that keeps magic within some limits. Advances that allow for a small improvement, or a few more lives saved, but not enough to materially change larger events, for example.
I am not in fact a poet, but I've talked with poet friends about working within the limitations of a particular form, and the way those limitations often produce surprising and thought-provoking pieces. I was, originally, much more interested in music theory and composition than in writing. Thinking about magic this way is in large part thinking about the underlying structures, the places where theme and variation bring out things that a single melody doesn't.
For me, putting the magic in the infrastructure does that. It compels me to look at the places where a spark of magic might change a particular chord, without disarranging the entire piece. And it opens up entirely new roads and doorways into different kinds of stories, a perpetual 'what if?' that is simultaneously familiar enough to be understood and different enough to allow for new stories and plots and character interests.
Celia Lake writes cosy historical fantasy romances set in the magical community of Great Britain, currently running between the 1880s and the 1940s. She's fascinated by the small changes that give stories depth and explore what it means to live in a world where magic is real but it doesn't solve all your problems. When not writing, Celia is a librarian living near Boston (Massachusetts) with her cat and a number of reference books.