19th April 2005, 7:06 PM
Wonder and mystery? I thought I addressed that by saying 'you haven't read any of these books so it's hard to explain what the result is'... I'd say any kind of magic has some amount of mystery involved. Feist has explanations of his magic/cosmology -- eventually, by the two or three characters in the book's world who understand it -- and there's definitely still a sense of mystery there... Jordan? He's just a great writer. The magic system is well explained and made clear, but because it is something impossible in the real world it's just that: a well-explained magic system. And 'magic' inherently involves some amount of mystery... though it depends. Is your magic something so common everyone is used to it and the only mystery is our own thoughts of 'that's cool', like it often is in D&D, or is it like David Eddings' works, where under ten people in the world can do magic and to just about everyone else it's impossibly mysterious and probably impossible...