Hacker News Reader

Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Hmmmmm...

I have to say the title and the concept of "a universe programmable in some kind of special language" reminds me very much of a webcomic I follow (and wholeheartedly recommend), called Unsounded (https://unsoundedupdates.tumblr.com/). It has the concept of "pymary" (http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/world/index.php?title...), which can be used to "reprogram" reality (which to the uninitiated is indistinguishable from magic), and for that it uses a mysterious language called "Old Tainish". And before anyone raises that objection, from what I can see the comic is older than the novel by ~ 5 years. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, and both these works could be inspired by another source which I'm not aware of...

View on HN

(Unsounded is not the best fantasy story nor the best fantasy story told in graphical medium, but it is one the best fantasy webcomics around.

But yeah, magic as a secret language (or version where knowledge of the "true names" of things grants power) is old as anything. LeGuin's series was one the most popular studies of the idea, but it crops up in many mythologies. TvTropes has an non-exhaustive list of works that use the idea:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LanguageOfMagic

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IKnowYourTrueNam...

Ursula K. LeGuin, Earthsea.

From Wikipedia: One vital aspect of magic is that it is impossible to lie in the old language, so that magic works by forcing the universe to conform to the words spoken by the magician.

So spells just accumulate?

That is, if a mage says something general, all the rest of reality and other mages will just have to deal with it?

Disclaimer: it's been a few decades since I read that. I may be completely wrong.

It's not like you can simply say something universe-altering just because you know the right words. You still need the magical ability and if you're not powerful enough in that ability for what you want to say, you simply can't say it.

But otherwise, if the mage is THAT powerful, then, yes, the rest of the universe has to deal with it.

Part of the plot to HPMOR is exactly this: https://hpmor.fandom.com/wiki/Interdict_of_Merlin

Elantris is an interesting mirror / inversion of this trope.

There's also "The Gods are Bastards" (currently on hiatus due to author burnout but there's a huge amount of content to go through for first-time readers), which turns out to be something of a created infosphere, the entirety of the setting's "magic" is really sufficiently advanced technology, which is then used by the "mortals" of the world to emulate technology (through sufficiently advanced magic).

'Magic as programming' is a relatively common trope - conceptually, the two have a lot in common, and it ties in nicely to old legends about true names etc.

One nice thing about this book is that is reverses the relation between "magic stuff" and "normal stuff".

[Worldbuilding Spoiler Alert]

In Unsong the world is purely magic to begin with, sustained purely by the divine light until the Archangel Uriel converts all the divine light into science and mathematic to stop the war between hell and heaven.

Also, Eragon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com