Books Mark as Read Magic Doesn’t Have to Make Sense In praise of fantasy that embraces rebellious, lawless, and delightfully un-rulebound magic. By Molly Templeton | Published on May 22, 2025 Photo by Scheich Méshaël Zahedd [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Scheich Méshaël Zahedd [via Unsplash] For reasons I’m not sure I will ever fully understand, the topic of magic and rules comes up with slightly alarming frequency in SFF circles. So much so, in fact, that it is very tempting to use ominous capital letters when referring to the two bits of said topic: Magic and Rules. Does magic have to have rules? Would everyone just run about drunk with power if the rules did not constrain their magics in some way? What are rules, and what are parameters? If limits are not imposed upon wizards, will they ever impose them upon themselves? When does magic become science, and how much of this entire topic can I throw at the feet of Clarke’s third law? That law, for those in need of a refresher, states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Fair enough. But must we try to reverse-engineer this? Let me back up: I know there are a lot of books with intense magic systems because I hear about them. I read about them. I encounter online arguments about them and I see authors’ laws and notions about them. But I don’t, for the most part, read those books. I bounce off magical rule sets like drunk bees bounce off windows. But I’m not here to drag the rule-havers, long may they reign in their specific territory of fantasy. If you like the rules, more power to you, go with god(s), etc. I’m sure we can find something else to talk about should our paths ever cross.  I am here instead to sing the praises of rebellious, lawless, delightfully un-rulebound magic—not just the kind people do, but also the kind that simply is. I tried to find an example from Catherynne Valente’s Fairyland books and was overwhelmed with them: the wyverary (half wyvern, half library); Gleam the lamp; the smartly dressed Green Wind; the whole thing with the moon in the third book: Valente writes like she’s never heard of “rules,” and I have never wanted anything in one of her novels explained to me any further than she explains it. Strange, arguably magical things happen in Helen Oyeyemi books, and whenever they—or she—run up against a rule, whether of science or nature or anything else, it goes ignored. A lot of my favorite books, I can’t remember how the magic works. And I mean that as a compliment. In The Incandescent, magic exists, and some people are just better at various kinds of it than others. (Some of it involves invoking demons, and if you mess up that kind, well, magic definitely has a price.) Magic in The Magicians comes from pain. That’s fine. That’s a source, not a rule (one does have to learn fancy hand motions in order to do magic, but that’s a process). It also always kind of feels like a wry punchline to me. Every life has some pain. Therefore we’ve all got some magic. Magic relies on things, has processes, requires learning: yes, yes, yes. If magic is an art, well, art takes study. I could spend hours learning to draw and I would still not be an outstanding artist. Why would this not hold true for magic? What of the incredible alchemy of art and skill and practice and learning? If magic is a natural force, well, one also has to learn to understand those. I am not suggesting every wizard, witch, sorcerer, or other practitioner suddenly have access to powers unbounded. It only tracks, in my kind of brain, that in a world with magic, some people would have it come easily, and some would have to work a lot harder. Some would decide that the work wasn’t worth it, and learn to make elaborate candles or really good focaccia instead.  I admit, though, there is a little part of my brain that understands the rules and parameters and specific magical-math folks. A little bit. At least in principle. I understand the appeal of directions you can follow, steps you can take, a path laid out for success. Quantifiable actions. Stages and tasks and if-x-then-y. I play a lot of Zelda. I feel like magic systems are like when you decide to upgrade your armor: You will need a number of lizalfos tails and a number of flowers and probably some pretty gems you dug up in the mountains. It’s all fun and monster-killing and steady progression until you realize the game is never going to provide those elusive electric lizalfos tails. And then it just becomes homework. There’s also a little part of my brain that understands wanting magic to work like things we know. Maybe it takes a certain alchemy of light and water and invisible elements to create a flower; maybe it takes that to create a spell. But I don’t want to read a textbook for something I cannot actually learn. There is a point, for me, at which the fictional education becomes too much. Magic feels to me like something that should, on some level, be unknowable. Maybe dangerous. I’ve read more than one book in which magic elicits a sort of backlash. Unpredictable, possibly dangerous, and uncontrollable. You would have to be really sure that you needed to do your magic if it might come back to bite you in the metaphorical (or literal) ass like that. I like not knowing. I am currently sixty-odd pages into Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage and I have no idea what kind of book I’m dealing with. It’s sort of like if Piranesi and City of the Uncommon Thief are doing a really complicated dance together, beckoning for the reader to join them, but said reader has no idea how the steps go. There are people with trout heads and a beehive that prances around like a pony. Magic. No one’s doing magic, exactly, at least not yet, but this world is magic in itself. There is magic in its seams. I do not need to know why the trout person has a trout face. I might find out, or I might not. But logic is not required. Magic! Illogical, glorious magic! Give me more. Shape it with names, summon it with car-antenna wands, sing to it with bells, make deals with demonic figures, do incredible works through magic rocks. Let magic run wild and only a few people know how to chase it. Make it as common as air and a pain-in-the-ass to wield. Limitations are great. Limitations are fun to work with, fun to play with, delicious to smash. I’m not suggesting we need a whole lot of nuclear-warhead level mages in every story doing whatever they want, because that would be boring. But that’s not down to the rules or the magic system; that’s down to the story and the characters. Anyway, maybe magic doesn’t want to be used like that. Maybe it’s sentient. Maybe it hates you. Maybe it’s petty. Maybe it likes systems! Maybe sometimes magic systems are just science in new outfits. Maybe magic met chemistry in college and they got along really well.  I am not the first and will not be the last to make this plea: Let magic be magical. Let it not “make sense.” If you don’t believe me, will you listen to N.K. Jemisin? Because this is magic we’re talking about. It’s supposed to go places science can’t, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own. In most cultures of the world, magic is intimately connected with beliefs regarding life and death — things no one understands, and few expect to. Magic is the motile force of God, or gods. It’s the breath of the earth, the non-meat by-product of existence, that thing that happens when a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it. Magic is the mysteries, into which not everyone is so lucky, or unlucky, as to be initiated. It can be affected by belief, the whims of the unseen, harsh language. And it is not. Supposed. To make. Sense. In fact, I think it’s coolest when it doesn’t. It’s coolest when it doesn’t. This is from Jemisin’s 2012 blog post, “But, but, but — WHY does magic have to make sense?”  This is also why I love it when writers get their fantasy all mixed up with their science fiction. Space is big and wild and if we’re going to explore far distant (made-up) parts of it, who’s to say what lurks between those moons and stars and planets? Who’s to say there are limits on what fiction can invent out there in the black? A book—any book—needs to have a sense of internal logic (unless it is purposefully and cleverly not doing that, but that’s a whole different thing). But that doesn’t mean we need to know why there are talking trees. Or what songs the stars are singing to the spaceships that drift by on their way to new (and possibly magical) worlds.[end-mark] The post Magic Doesn’t Have to Make Sense appeared first on Reactor.