The Binding Vow of Reductionism

; foreword

: It's surprising to realize how little I've discussed worldbuilding on this site. All those essays about prose and plot and character, but any long-time fan of my work knows that my real passion is lore.

I have plenty of opinions on how to best go about fleshing out a setting, with a particular emphasis on the mechanics of its speculative elements --- which no doubt explains the length of this essay. Originally, I only wanted to dash off a quick tumblr post, but I kept hitting on things I wanted to express and realized I never had, not publicly.

But with... quite a bit further ado actually, let's get this essay started.

; related : -

• Reductionist Magic 1: The Problem
• nostalgebraist's counterpoint to rational fiction

Introduction

This evening, as I am wont to do, I found myself thinking about reductionist magic. It's my favorite way to design fantasy magic systems. Hard magic is rather in vogue these days --- clear and specific rules, wizards akin to scientists of arcana and engineers of spells.

Why? Contrivance is unsatisfying in narratives --- resolving a plot by deus ex machina is bad, and what fundamental difference is there, between "How was the villain thwarted? Because the gods willed it," and "How can wizards cast spells? Because the gods will it," ultimately?

Thus, hard magic serves as a balm for what is both a real problem and a persistent anxiety in writers. To resolve plots with magic, the reader needs to understand both the power and stakes of what magic does.

Brooms exist to solve a real problem: Dust and detritus accumulates on the floor the longer you live within a space, so you push it into piles and throw it away. Or, what comes first, your parents tell you to clean up your room, then check to see if your floor is actually clean.

If the problem a child thinks they're solving is clearing up the floor, why not sweep trash under a rug where no one can see it? But looking clean isn't the important part --- food crumbs, for instance, will rot and attract pests. Hiding them doesn't fix this.

The rise of hard magic comes hand in hand with an impulse toward avoiding plot holes. In a way, hard magic is just an exercise in amending the same sort of error, but located in the backplot and the worldbuilding --- lore holes, if you will, though that sounds almost lurid.

These holes come in two chief varieties --- lacuna and aporia.

Aporia is what everyone recognizes as a plot hole. Here, the text says X. There, the text says not-X. These cannot both be true, hence contradiction.

Say a fantasy party sets off on a quest to recover the lost remains of a legendary heroine, which are necessary to revive her and defeat a grand evil. An early encounter goes terribly wrong, they find themselves facing death at the daggers of a trio of goblins --- but then a wizard arrives to save the party with a timely casting of fireball, incinerating the fiends and leaving only charred skeletons.

Later, deep in the lows of the second act, tensions reach a breaking point as conflicting motivations tear the party apart. Suddenly, the wizard casts a traitorous fireball that incinerates the love of the protagonist's life. There's no way to revive her now --- the fireball had burnt so hot there's nothing remaining but ash on the wind. The protagonist falls to their knees and weeps at this grand tragedy.

Tragedy? I say farce. If the fireball is so hot it burns bones, then why did we see the goblin's skeletons earlier? Gotcha!

In practice, aporia is not what people call plot holes. Make no mistake, it happens: the sloppy writing of popular media is full of these slips. But how do you recognize plot holes? You first notice that you're confused; something doesn't add up. This doesn't make sense to me.

This brings us to lacunae. Consider this new narrative: First, we see a off-duty police officer take out a gun from his safe and slip it into his pocket. We watch him take a walk into the misty night, crickets chirruping an eerie ambient drone. As he passes in front of an alley, grah! A monster looms out of the darkness.

The cop turns tail and runs.

Does this make sense? There's no apparent contradiction. No, the issue isn't what happens, it's what doesn't happen. If the cop is scared, if he's fearing for his life, why doesn't he reach for his gun and shoot? We know he has one. Did he forget? Did the author?

So if aporia is the presence of logical contradictions deriving from supposed premises, then lacuna is the absence of the logical consequences of those premises.

But every dichotomy is just a spectrum with a lack of imagination.

There's a reason it's so natural to call both these things "plot holes." The contradiction buried in the cowardly cop example is we naturally assume a police officer would try to defend himself if feeling threatened --- he's got the training and he's armed. Media literacy means parsing and engaging with this kind of subtext.

But that's the rub: it's all interpretation. We don't know, so we have to infer. Was the traitor fireball really contradictory? Maybe the wizard simply poured more power into the spell against a human than against goblin.

Consider the following:

• There are five boxes in a circle, each with one marble inside.
• Marbles come in three colors and at least one of each is present.
• No box is immediately beside a box with a marble of the same color.
• Two of the marbles are blue.
• There are more red marbles than green.
• No green marble box sits to the immediate left of a red marble box.

Got all that? Now imagine I unveil a red marble. You aren't surprised; the rules say as much. Then I unveil the box to its right. It's blue.

Probably you don't blink. If you were a logically omniscient computer, though, you'd segfault.

Try it yourself, it's not hard to construct a sequence that matches these rules. Quickly you'll find yourself locked into a single valid sequence. And the result is not a configuration that has a blue box to the right of a red box!

Easy for you to guess this much, just pagescrolls above we were talking about contradictions. But would you have blinked if this puzzle had showed up in a fantasy story --- instead of marbles, it's the stones of power needed to activate mystical array? What happens if the rules were dripfed to you over the course of an arc, each established in a different scene?

The contradiction only emerges when you combine all of these constraints together, then spend an additional minute working through the implications.

In some ways this is close kin to an aporia --- it's explicit contradiction among what we're shown --- but this type of multi-step reasoning is what it takes to finish drawing an equivalence between the two.

To derive true contradiction from a lacuna is much like getting partway through a sudoku puzzle and realizing you've fucked up. In sudoku, you can rule out certain numbers by direct application of the rules, while other remain in an ambiguous superposition, but if you align enough superpositions, you discern certain permutations of states are contradictory and the others share implications. Sometimes, through the cloud of possibility, you discern that no matter what's really happening over here, every permutation places the same contraint over there. If you rule out what's impossible and nothing remains, the lacuna was truly vacuous.

It's worse than I let on --- this isn't just a spectrum, there are two spectrums. It's a plot hole polical compass!

This isn't an essay about plot holes, though lore holes will figure heavily in what's to come.

It's clear enough that we want to avoid confusing the reader, and to do that we need to think carefully about what we include in our worlds and what this implies.

But what are we really accomplishing, when we strain to avoid plot holes? There's a related concept, couched in the same kind of quippy TvTropes lingo --- fridge logic. It's when you watch a show, then once you step away to get a drink from the fridge, the implications hit you, and you go wait, what?

But if a story passes the sniff test while you're watching and it only falls apart later, hasn't it done its job entertaining you? Only a subset of readers go on the internet to rant about plot holes --- and crucially, you can always find narrative holes if you run far enough down the chains of logical implication, because the root of every story is a falsehood. None of this ever happened!

Part of what distinguishes aporia from lacuna is that one is charitable and one is adversarial. Aporia is a case where you get stung simply by believing what the story told you, taking it on own terms. Lacuna involves asking questions the author did not. This is important --- unconscious biases are worth examining --- but at a certain point you're just buying clothes at the soup store.

We're here to talk about hard magic --- adding rules and limits to make our spells more logical and believable. We do this because it's more satisfying, less confusing --- and to accomplish this, we might first try preëmptively thinking like a critic. Whether developing a plot development or expositing lore, at each point you imagine a reader who incisively asks, "Wait, does that really make sense? Why? How?"

But watch out! This is why I mentioned sweeping things under the rug. Only asking yourself whether you can satisfy readers