Larry Niven had a good system of magical economics in his stories "What Good is a Glass Dagger" and "The Magic Goes Away." He had magicians drawing upon a fixed reserve of "manna" -- the force powering spells.

JT, you're an Eddings reader?

I knew there was a reason I liked you. :)

Of course, Eddings is no Tolkien, but for "lighter" fantasy, he's one of my favorites.

And it doesn't hurt that we share a first name.

When you consider that this series is for kids, it's not too surprising that the economics of magic aren't exactly up to adult scrutiny. And there's actually a few things touched on in the last book about limitations on magic (which I don't think will spoil things if I mention one here) such as just WHY you can't magic food out of thin air.

Well, I don't read HP for economic theories. If the magic system is cohesive enough to work unobtrusively in the context of the story, that's good enough for me. A lot of the SF I read requires a suspension of disbelief, and it's only if something REALLY gets out of whack that I'll go "Um, no, that's not right..." and lose interest in the story.

I always liked Niven's system, too. If a wizard stayed too long in one place, he'd use up all the manna in that area, and his spells would stop working. He'd have to move. If enough wizards were in close enough proximity they'd create large dead areas. There were also specific ways that wizards could attack each other (or other kinds of magical enemies) using very costly spells that could drain the manna from an area quickly.

This also explains why there isn't any magic in the modern age. All the manna got used up.

"There are drawbacks to Dresden's power, though. For one, he does not get along with technology. Gadgets of all kinds tend to screw up in his presence. He drives an ever-increasingly-battered Volkswagen Beetle (it's so simply built, it tends to resist his influence) and his apartment doesn't even have electricity."

Dresden drives a Jeep, and has electricity in his apartment - he has an old dial phone that shocks him when he touches it and an old tape based answering machine (how would that answering machine work without electricity?).

That might be in the TV series, headzero, but I'm quite certain about what I said applying to the books -- his car is the Blue Beetle, although the blue parts are rapidly diminishing as they progress; he has a spell ("flickus bicum") that lights his candles; and he refers frequently to his "icebox" that is, literally, an old icebox, not a refrigerator.

I bet his office has electricity, though, but definitely not his home.

J.

Re: #5

That's Dresden Files, the TV series. In the book, he drives a ever stripped down re-conditioned VW bug (the interior eventually got stripped of pretty much everything not metal by a demon), and has no electricity in his home. The only technology he has in his home is the phone.

Now, if you want a truly complex system of magic, check out the Recluse series by L. E. Modesitt.

His mages frequently have to have day jobs.

A Jeep is much cooler than an old Volkswagen. But Jay Tea is correct - there's NO electricity in his home, no phone, but he does have running water.

I think he does have a gas stove, though I've seen numerous mentions of cold showers because of no water heater. I guess his magic would screw up a water heater's thermostat, which is dependent on a tiny bit of electricity from a thermocouple heated by a pilot light. And a failure in one of those... well, knowing Dresden's luck?

http://www.waterheaterblast.com/

Heck of a way to start the day...

Yes - I was refering to the TV show, sorry. Gave up reading dead trees about 12 years ago unless they were technical manuals.

Modesitt is a fantastic writer. I have read the entire Recluse series and am now reading his Corean Chronicles. Everything magic or powerwise has its consequences. He seems to like telling the stories from both sides in his books.

FWIW, you can get atleast the first two Dresden books in audio version read by, of all people, the actor who played Spike.

Rich, there's a new Recluse book due out in September.

I can't wait!

"The low opportunity cost attached to magic spills over into the thoroughly unbelievable wizard economy. Why are the Weasleys poor? Why would any wizard be? (...) ...they lack things like new clothes and textbooks that should be easily obtainable with a few magic words. Why?

The answer, as with so much of JK Rowling's work, seems to be "she didn't think it through"."

I think she didn't think it through because she's not a fantasy writer. (Weirdly, that also may be why the books seem more accessible than others in the genre.)

The convention that magic has to cost something is like the convention in SF that if there is anti-gravity it has to be reflected in the whole of the world-building. Bujold does a great job of this. Her spaceships have inertia dampeners and artificial gravity (the same thing) and so her worlds have floating pallets, lift tubes, and gravity controlled fountains as municipal artwork.

Whatever is true in one situation has to be able to be applied to other situations.

The answer, as with so much of JK Rowling's work, seems to be "she didn't think it through"."

Actually, if you read the books, she apparently did. . . but good authors don't have to explain outright the background details of their world, they let the story do it for them.

The explanations for the economics are scattered hither and yon, but they are there. .

I don't know all the rules of magic, but it's my understanding that things can indeed be unmade. It's called subtractive magic and any ethical wizard either does not or cannot use it. Subtractive magic is derived from the underworld and always has unpleasant implications or outcomes.

I suppose that the rules of magic were written long ago and people who are familiar with them look to make sure those rules are being followed when reading such stories, so perhaps the concept of subtractive magic is unique to the Sword of Truth series, (a Google search of the term always references Terry Goodkind's books) but I think it makes things a little more interesting.

Terry Pratchett had several great plot devices for limitation of magical power, the best one being an application of Newton's Third Law to leviation: if you tried to lift something too large, you'd end up with your brains in your boots. Or something to that effect.

has AL GORE been turned into a toad yet?

Well, if we try to start poking holes in Rowling's books, we'll find some big enough to levitate a truck through. I agree that there are economic problems, but there are other problems as well (such as why wizards, very few of whom were not raised at least in part by or around muggles, have so little understanding of muggles; the alternate problem of muggles not knowing about wizards is minor by comparison). The writing, though having moments of brilliance, is generally good, but not often great. The plots have seriously large holes in them much of the time. (Consider the last book, in which the passage of time, considered by Dumbledore to be necessary for Harry to behave correctly at the correct time, is actually irrelevant: Harry behaves correctly because the sequence of events has brought him to the right state of mind at the right time. This same sequence of events could have happened more quickly with the same end result. Yet when Harry is given this reasoning, at a time when he is skeptically questioning his relationship to Dumbledore, and even though Harry's character was pointing this way from the very beginning of the series, Harry simply accepts that time was needed before he would do what he would have done anyway, given the sequence of events.)

But the thing is, these problems can be ignored most of the time, and the story is so immersive, and the characters so believable most of the time, that Harry Potter is a wonderfully fun read. Rowling has earned her money, even though serious magical fantasy buffs will never consider her books useful in advancing magical theory or considering the ethics of the superhuman or supernatural, which is where most magical fantasy really shines. But like much magical fantasy, the Potter books are in part a call for normal people to behave heroically, to be better than their baser natures. Rowling really brings out Spartan ethics, for example, in a way that is very emotional for someone who is already steeped in them.

Anyway, the point is that it's easy to criticize the Potter books, but that criticism does not diminish the achievements of the books.