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It’s not magic: How fantasy works for authors and readers
Writing speculative fiction — fantasy and science fiction — may feel like freedom to the new author, since the world of the story is up to its creator, but if the reader is going to be able to live in that world for the duration, it must be one that is believable, a world that works at least as much as the plot and the characters use it. Fantasy specifically is often, but not necessarily identified with magic, and if you are going to write stories that include this, you need to have the rules figured out in advance.
The first thing to consider is what, exactly, is magic in the world of your story. The ability to communicate around the globe at a speed that feels instantaneous would sound like magic to someone from the days of the Roman Empire, for example, and the transporters of the Star Trek universe would look the same to us. These are illustrations of Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law — any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — and how magic systems differ from science fiction can end up being more quibble than actual distinctions if the world is fully realized. The Potterverse presents magic as something that can be studied, and while J.K. Rowling does not go into much discussion of magical theory in the stories, the implication is there that magic is simply a part of an expanded physics that some organisms can employ.
