There's another thing that I think of when I see this, which is the Dungeons and Dragons "wizards have to memorize their spells every day" thing -- this is usually attributed to Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, and it's interesting because it is in that. But this use-it-and-lose-it feature of magic spells only appears in one story -- Mazirian the Magician -- and 1) is only one of many different things that wizards can do (Mazirian, for example, has Live Boots that help him run somehow), and 2) is also never mentioned again.
In another story they mention that the council of wizards or whatever has established that there are 100 spells that they know work, and whenever a magic spell is mentioned, it's effects seem completely unrelated to any of the other spells -- spells that make a guy spin around in the air until he explodes, spells that shoot multicolored lasers, a guy finds a spell that will turn a hill inside out, &c.
And I think there's an interesting irony here, because Vance is very clearly sort of taking the piss of the very idea of formalized magic; magic is weird and specific and idiosyncratic and nobody knows how or why it works, and the features of magic in Dying Earth reflect that. Why do you lose a spell after you cast it? Who knows. Can this spell that turns a hill inside out turn other things inside out? No, probably not. Just hills.
It's Gary Gygax that formalizes it, because he wants to make a fantasy equivalent of Napoleonic war games and "fireball" is a pretty good equivalent to "grenadier", and so Vance's wizardry, which is very specifically meant to be anti-systemic, becomes the poster child for Magic Systems by way of D&D.
“These fans have no taste, in the sense that they are literally unable or refuse to operate within the framework of taste.” finally someone has articulated this uniquely horrible mode of media consumption that i have struggled to put a name to for fear of summoning a demon
That's an insult to Kirkland.
🔥
There's another thing that I think of when I see this, which is the Dungeons and Dragons "wizards have to memorize their spells every day" thing -- this is usually attributed to Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, and it's interesting because it is in that. But this use-it-and-lose-it feature of magic spells only appears in one story -- Mazirian the Magician -- and 1) is only one of many different things that wizards can do (Mazirian, for example, has Live Boots that help him run somehow), and 2) is also never mentioned again.
In another story they mention that the council of wizards or whatever has established that there are 100 spells that they know work, and whenever a magic spell is mentioned, it's effects seem completely unrelated to any of the other spells -- spells that make a guy spin around in the air until he explodes, spells that shoot multicolored lasers, a guy finds a spell that will turn a hill inside out, &c.
And I think there's an interesting irony here, because Vance is very clearly sort of taking the piss of the very idea of formalized magic; magic is weird and specific and idiosyncratic and nobody knows how or why it works, and the features of magic in Dying Earth reflect that. Why do you lose a spell after you cast it? Who knows. Can this spell that turns a hill inside out turn other things inside out? No, probably not. Just hills.
It's Gary Gygax that formalizes it, because he wants to make a fantasy equivalent of Napoleonic war games and "fireball" is a pretty good equivalent to "grenadier", and so Vance's wizardry, which is very specifically meant to be anti-systemic, becomes the poster child for Magic Systems by way of D&D.
“These fans have no taste, in the sense that they are literally unable or refuse to operate within the framework of taste.” finally someone has articulated this uniquely horrible mode of media consumption that i have struggled to put a name to for fear of summoning a demon