Five Favorite Magical Systems | Sunday Five | #WyrdandWonder

Hello hello.

This year we are back with the Sunday Fives for Wyrd and Wonder. Though we don’t have five sundays this year’s May, it still works fine. And for this first topic we will be talking about favorite magical systems or spells. I’ve chosen to share a few favorite magical systems I’ve found in books.

Orogeny

From The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

The Broken Earth trilogy is one of my favorites and it might not surpise you that the magic called orogeny in the books is a type of earth magic. While I loved to see how they had the abbility to manipulate thermal, kinetic, and related forms of energy to address seismic events, how Jemisin writes the contrast between the stills (those without orogeny) and the orogenics and if orogeny should be more controlled really adds to the experience of the magic itself.

Scriving

From The Founders trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

I fell in love with Foundryside for the characters but also for the ‘magic’. In this world they use scriving, a sort of magical technology. They scrive commands into items so they can do things that the object otherwise would not be able to. Sancia, the main character, has the abbility to change these scrives by letting the item believe that she is right and what is scrived into them is wrong. I really liked seeing how this world created automatic processes through these means.

Zodiac Magic

From The Conductors by Nicole Glover

In the Conductors there are two types of magic. The zodiac magic as used by the black people and the western magic as used by the white people. As we follow Henriette Rhodes we see mostly zodiac magic. I really liked seeing how she uses sigils and how she sews protection into clothes or how her husband branded it into wood. It is a different kind of magic than we often get to see. More practical, nothing overly grand.

Book Magic

From The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith

Perhaps not a complete system but I enjoyed seeing, especially in the first book, how characters from unwritten/unpublished books came to life in the library and how that all worked.

Just Magic

From Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho

The magic in Sorcerer to the Crown is a bit more of the normal magic with spells, books, magical eggs, cloud surfing and faeries. But still so much to discover and have fun with that it had to be added to this list.

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