Sanderson's Hidden Law of Magic

If you are a creator of science fiction or fantasy in some capacity, you owe it to your craft to read Sanderson’s Laws of Magic. You can find his overview here, but to really understand them, you should read the article for each law.?

I do them a disservice by doing so, but I’d sum up the first two laws in this way: Fictional science or magic only really works for your story when it functions within comprehensible limits.

“But it’s magic! That’s the point!”

Listen, deus ex machina worked for the ancient Greeks, but audiences have moved on. Read Brandon Sanderson’s articles. He’ll do a much better job of convincing you than I.

The devious bit comes in with Sanderson’s third law: Expand what you already have before you add something new. I think Sanderson missed a trick.

There’s a hidden fourth law critical to developing magic or sci-fi in intellectual properties: Follow the unwritten rules.

The use of magic or sci-fi in a story often comes with defined limits. These are the rules that we see enforced during the story. Creators often look at such written rules and look beyond them for the “design space.” The general idea is that within the rules put forth, nothing says you can’t, which mean that’s a place for you to expand into. Sanderson encourages that, and I largely agree.

However, what creators—even the original authors of the rules—often miss is that the story created a subtext of unwritten rules. These unwritten rules can be hidden third rails, ready to shock you when you stray across them. My favorite examples of this are from Star Wars and Star Trek.

In the original Star Wars trilogy, we get both implicit and explicit rules about the Force. When Obi-Wan waves his hand at the stormtooper and says, “These are not the droids you’re looking for,” it’s prefaced by him waving his hand at the stormtrooper and looking in his face and saying “You don’t need to see his identification,” which the stormtrooper repeats back to Obi-Wan. As the scene plays out, we see that the stormtrooper is under Obi-Wan’s thrall and being mind-controlled in some way. When Luke later makes a remark about not understanding how they got past the stormtroopers, Obi-Wan says, “The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.” In Return of the Jedi, we see Luke use the same technique on Jabba the Hutt’s majordomo, but then we see Jabba the Hutt upset at his underling for falling for the “Jedi mind trick” and Jabba himself immune to Luke’s mental powers. The explicit rule is that it works only on the weak minded. The implicit rules are about proximity, a hand gesture, and looking in the eyes. It’s a great example of adhering to the written and unwritten rules of the Force, and it's a great story moment as it immediately shows us how far Luke has come in his skill with the Force.

When Darth Vader first Force chokes someone in A New Hope, he makes a pinching motion with his hand at a person in the room and looks that person in the face. In Empire Strikes Back, he does the Force choke through a video transmission without making any hand gesture. Proximity is no longer an issue nor is the gesture necessary, but he still needs to see the target and have their attention. In Return of the Jedi, we even see Luke Force choke a couple of Jabba’s gamorrean guards, but he follows the rules: proximity, gesture, and eye contact.

The first three films reuse this in several ways, such as jedis moving nearby objects through space by proximity, gesture, and eye contact. In the Force-choking scene in Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader breaks some of the unwritten rules (no gesture, vast distance), and that the escalation in Darth Vader’s power makes him more threatening.

But in movies and TV series released in later years, Darth Vader breaks the implicit rules earlier in the timeline. In Rogue One, he chokes someone with his back turned. In the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, he pulls someone out of window and has them float in the air before casually walking down the street and Force choking people to death at random as he passes. These escalations of his power critically take place before Star Wars: A New Hope. If he could do all these things before Star Wars: A New Hope, why didn’t he do them in that movie? Darth Vader even force chokes and floats the Emperor in Episode 1. If he could do that in all those earlier phases, why hold back against Luke or Obi-Wan in any of the original trilogy?

The answer of course is that the creators of those later stories (including George Lucas) were looking at the totality of what is possible with the Force in Star Wars and trying to one-up preceding depictions. They saw the “design space” to create an exciting new scene without taking into account the unwritten rules the narrative had already laid out. While such decisions might have seemed to have a good dramatic payoff, breaking the unwritten rules can throw people out of the moment and make them start critically examining the work.?

Does it sink the IP? Not a behemoth like Star Wars. That’s like hand drilling a hole in the side of an aircraft carrier. But the thing is, it’s not the only hole. A lot of creative choices in the TV series and movies violate the explicit and implicit rules set up by the original trilogy. Sometimes a series or movie repairs some of the damage. Sometimes they make more holes. I trust the Star Wars IP will be with us for generations to come, but there will be plenty of people who see the patches in the hull or feel their feet getting wet and decide to jump ship.

Star Trek has a lot of similar issues, but the one I find most illuminating is how transporters work. Now, I’m sure that there’s some Star Trek tech manual that has been published or some comic book or novel that has gone deep into the weeds about exactly how transporter technology works, but that’s not what most people see. The implicit and explicit rules for transporters are given to you in the original series and largely adhered to in later movies and series.

How far can you transport?

Ship to ship, and ship to planet.

How many people/things can you transport??

As much as you can fit on a transporter pad.

What can you transport??

People and moveable things—the kind of stuff that fits on a transport pad.

Where can you transport??

To and from a transport pad, but often to or from a planet or from one ship to another without the person starting or ending up on a transport pad.

When can’t you transport??

Through ship shields, various sci-fi energy interference, and maybe a weird mineral or something.

These basic ideas come from the first series because the transporter was solving dramatic and production problems. They didn’t want to have to land a whole ship or a landing vehicle on every planet they visited. The small transporter pad fit in the studio. But these practical limitations of budget and special effects have a tremendous benefit: The small group being transported makes their interventions on other planets more like diplomatic missions than invasions. That fits with the optimistic themes that Gene Rodenberry wanted to present.

But nothing says you can’t transport from star system to star system or across a planet. Surely a transporter pad could be made that was powerful enough to do it.

Why not make transporter pads bigger? You could transport more goods and people. Why not a transporter pad as big as an aircraft carrier? You could transport whole ships.

Why not use a transporter as a weapon? Disassemble an enemy ship by disintegrating critical portions of it. Or you could transport bombs from a secret pad somewhere on a planet and proceed in a campaign of targeted killings.

But wait, what’s the pad for anyway? Why not use transporters to just send people and things all over the place from all over the place? Why even bother having spaceships?

This looks a lot like “design space.” This looks like we’ve found areas where a Star Trek story could be innovative, and where a creator could really leave their mark on the franchise.?

They’d leave a mark alright, and it’d look like a hole in the hull of the IP.

You might not see an explicit reason why you can’t do these things in Star Trek, but there’s a host if implicit reasons why you shouldn’t. When you start breaking the technologies’ implicit rules, you’re actually breaking the IP’s implicit rules. Fundamentally, the Star Trek IP is optimistic: Star Trek stories are about a group of friends going on an adventure and finding they have common ground with even the most alien species. That’s reinforced in how transporters get used: small groups moving to and from alien worlds or ships. While technically you could write stories that mess with transporters, you wouldn’t be writing stories that feel like Star Trek anymore.

As the creator of an IP, you can make those implicit rules explicit to yourself and your team. Write down the unwritten rules, and then explain to other writers why they exist and why they’re not for public consumption. And then as time goes on, examine your IP for the other unwritten rules that might crop up. It’s a lot easier to maintain a consistent, compelling and coherent IP when you write those unwritten rules down.?

You can see this post and more stuff?on my website.