Monday, September 24, 2018

The Dresden Files: A Different Magical Harry


Harry Dresden has outed himself as a wizard in the Yellow Pages. He’s the only one self-advertising, mind you. But he needs clients to pay rent and so offers to investigate incidents involving the paranormal or finding missing objects. Naturally, the Chicago Police Department has him on retainer for when something bizarre comes up, but they don’t pay well and some of the cops think he’s a fraud. It turns out he is an actual wizard, living in a dilapidated basement apartment. At least those are his current humble beginnings in the first book in the Dresden Files series, Storm Front, written by Jim Butcher


The story follows the lines of a detective noir novel, but with supernatural bits included. There’s a police officer ‘partner’, a journalist, and a supportive grunting neighborhood bartender. For TV-watchers Dresden might be a combination of Grimm and The Mentalist. There is magic involved, but much depends on being observant and keeping one’s wits in tricky situations. In that sense, there’s nothing too special about Storm Front. Harry Dresden is not like Harry Potter, in case you were wondering. There is something akin to a Statute of Secrecy among the wizarding folk in Dresden’s world, but he’s willing to breach it for cash. But he has principles. He won’t appear at parties, provide endless purses or make love potions. He really is a detective at heart, and seems to want to do his bit to help others. Dresden thinks there’s a need, even though most people don’t believe he’s a ‘real wizard’. Here’s his justification.

The end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the new millennium had seen something of a renaissance in the public awareness of the paranormal. Psychics, haunts, vampires – you name it. People still didn’t take them seriously, but all the things Science had promised us hasn’t come to pass. Disease was still a problem. Starvation was still a problem. Violence and crime and war were still problems. In spite of the advance of technology, things just hadn’t changed the way everyone had hoped and thought they would. Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become somewhat tarnished… People were looking for something – I think they just didn’t know what. And even though they were once again starting to open their eyes to the world of magic and the arcane that had been with them all the while, they still thought I must be some kind of joke.

Storm Front is written entirely in the first person – Dresden’s perspective of course. This has two advantages. One, the action moves quickly and doesn’t split into several parallel threads. Two, the reader gets a glimpse of how a wizard thinks internally. This latter point is what I find interesting. Dresden drops interesting tidbits along the way about how magic works. I see the potential for a systematic (perhaps even ‘scientific’) building of magical theory in the author’s approach; it’s at least enough for me to put the next book in the series on my reading list.

Unlike in Harry Potter, where the interference of magic and Muggle electricity is only mentioned in passing, this link is experienced explicit by Dresden. Here are a couple of passages.

The phone rang again almost the instant I put it down, making me jump. I peered at it. I don’t trust electronics. Anything manufactured after the forties is suspect – and doesn’t seem to have much liking for me. You name it: cars, radios, telephones, TVs, VCRs – none of them seem to behave well for me. I don’t even like to use automatic pencils. … The music continued for a few seconds more, and then it began to skip over a section about two seconds long, repeating it over and over again. I grimaced. Like I said, I have this effect on machinery. It has something to do with being a wizard, with working with magical forces. The more delicate and modern the machine is, the more likely it is that something will go wrong if I get close enough to it. I can kill a copier at fifty paces.

Driving a car can sometimes be a challenge. Dresden also avoids elevators, for good reason. I have previously speculated that the link is via electromagnetic radiation. He calls the science of magic ‘quasiphysics’ – which seems appropriate. When investigating what seems like a magical crime, Dresden concludes.

There just weren’t all that many people who could get enough power into that kind of spell to make it work – unless there was some flaw in the quasiphysics that governed magic that [redacted for spoiler]; and I wouldn’t know that until I had pursued the forbidden research.

Dresden has a lab in the sub-basement of his apartment. From his description, it sounds like a chemistry lab. He discusses the essence of making potions – providing a rudimentary theory of sorts – but the explanation seems weak or underdeveloped to me. He also has a lab assistant in the form of a spirit that he has trapped in a skull named Bob. It turns out Bob is like Alexa. But instead of being connected to the Internet, he’s connected to a treasure trove of magical information down the ages. Bob is helpful with remembering potion recipes and adapting them to the brewer. There seems to be some uniqueness between the efficacy of the objects used and who brews the potion and for what purpose, i.e., potion recipes are dynamic and must be adapted. It isn’t clear yet exactly how or why. There is however a mention of lab coats and wizarding robes!

I took my off my duster and got out my heavy flannel robe before I went down into the lab. That’s why wizards wear robes, I swear to you. It’s just too damned cold in the lab to go without one. … [Bob] made his residence inside the skull that had been prepared for him several hundred years ago, and it was his job to remember thing. For obvious reasons, I can’t use a computer to store information and keep track of the slowly changing laws of quasiphysics. That’s why I had Bob. He had worked with dozens of wizards over the years, and it had given him a vast repertoire of knowledge – that, and a really cocky attitude.

Dresden considers the energy required before he attempts to cast a spell. Energy efficiency is crucial. I think a sensible theory of magic requires you to expand a proportional amount of energy for the changes you are making to the material world, so I applaud this effort. This is why one needs powerful objects to store magical energy. Dresden makes a direct connection when he discusses ‘violet’ light that he senses in a place full of magic energy that he can potentially access. In the electromagnetic spectrum, violet is at the edge of visible light and carries the most energy compared to other colors of the rainbow. (Is there a magical color?) There is also an interesting discussion of the tension between dark magic and light magic – I think this is something that could be explored in subsequent books, and there might be an underpinning magical theory to this.

I close with his description of ectoplasm. Yes, there is an occasion where Dresden gets covered in the goo. But there’s now a direct connection when matter is summoned.

Both of us were coated in dust that was stuck to the stinking, colorless goo, the ectoplasm that magic called from somewhere else whenever generic mass was called for in a spell. The goo wouldn’t last long – within a few more minutes, it would simply dissipate, vanish into thin air, return to wherever it came from in the first place. For the moment, it was just a rather disgusting, slimy annoyance.

It’s enough to keep me interested in reading the next book.

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