Tricking Nature

Last weekend, I finished reading Foundryside, the first book in the Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett. I had read a review that the “magic” system was interesting, the premise being that one tried to trick nature into behaving differently. I don’t think the word ‘magic’ is used; objects that have been tricked to defy nature’s law are referred to as scrived – which essentially means ‘written’. The premise is that the symbols of a ‘language of creation’ were discovered in ancient ruins, and when commands in that language are scrived or inscribed on an object, you could alter its behavior to transcend the natural laws of physics and chemistry. (I guess Latin is not ancient enough for the Foundryside world even though it seems to be okay for Harry Potter and friends.)

 

Metals play a key role. The inscriptions seem mostly to be done on metal which then must be crafted or fused into or as part of the object. It’s like writing computer code and then executing the program, except that it’s on metal-hardware rather than software. But the tricky part is that you have to be very precise in your code so that the object does exactly what you want it to do, not more, not less. If you’re not careful about specifying the rules precisely, unforeseen accidents will happen.

 

I was hoping for more details about exactly what this involves, but I found the level of description a little underwhelming. I think there are some clever parts, and I would personally find it intriguing to delve further into the nitty-gritty, but the writer wisely keeps the story moving. The novel is more steampunk than fantasy or sci-fi, but in any of these genres, it’s the interaction of the people in the story that drive the plot. The magic or gadgets or, in this case scrivings, are secondary to having an interesting narrative that keeps the reader engaged. Personalities and life choices in difficult situations are the meat of the story, and rightly so.

 

That being said, I will indulge my delving a little. The story implies that scriving is easier if you’re only trying to perturb the behavior in a small way. For example, if I wanted iron to behave more like copper, I could inscribe instructions for iron to behave more like copper. They’re both metals, and have many similarities, but there are some differences in physical properties. Copper is a softer metal than iron and easier to shape. Copper is also a better conductor of electricity. Since I’m trained in chemistry, my inscribed program would command the iron to behave as if it had three more d-electrons, so it would have the chemistry of copper, but I would also have to ask it to pretend it has three virtual protons to keep the element neutral overall. Would I need to add neutrons too? Maybe not. If those virtual protons only exerted their electrostatic charge effects on the electrons and not any other non-virtual protons in iron.

 

But how does nature get tricked? In the world of Foundryside, the interesting element is that everything has a personality – it’s an animistic worldview. Thus if you were to enter into dialogue with a piece of iron, the iron atoms would first just repeat a mantra such as “we are attracted to our mobile sea of electrons” (where I’ve used a simple description of metallic bonding). Let’s call that its primary directive. To trick the iron into doing something else, you have to suggest a loophole to sidestep that primary directive. You could then enter the dialogue by asking it to consider having electrons that repelled each other a little more, but still allow them to remain as a mobile sea. This would allow the iron atoms to move further away from each other but still stay connected through the mobile electron cloud. You could thus increase the volume of iron without changing its mass, making it less dense until eventually you get it to float on water. Nature though is much more complicated. Change one thing and you almost always change another thing. Resizing matter, for example, is trickier than it looks.

 

In Foundryside, the behavioral perturbations mostly have to do with kinematics and defying gravity, i.e., things associated more with physics than chemistry. Expert scrivers, the equivalent of magicians, find that scriving is much easier with inanimate objects and that living things are much harder to deal with. I expect that’s where chemistry sneaks a little into the picture. Metals are pure substances made up only one element. (Alloys have more than one element.) Sand, simply put, is just silicon dioxide. But the living leaf of a tree has many different kinds of molecules that interact with each other in complicated ways – essentially biochemistry!

 

I therefore claim that to be a master scrivener you must learn organic chemistry and be able to imagine things happening at the molecular level. I’d say the same for wizards and witches who want to manipulate matter in the most exquisite ways. Foundryside takes a different tact by introducing a God-language, more ancient than the initial creative-language found. It would be cool if that God-language is chemistry, and if the super-ancient  more powerful symbols are representations of chemistry! I suspect not. In any case, I’m still debating whether to read the second book in the trilogy. Foundryside had an engaging narrative and interesting characters but it didn’t wow me. But it might be intriguing enough for me to see where the story leads and discover more about how mind can be infused into matter, an interesting philosophical question at the very least.