Magic vs Natural Aging

[Sheilawisz]

I have noticed that in many Fantasy worlds where some kind of Magic exists, the Magical characters cannot defy the natural laws of aging even when they have reality warping powers- This happens in the Stardust book and movie, the Harry Potter series, the recent Snowhite and the Huntsman film and others.

It seems that for many Fantasy writers the natural process of growing old (and eventually dying!) is something that cannot be overcome even with Magic, not even when their characters can perform great magical feats like flying, transforming people into animals or throw devastating magical attacks.

Why is that, in your opinion? What is it like in your own Fantasy worlds? Can your Magical characters forget about the ghost of growing old, or they have to keep aging like everyone else??

 

[ThinkerX]

Depends on the book and author.

Lin Carter had several wizards that were centuries or millenia old.

In Feists 'Magician' series, the really powerful wizards aged very slowly, some of them being a good several centuries old. The not so powerful ones aged normally.

In Eddings books, the wizards were pretty much immortal and very powerful.

Normal lifespans were the rule for wizards In Elliots 'Crown of Stars' - but most of them were not that powerful.

In Kerr's 'Deverry' series, there were a couple wizards that lived a very long time - one as a result of a curse, the other through very black magical practices.

In short, there is more variation than you seem to allow for.

In my works, most of the wizards are magical wimps. They live a bit longer than normal, but a lot of that is through....'clean living' for want of a better term, meditation, diet, exercise, understanding their own bodies.

 

[Penpilot]

IMHO it's about establishing limits on the magic, even if its a soft magic world. Otherwise too much is possible, too easily. In my WIP the highest level of magic users have extended life spans, can manipulate, in limited terms, time and space, and create ghosts, but I firmly establish such things are achievable with great difficulty and there are things Magic and Magic users can't overcome like death, and disease or even a simple bullet to the head if caught unaware.

 

[Jess A]

I have had faeries who never age, and also other creatures. But usually they can die by other means. Some by the same means as any human, and others by different methods (but not necessarily difficult methods). This way, they have stayed alive by their cunning and/or skills (etc) but have lots of vulnerabilities. It's no fun if a character has no limits. No fun at all. Not to read, or to write...

An exception might be gods - but even gods can fall and fade.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

I have noticed that in many Fantasy worlds where some kind of Magic exists, the Magical characters cannot defy the natural laws of aging even when they have reality warping powers- This happens in the Stardust book and movie, the Harry Potter series, the recent Snowhite and the Huntsman film and others.

It seems that for many Fantasy writers the natural process of growing old (and eventually dying!) is something that cannot be overcome even with Magic, not even when their characters can perform great magical feats like flying, transforming people into animals or throw devastating magical attacks.

Why is that, in your opinion? What is it like in your own Fantasy worlds? Can your Magical characters forget about the ghost of growing old, or they have to keep aging like everyone else??

Because life, ultimately, means learning how to deal with death, and that's reflected in our fiction. It's relatively childish (I don't mean this in a dismissive or insulting way, I mean it literally) to fantasize about living forever, but the older you get, the more evident it becomes that, no, you are not special and are not going to outrun your own mortality.

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.

 

[shangrila]

I thought the Snow White movie would have been an example of the opposite. The queen, whatever her name is, is obviously hundreds of years old yet still looks sexy as ever. I mean, yes, she does have to suck the life out of others to prolong her own, but that's just how she's used magic to get around aging.

I'll give another example; Joe Abercrombie's world. In it, there's a cadre of mages who've been alive for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years. Two of them, in fact, have created and manipulated the development of the two major societies in it. They don't have to suck the life out of people or anything either, they just live (although they look like they're late middle age, so maybe they just age really, really slow).

As for my stories, no, they can't. Magic comes at a price and, in most cases, it's either their physical, mental or both that suffers for it. I wouldn't really want immortal characters either; the psychological effects of having lived so long are kind of daunting to think about, at least in my opinion. I never buy when a guy that's hundreds of years old just comes across as normal.

 

[ShortHair]

Magic is about changing reality in ways that can't happen in our world. The strongest instinct we have is for self-preservation, so it makes sense to use magic for life extension. What I don't understand (and what the OP may be asking) is why there seems to be a blind spot here.

A character can use magic in any number of unnatural ways. This magic will defy physics, biology, logic, and any other branch of science you care to name, and it's treated as normal. Let him or her try to live longer, though, and suddenly there are limits, tradeoffs, penalties. "Her fate has caught up to her." "He was living on borrowed time, then he had to pay it back." "You can't cheat the Reaper."

In our universe there's supposed to be conservation of energy and matter. If your character shoots a fireball at someone, for instance, you should explain where he got the thermal energy to heat the ball and the kinetic energy to move it. (For now we'll put aside the question of what's actually on fire.) Typically, though, we don't get that explanation, or even an acknowledgement that an explanation is necessary.

So why do we see the opposite in immortality? We celebrate people who live beyond the average lifespan. Why is it so often necessary for fantasy immortals to gain their extra time by stealing it from mortals? Why is it wrong to want to live longer?

While I'm at it, what's with the trope of turning to dust when the immortality ends? It's poetic justice, and it makes for dramatic scenes, but it doesn't make sense.

 

[Sheilawisz]

Thanks everyone for your interesting points of view =)

In the Snowhite and the Huntsman movie, Queen Ravenna is forced to magically suck the energy/youth or whatever out of others to counter her own natural aging process, which means that she keeps aging and that she cannot really stop it. In Harry Potter there exists the elixir of the Philosophers's Stone to extend your lifespan... as long as you keep drinking it, because if you stop, the natural aging comes back to get you!!

The same applies to Magical characters from other Fantasy worlds who can live to many thousand years or age very slowly: That does not matter, they are still subjected to the natural process of aging and cannot really be free of it =)

Also, from my point of view being free of growing old does not mean immortality at all... My own Mages do not worry about the aging of their biological bodies, but still they can get killed in battle.

Benjamin, I liked especially your point of view that the meaning of life is to learn how to deal with death, so that is reflected in our fiction and our magical characters as well...

 

[Feo Takahari]

As another way to look at this, why doesn't this apply in sci-fi? That genre has no problem with depicting societies where deaths come from accidents or murders instead of aging (Altered Carbon, John C. Wright's The Golden Age, Eight Worlds, etc.)

Personally, my theory is that it's easy and comforting to believe that bad things happen to you because Fate requires them for a grand purpose beyond your comprehension. Many fantasies rely on the idea that an all-powerful Fate wants good to ultimately triumph, so they make inevitable death part of Fate and thus good. Sci-fi, on the other hand, is a largely "godless" genre--if Fate is depicted at all, it exists not as a greater good, but as a mathematical equation summing to zero. As such, sci-fi has no incentive not to explore what would happen if people (or at least the rich and powerful) lived until accidents or murder claimed them. (Note that immortality is usually depicted as immoral in religious sci-fi, and that fantasy without Fate doesn't always depict immortality as immoral.)

Edit: To clarify, I think the reason death is portrayed as good and part of fate, but the triumph of evil is portrayed as bad and prevented by Fate, is that the triumph of evil is merely common in our world, whereas death is and will always be inevitable (even a post-Singularity society will face eventual death.) Were the triumph of evil inevitable, fantasy that relies on a benevolent Fate would portray such triumph as similarly proper.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

As another way to look at this, why doesn't this apply in sci-fi? That genre has no problem with depicting societies where deaths come from accidents or murders instead of aging (Altered Carbon, John C. Wright's The Golden Age, Eight Worlds, etc.)

Probably because clinical immortality is theoretically plausible. A biological organism is just a state machine; as long as there's an energy input, the system can be arranged so that it does not decay under normal conditions.

Now the main problem is that evolution has constructed us to senesce and die (so as to allow new genetic combinations to flourish); so re-engineering ourselves so that this no longer happens, while difficult, is possible, and if the human race survives long enough, we'll figure out how to do it. So in science fiction, it shows up.

But not in fantasy, because that's technology that isn't even comprehensible in the relatively primitive medieval societies depicted in fantasy. Immortality in fantasy, for all practical purposes, has to come from magic. Anyone who manages to make themselves immortal is usually considered evil by virtue of the fact that in those fantasy realms, only gods are supposed to be immortal, and a mortal pretending to be a god is the height of hubris and must (thematically) be punished.

Science fiction is about examining the effect that technologies have on people, which means that immortal entities are entirely allowed (see Greg Egan's Diaspora for an examination of a society where almost everyone is an immortal AI and they live for eons inside simulations).