Sorry, I was having a bad day and decided stupidly to take it out passive aggressively on the Internet - never a good idea. Your questions have actually raised a lot of interesting questions in my mind. If I do continue this to more than one book I'm going to have to come up with a clearer idea of the magical system because I've just realised that there's a secondary character in book two or three who is in fact a magic user, although I'm not sure how much formal training he's had at this point. I think he wants to go to the university but hasn't got the funds or the sponsors. Mainly because he's crazy.
The reason I raised the magic vs tech debate was because, although it is only backdrop, the political backdrop and the general feel are important in the novel, and one of my characters is magical just not in a human way (she's half undine) and there's going to be some prejudice there because the ordinary people don't get the difference between magic user and magical creature so much, or if they do it's to claim that she's not human at all. All magic is bad to some of them, and to others magic has a sort of quasi religious feel to it. That's partly because it's so far removed from them and people have a tendency to deify or demonise things that they don't understand or they don't see that often.
↧