Authors Note on Science in Mage Errant

These notes will be included at the end of The Gorgon Incident and Other Stories anthology, out in late February, so I'll have to take them down at the end of January. At the end of this list will be notes for Murder in Ras Andis and Gram of Clan Castis, which were included at the end of Mage Errant books 4&6 respectively.

------------------------------------------------------------

Many of the stories in this book— as well as much of the magic and setting in the Mage Errant series proper— were inspired by real science. I’ve used magic as an excuse to play a little loose with some of the science, but I’ve tried not to stray too far. The following are a few notes and comments on the various scientific inspirations for some of the stories in this collection.

Tsarnassan Silk: 

Spider silk does, in fact, come in a wide variety of types. Spiders aren’t immune to the stickiness of their own webs— they instead navigate them via remembering where the non-sticky structural webbing is. 

Agroforestry— farming tree crops— has a comparable or even much higher yield than ground crops. It’s also much better for the soil and environment, is carbon negative, and you can often still grow shade-loving ground crops around the bases of the trees, increasing yields even further. Why don’t we do it more? Partly political resistance to change, partly the fact that agroforestry is resistant to mechanization and requires more human labor.

Spider-parachuting is a real phenomenon, and spiders can travel hundreds or thousands of kilometers through the air this way, often in great clouds. There are videos of farms completely covered in descending spider parachutes. It’s also known as ballooning. 

The Wanderer:

Yellowstone is, in fact, any one of a number of uranium minerals, which tend to be quite brightly yellow. Uranium mages on Anastis have not, however, figured out how to use their magic to set off a nuclear explosion yet, nor are they liable to. There’s a complete lack of the scientific knowledge necessary to do so, even with magic hurdling some of the technical challenges. Absolutely not going to happen, even by accident. (A uranium mage isn’t going to randomly enrich uranium for no particular reason, for instance, nor would they know of any reason that they’d need to do the process, nor even how to go about it. Plus, the fact that they all die super young from radiation poisoning is a huge deterrent.)

Test of Magic:

Brimstone is sulfur.

Amiant is an old name for asbestos, a silicate mineral which, though it has countless industrial and construction uses as insulation and more, is incredibly toxic and harmful to human health. Despite being banned in many countries, tens of thousands of people die of asbestos-related health complications every year.

The mapmaker snail mentioned in the story is a reference to the fish-eating geographer snail on earth, which does, in fact, kill within a few hours of stinging someone— which thankfully happens rarely, and only in self-defense.

Old Setah and the River:

Rivers switching course is a common occurrence on Earth. Rivers never hold still— they writhe and twist in their beds like snakes, carving the earth as they go. Rivers in depositional zones, like the Saldist in the story, flow over countless fossil riverbeds, ones that modern geologists have learned to peer down to see through the soil with various scanning technologies, giving them a glimpse of the history of rivers. (In erosional settings, like canyons, water plays by different rules— but its power over the land is even more obvious there.) 

The Mississippi River, down in Louisiana, has been straining to jump its banks and flow down the Atchafalaya River instead for more than a half-century now, and only the waterworks of the Army Corps of Engineers stand in its way. Water is patient and relentless, and someday the Mississippi will get its way. When it does, it’s going to be a lot messier than the Saldist’s shift. The most important industrial zone in America will lose much of the waterway essential to its shipping, New Orleans’ sinking into the Gulf of Mexico will accelerate even faster without the Mississippi sediment to renew the delta, and numerous towns along the Atchafalaya will be drowned. And then, someday, long after, the Mississippi is going to jump its banks again. Maybe it will go back the way it goes now, maybe it will go another way entirely. Water always gets its way in the end. 

Counterfeit:

Having a blind mind’s eye is a real condition— it’s known as aphantasia, and about one in fifty people on Earth have it. Ask them to envision a beach or a car, and they’ll be literally unable to. While aphantasia prevents you from becoming a mage on Anastis, it doesn’t particularly hold people back on Earth— people with aphantasia work in jobs as disparate as engineers to scientists to screenwriters for television to even an artist for Disney. It’s pretty crazy stuff, though, and well worth researching if you’ve never encountered it before.

The Lich Days of Summer:

Mangroves, like coconut trees, depend on the sea to spread their offspring. Most mangrove saplings (or propagules) are are germinated on the tree, then end up rooting near their parents. Some, however, can travel for years, rooting thousands of miles away from their parent tree. 

Fool’s Silver: 

What Ephesia refers to as fool’s silver is the element we know as gallium— it’s a really weird, fascinating material, and you can find all sorts of fun videos of people doing tricks with it online.

The Third Known Death of Ephesia of Skoura: 

Fort Garnet is built out of a lighter-colored garnet gneiss. Look up pictures of garnet gneiss, it’s a really beautiful stone.

Gallium expands by about 3.1% when it freezes. (Which happens at 85.58°F/29.76 °C.) The degree of expansion in the story is considerably amplified by magic, however. Elements and compounds that expand when frozen are very rare. One of the few others known is water. Without that unusual property of water, life on Earth as we know it couldn’t exist.

Dead Alchemists:

Eutectic solutions are very much real, though the keratin eutectic in the story is entirely fictional. I also played a little loose with the appropriate grammatical usage of eutectic, for the sake of the prose— a eutectic solution normally only refers to the final mixture that has the lower melting point, not its individual ingredients. 

To Secure a Vault:

Natron was immensely prized by the ancient Egyptians for dozens of different uses— most notably preserving mummies, and for the production of the pigment Egyptian Blue. Natron is less used today, but it does still have one incredibly important use— it’s a key ingredient of pretzels and gives them their distinctive taste and brown color.

Quicksilver is just mercury, and it works essentially as described in the story. (Mercury poisoning is even worse than I described, though.)

Gold mining is one of the most horrific environmental disasters on Earth. It’s such a toxic process. The glass method, however, is quite real, and was used widely in medieval Africa. (Medieval Africa was a far more advanced and fascinating place than most people are taught in school— it was, in fact, more important in many ways than Europe in global politics at the time. Medieval Europe was very much a global backwater between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the start of the Age of Sail.)

The method of purifying gold with lightning mages is basically electrowinning, another real method of gold purification.

The white, powdery crystalline alchemical eutectic is borax.

Royal solvent is a real liquid— it’s a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids that chemists on earth refer to as aqua regia, or royal water. I didn’t want to just randomly stick obvious, non-loan word Latin into the story, though, hence calling it royal solvent. (Same thing with calling gallium fool’s silver or mercury quicksilver— though quicksilver is, in fact, an older Earthly name for mercury.) There is, of course, still plenty of anachronistic vocabulary in Mage Errant- I only avoided some of the most egregious examples, to my own personal taste. I should also note that aqua regia isn’t as difficult to produce as the story makes it seem— that was dramatic license on my part.

Anastis has a LOT more gold than Earth does— all the gold ever mined on Earth would only fill a couple of Olympic swimming pools, if that. This is partially due to Anastis’ geology; and partly due to the fact that a lot of gold has been brought to Anastis from other worlds by the Radhan, many of Anastis’ early settlers from other worlds, the [redacted], and others.

The Castle Thief:

Mother-of-pearl, or nacre, is one of the strongest biological materials— at least compressionally. Only limpet teeth are known to be stronger.

The Battle of Lothal:

Octopus arms do, in fact, possibly have minds of their own— two thirds of their neural tissue is in their arms, not their body. It's unknown how this affects the way they understand the world, but it definitely aids them in coordinating eight whole limbs. As an interesting side note, octopus brains are toroidal— donut shaped— and wrapped around their esophagus, with the neural tissue of the arms branching off. It's fascinating to speculate how this bizarre brain shape could affect the way octopuses think— but it seems to work well for them, given how famed octopuses are for their intelligence. The shape of their brains also means that octopuses have to be quite careful of what they eat— if they swallow something too large, it could potentially cause brain damage when it passes through their brain donut. 

Octopus skin also can seem to "see" to some extent— it contains many of the light-sensitive pigments in their eyes. My depiction of this in the story is just as speculative on my part as my depiction of what the mind of a gargantuan octopus might be like. Quite frankly, I believe I've massively undersold how alien both Ampioc's skin sight and his mind are likely to be for us— this was a definite case of the demands of the story reining in the wildness of my speculation. 

Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or POF, the disease Fort Marrow has, is a real, and absolutely tragic, disease in our own world. Unfortunately, it doesn't have effective treatments like those that exist in Mage Errant. The disease heavily inspired bone mages in Mage Errant, like the Sacred Swordsman bone mage in book 4.

Lost Qokeen:

The immense size of Anastis’ moon, and the planet’s resulting giant tides, as well as its monstrous storms, are what ultimately doom most of the floating cities in the story. I would have loved to have proper floating cities in Mage Errant— indeed, I originally planned on it— but I quickly realized my worldbuilding made that implausible. Still, inventing failed floating cities was just as fun as inventing successful ones!

The process used to make the narrator’s “own” Qokeen— the one grown out of limestone at sea— is very much real. Conducting electric currents into metal rods at sea can cause limestone to precipitate onto them. Architect Wolf Hilbertz invented the process, calling the product “biorock.” Before his death in 2007, he planned a city off the coast of Portugal on the Ampere seamount, called Autopia Ampere, made almost identically to the version of Qokeen in the story— albeit with technology rather than magic. (He later moved the planned spot to the Saya de Malha banks in the Indian Ocean, the largest submerged ocean bank in the world. Autopia Saya doesn’t sound quite as cool as Autopia Ampere, in my opinion, though.) It would have been an autonomous nation relying on tourism, fishing, sea farming, and, via the same means as its construction, limestone exportation.

It should be noted, if it wasn’t apparent from the story, that while I’m absolutely fascinated with the seasteading movement and dreams of oceanic cities, I’m rather skeptical about their feasibility and moral worth, ultimately. The majority of attempts have been deeply silly libertarian pipe dreams undertaken with an overabundance of enthusiasm and a deep drought of research and preparation. I… really wish this wasn’t the case, because it’s often a majestic dream. Still, on an artistic level, oceanic cities are often quite wonderful. I highly recommend searching for “Autopia Ampere” online and checking out some of the concept art.

------------------------------------------------------------

Murder in Ras Andis: 

The welded ash-stone of Ras Andis’ cliffs is known as tuff on our world, which I refused to name it on Anastis, because it’s a bit too silly to sound real. A layer of tuff that thick might be slightly alarming to any geologists out there, and say something important about the world of Anastis and its geological past.

Gram of Clan Castis: 

What Gram refers to as a combustion affinity is, in fact, an oxidation reaction affinity that includes the oxidation reactions that occur in the body when you breathe, as well as the oxidation reactions of fire. The people of Anastis haven’t yet discovered oxygen as an individual element yet, however. (It was only discovered on Earth in the early 1770s, with independent discoveries by the Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele and the British clergyman Joseph Priestly. French chemist Antoine Lavosier built on their work, discovering oxygen’s role in combustion after that.) If the people of Anastis had technology like ours, they’d discover a lot more variability between individual affinities than they think is there— individual oxidation affinities, for instance, include a different range of reactions from person to person. Gram’s for instance, wouldn’t be much use in picking up many of the oxidation reactions in some types of mineral formation— not that he spends a lot of time thinking about rocks, anyways.