A Hot Take on Ra
If you want to stand in the kitchen, you have to feel the heat. You want the ball to go up? It has to come down. Want the premise? Get the conclusion
And if you ask magic questions, you get magic answers.
Have you ever played that game, where you get two random, ostensibly unrelated things, and you have to start at the wikipedia page of one and make your way to the other? It seems like a fun challenge, it might even seem difficult or impossible at first. But play it for a few rounds, and you discover that’s actually boring. Almost trivial. The algorithm is easy: go up. You can get anywhere from a high enough level of abstraction. Want to get to a small town in Nebraska from a page on an obscure mathematical theorem? Find a mathematician’s name, from that name a location, from that location, a country, then united states, then state of Nebraska, then… It’s six degrees of separation. Hubs connect everything to everything else. Through the right hubs, any page is a small integer number of clicks from any other.
And through a small set of key assumptions, any setting can be extrapolated.
Enter Ra, an kind of urban science fantasy with an emphasis third act twist. Spoilers follow.
Ra is a critique of itself. Ra is a proof of its rationality, a justification of its setting, that doubles as a argumentum ad absurdum that it could never have been otherwise.
When you have an idea, there’s two directions you can go, to systemically explore it, the way a good ratfic would do. “Why this? and”what’s next?” When I hear critique of Ra, I think it’s because it takes the first route instead of the second. A rationalist hears “people can do magic with meditation, recitation, and geometrical circles”. Goofus asks, ‘Wait, how is that possible? What physics effect could give rise to that?’, Gallant asks ‘Sick. How’s this going to revolutionize industry? Tell us about magic engineers, tell us about a world where magic is the next electricity’. Gallant enjoys the idea for what it is, Goofus dissects the frog.
The problem is, Goofuses will exists in the setting. There are people who are going to wonder how magic possibly rationally exist, and be undiscovered until the 70s and be undertapped (untappable!) by any other organism. These are things that are baked into the premise, and if you are seriously examining the premise, you have to pick one: 1) you get into why magic is possible, 2) you dont.
Ra, of course, picks the first. You can contrast this with another ratfic darling, HPMoR, which, when musing on reason for magic, raises the exact idea of something like Ra’s explanation is what undergirds it. HPMoR has something Ra doesnt, though — a pre-existing setting, a plot that’s more important. It doesn’t make sense that HJPEV could figure out the fundamentals as a first year, and the story doesn’t need him too. And more, it tracks that no one’s figured it, the wizarding world characterized as irrational, unscientific.
In contrast, Ra. Magic exists in our world, and we’re very capable of scientific investigation. People are going to try to figure out what’s going to happen, and you’re going to have to figure out what happens in those investigation. Either they’re going to figure out what’s up, or they aren’t. And if they don’t, it’s going to increasingly feel like the universe itself is conspiring to prevent itself from being understood — and that’s going to feel like, at your core, the world doesn’t make that much sense. And it doesn’t.
Or, they do. And if they do, then show me a rational take on Ra magic that convincingly comes back with any other answer.
(To me, the idea of a version of Ra that refuses to delve into this the way HPMoR did is about as disappointing as I think the version of Ra that exists is to those who dislike it. Potterverse already exists, already’s been explored to death. Raverse only exists in Ra. Not even thinking about why there’s magic feels like a wasted opportunity, an inquiry obvious for any story of the sort.)
So when Ra uncovers that its magic system was all a lie, and that it always was clarketech AI and humans with godlike power, I’m like of course, what else could have been? Where else could the buck have stopped?
I think about this particular response, which perfectly reflects my read of Ra.
“Adam King lost his mind in the War,” she says. “As did all of you who fell in with him. You could have built an entirely new world, or left the planet uninhabitable as it was, as an honest memorial. Even oblivion would have been preferable. But after such unimaginable chaos, you were desperate for a world where there would be a manageable order. You turned the Earth into a facsimile of a working planet. A romance.
“We found ‘magic’ to be absurd. We found the ‘Earth’ you were building to be an obscenity. We left the world rather than stay and be complicit in your madness. Instead, we came to Sirius, terraformed its fifth planet and started a new culture. A real one. Any of you could have come with us if you’d chosen to.”
We found ‘magic’ to be absurd.
A complex system like Ra’s magic must have been created by something that, in effect, amounts to a intelligent, hyperpotent god. If you allow the chain of reasoning, it’s all but inescapable that when your setting has magic like this, there’s something better they could be doing with those resources.