If you’re an author of any kind of speculative fiction, you’ve probably heard of Sanderson’s Laws of Magic. These are three cardinal rules for developing magic systems in fantasy stories, developed by the author Brandon Sanderson (on his website, he very humbly says that these are just guidelines you should feel free to break if it’s right, and while I agree with the principle of that, I would like to state for the record that I think the man is right, and if anything to deserves to be called a law of writing, it’s this). If you hang out in any online spaces devoted to writers or writing craft, you’ve probably heard a lot about them in the context of fantasy. But something I don’t hear talked about a lot is the fact that they can be applied just as easily to science fiction. Today I want to talk about how I use Sanderson’s Laws to develop the technology in my sci-fi novels, and if you’re a sci-fi writer, what Sanderson’s Laws can do for you.
What are Sanderson’s Laws?
Sanderson’s Laws, as stated by Sanderson himself, are:
- Your ability to solve problems in the narrative using magic is directly proportional to how well your readers understand the magic system.
- Limitations are more important than powers.
- Expand on what you already have before adding something new.
To give you an example of how these apply in a fantasy setting, let’s look at the Throne of Glass series by Sarah J. Maas. I picked this example because I love that series and I could yap about it all day, but also because it’s a good example of a magic system that often comes out of the woodwork to solve profoundly unsolvable problems in bombastic fashion, somehow without seeming contrived (one of the hardest things to pull off in the world of writing magic systems). I’ll keep the spoilers as light as I possibly can for those who haven’t had the pleasure of being emotionally traumatized by this series yet.
First thing’s first: reader understanding. Throne of Glass does this really well, building up your understanding of how magic works gradually throughout the first few books, long before magic actually comes into play. We learn about magic largely through the characters as they learn about it, which is a good way to avoid an infodump because it presents immediately relevant information in context, making it both memorable and demonstrating the point of it at the same time. We also see the characters mess up with their magic a lot, giving us valuable information about the costs and limitations of magic.
The key is that all of this happens long before magic ever becomes relevant to solving problems in the plot. In fact, in the early books in the series, magic isn’t even possible – it’s just a thing some of the characters remember from times gone by. The number of battles fought and won with magic increases gradually over the course of the series, proportionally to the amount we know about how magic works. If you’ve read this series, think about what it would be like to try to explain the magical hijinks in the last few hundred pages of book 8 to someone who’s only read book 1. You’d sound like a lunatic, and the things that happen would sound deeply contrived, because your audience hasn’t yet been on the journey of slowly learning about the magic system before it becomes relevant. (Your hysterical sobbing also wouldn’t help, but that’s not the magic system’s fault.)
And notice specifically what it is that we learn. We don’t get a ton of demonstrations of what magic can do – that’s pretty easy to infer. What we learn about the most are the costs. The moments of us coming to understand how the magic system works are really just a series of “oh, by the way, you shouldn’t do X” moments. You shouldn’t use too much all at once, or you’ll burn out. You need to gather your strength before doing a big magical thing, or you won’t have the juice. You should read the fine print before you make magical bargains with the gods that gave you your powers, or your love life might get messy as hell.
Critically, all of these limitations are tied into the plot in important, tangible ways. Magic causes a lot more problems than it solves in this series, to the point that the main character fears her own powers for a long time, and often wishes she didn’t have to deal with any of this at all – and who can blame her? It’s counterintuitive when we think about the attraction of the fantasy genre as a reader – the wish-fulfillment, the escapism, the boundless potential of a world where you can snap your fingers and conjure a cheesecake from thin air – but your magic system will be a lot more interesting if it’s kind of a giant inconvenience. It’s fun to watch our main character burn armies to a crisp, but it’s more fun to watch her mishandle her abilities to the point that her love interest has to dump her into an ice bath, or the part where an exhausted, burned-out shapeshifter accidentally walks into an important war meeting as a horse.
Finally, the magic system is pretty self-contained, and when it does expand, it expands inward. We know by the midpoint of the series that several characters have elemental powers (fire, ice, etc.). When we meet a new character who has air-related abilities, it’s an interesting addition that fits in with what we already know. If he had, say, telekinesis, that would be neat but much harder to explain within the bounds of what we already know, and it wouldn’t feel as though it fits in with the rest of the world.
Another example of this is the way the magic-wielding characters in Throne of Glass are often tied somehow to the gods. This allows new, seemingly random and very convenient-sounding abilities – for example, supercharged healing powers – to fit neatly into a framework we already understand. She’s blessed by Silba; don’t ask questions. And you don’t need to – you probably don’t have any. The legwork of understanding why and how her magic works was already done by other characters earlier in the story, making this expansion feel like a natural progression, rather than something tacked on for narrative convenience.
This is all pretty cool, if you ask me. But now let’s see how it works in sci-fi. From the top, with robots this time!
Sanderson’s Laws: Sci-Fi Edition
Here’s how I would rewrite the original laws in a sci-fi context:
- Your ability to explain things that happen using technology is directly proportional to how well your readers understand how that technology works.
- The limitations of your technology or gaps in what is known or understood by science are more important than what science can explain or what your technology does when it’s working correctly.
- Ask what else your technology might be able to do before you add something new, and explore the implications of the science principles you’ve established before you invent a separate mechanic.
Hopefully this is all pretty straightforward, but in case it’s not, let’s go through it with another example, this one from my own writing, to give you a better look behind the curtain. One of my projects, a dystopian sci-fi romance, features a malevolent AI that evil forces are attempting to use to control the main characters’ lives. Again, without too many spoilers (and you must promise to forget absolutely all of what I’m about to tell you before the book comes out), here’s how I used Sanderson’s Laws to make this technology fit realistically and usefully into the story in (I hope) an interesting way.
My first job is to make you understand how the AI works. This I must do without infodumping, meaningless technobabble, or instructing the reader to put the book down and go take an Introduction to Machine Learning course, and I must do it in a way that keeps the information relevant to the story. The key, as we saw with Throne of Glass, is to do it slowly. To that end, the entirety of the first book in this four-book series is devoted to the characters 1) realizing they are being controlled by an AI, 2) struggling to figure out how it works and why it’s there, and 3) using that knowledge to subvert and escape it for the first time. The characters go into this story knowing absolutely nothing about this technology. They don’t even know it’s there. You, the reader, learn about it alongside the characters, providing a slow and practical immersion into the world of the story. All the things that help the main characters escape in the end are principles you see in action in the early part of the story, when they’re still bumbling around trying to figure out what’s going on.
And specifically, those things are mostly limitations. The AI isn’t actually all that intelligent in the human sense of the word. It provides feedback and information to human operators based on a set of data that was provided to it, and there are a series of assumptions it has to make in order to interpret that data. This provides a convenient set of limitations on how and where the system can be installed and used, and even when it’s used properly, there are certain types of information it simply can’t comprehend.
Every one of these loopholes exists because of a specific type of problem I needed the characters to be able to solve to move the plot forward, and I spent a lot of time thinking about what those problems were going to be before I started writing, then worked backward to create a piece of technology that would contain the necessary loopholes.
In this case, there’s an interesting paradox in that because the AI is an antagonist, the limitations it has are actually good things for the characters, and the limitations imposed on the characters are the things the technology can do. This comes up a lot in sci-fi, particularly that of the dystopian flavor, when your characters are pitted against supercharged, futuristic, all-powerful technology or creatures. This is in contrast to fantasy, where magic is almost always framed as a cool thing the characters get to do, and considering the burdens of it requires you to set aside your inner child’s hope that your Hogwarts letter is just lost in the mail. So when you’re writing sci-fi, you sometimes need to reverse your understanding. Think about the limitations you’re imposing on the technology, yes, but also consider the limitations the technology imposes on your characters, and give equal weight to both.
Finally, we come to the third rule, and it’s the one I think most sci-fi authors struggle with the most. Particularly when you’re writing in a futuristic setting, there is a temptation to bombard the reader with all the incredible, cool stuff we’re going to have or be able to do decades or centuries down the line. But the most successful sci-fi worldbuilding usually traces back to a single innovation or development. This is how it works in real life, too, actually. Think of all the fanciest pieces of technology in your world today, and how they all trace their roots back to the humble microchip, or the advent of the internet: a single technological innovation that branches in a million directions to create a body of innovation far more cohesive than it may seem at first glance.
Throughout the course of my sci-fi series, we get to see our old friend the AI used in a wide variety of different contexts. The principle I relied on here is that the end user will try to use your invention for just about anything other than the thing you intended it for: a widely-held fascination and pet peeve of many engineers. In book one, the AI is being used to enslave a group of people and get them to perform a certain task, but in later books, we also see it being used to sabotage an attacking army, generally oppress the civilian population, manipulate the stock market, and more. When new pieces of technology are introduced, they are usually previously unknown or new-and-improved components of that original system, like microchips embedded in the brain that allow the AI to interface directly with the people it’s controlling. Most of these also have their own naturally-branching tree of creative uses that all stem from the same one or two major innovations, with the hope that no component of the technological world of this series feels out of place or too convenient.
Prompts to get you started
I want to end with a couple of questions you can ask yourself as you’re designing your technological system – prompts to get you thinking about how to use each of the three laws to enrich your worldbuilding and make it more cohesive.
- At what point does the POV character learn or deduce how the technology works? (If at all possible, make it the same point where the reader learns, and have them figure out as much as you can through trial and error rather than directly being told – it’s more fun to read about!)
- What did the people who designed this technology never expect a user to do with it or need from it? (Exploring this can lead you naturally to a lot of things that satisfy both the second and third laws.)
- What kind of morality does the person currently in possession of this technology have, and what might someone with the opposite morality do with it instead? Where might they struggle? What features would they never, ever touch?
- What is the most basic component of this technology, and what else could a person do with it? Also spend some time thinking about the limitations of that specific component, separate from the limitations of the system as a whole.
- What kinds of supporting technology, if any, does the main tech thing in your world require? (For example, maybe it needs huge batteries, or runs on a specific type of fuel that’s difficult to mine for, or requires a specialized kind of transport or installation, or has insane cooling requirements that mean you have to bury it on an ice planet in order for it to work at all, etc. etc. etc). How else might those things be used?
Sanderson’s Laws are one of my favorite writing principles, and hopefully this gives you a good understanding of how to use them in a context you may not have thought of, and an idea of where to start with using them.
Happy writing!