The Real Cost of a Magical Education: BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS IN NAOMI NOVIK'S SCHOLOMANCE NOVELS.
Author | Skwire, Sarah |
NAOMI NOVIK BEGAN her series of fantasy bildungsromans, in part, because she found Harry Potter extremely irritating. What annoyed her more than anything was the lack of economic thinking that went into J.K. Rowling's world building. "The world, when you start poking at it, doesn't work," she explained in a September 2021 interview with Polygon. "Magic doesn't cost anything, right? So why are the Weasleys poor? Half of them are adults, fully grown certified wizards, all of them apparently quite talented and smart. If magic doesn't cost anything except the time it takes to learn it and cast it, then the more wizards you have, the richer you are, right? Wizards should be trying to have all the kids they could possibly have."
One doesn't want to sound like a Death Eater, but the harder one looks, the more one suspects that the world of Harry Potter doesn't hang together. Why don't the Weasleys just magic up some new robes for Ron? Why do hand-me-downs exist in a wizarding world? Why haven't the Weasleys, and other wizarding families like them, led a revolution? And why in the name of Dumbledore would anyone who can do magic send their equally magical child off to a school where children are regularly turned to stone, set upon by Dementors, and even killed?
"There has to be some sort of terrible reason," Novik posited to Polygon. "It can't just be that you want to be powerful, because wanting power is a selfish goal, and you don't risk death to be selfish. Nobody says 'I'm going to jump off this cliff to make myself more powerful!' So what does drive you to a school like this?...I decided, for my story, the only possible answer was that the alternative was worse."
For many readers, Novik's revisioning of the "magical school" genre of young adult fiction and her thoroughgoing exploration of the idea of scarcity in a magical universe will be enough of a pleasure. And it is, indeed, a great pleasure. But the series offers more when viewed as an extended meditation on two even bigger questions: What is the right relationship between altruism and self-interest? And how should children be educated?
A STUDY IN SCARCITY
NOVIK'S ECONOMIC PREOCCUPATIONS were already evident in earlier works. Her 2018 novel Spinning Silver (Del Rey) explored the themes of Rumpelstiltskin in a story set among a family of moneylenders in an Eastern European fantasy world, while the dragons of her Temeraire series have a monetary system and complex economic interests. So her commitment to creating a magic system that has costs, not just benefits, is unsurprising.
What is surprising is how much a school-based fantasy world changes when forced to face scarce resources and tangle with Thomas Sowell's observation that "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs."
A Deadly Education, the first of the two Scholomance novels published by Del Rey so far, is a study in scarcity. It introduces readers to a school called the "Scholomance," created in the 1800s to protect the children of wizards. Because wizard children are magical novices whose power grows faster than their skills, they are an irresistible food and power source for vicious magical creatures called Maleficaria, or "Mais." How irresistible are they? Before the creation of the Scholomance, children who weren't protected by...
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