(no subject)

[james_davis_nicoll]

In Geoffrey Landis short story "Elemental", the University of Waterloo a centre thaumaturgical R&D. I am wondering how exactly magical R&D would fit into UW's faculty structure.

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

This began as "DnD characters, all of whom work at the same University in one capacity or another." Which in turn began with the line "Fool! Mortal weapons cannot touch me! I have tenure!"

[brooksmoses]

Okay, that is a good line.

[(Anonymous)]

Reminded me of an old comic - mad scientst with another scientist strapped to a tbel under some menacing device: "Mad? Me, Mad? Hahahahah! Why yes, I'm Mad! But I have tenure!"
8-)

Riderius

[rezendi]

It'd probably be Yet Another Engineering Subdiscipline.

[brooksmoses]

Yeah, if it's an R&D center, probably Faculty of Engineering. If it were just research it could probably go under the Faculty of Science somewhere or possibly Faculty of Environment for certain flavors of magic, and if it were just development there are flavors where putting it under the Faculty of Arts would be entertainingly appropriate. Laundry-flavored magic would go under the Faculty of Mathematics, of course. That just leaves out the Faculty of Health from UW's six Faculties, which makes for yet other potentially-interesting flavors of magic.

Actually, that's perhaps a useful strategy for creating a less-typical magical system: Take a copy of the UW academic directory, throw a dart at it, and create a magical system that should clearly go in that part of the structure.

Also, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Waterloo#Twentieth_century, I note that UW started off with complicated academic politics about its faculty structure, even more so than most universities.

[scott_sanford]

The complicated academic politics point suggests that there will be thaumaturgy studied somewhere unexpected, because that's where people finally exhausted themselves screaming at each other. ("To understand why transfiguration is Environmental, it's helpful to start in 1954...") Also, that different types of magic will be placed in different departments - putting healing magic under Health is too obvious; other things lend themselves to organizational bickering.

[austin_dern]

Department of Ceramics. Funny story, you'd never see it coming.

[ffutures]

Many years ago (well before the Laundry books) I tried to write a modern Call of Cthulhu adventure in which someone was using the computer science labs at Imperial College London for Cabalistic magic, with e.g. an industrial robot used to draw various ritual patterns on the lab floor. Unfortunately I didn't have a strong plot to go with the idea, and in the end I gave up on it. Which was a shame because golems are a lot of fun...

[bunsen_h]

Many years ago, I was toying with the idea of creating a D&D module based in a far-future Carleton University that had been buried so that only the top of the Arts Tower (now the Dunton Tower) was exposed. The entire campus would be accessible via the existing underground tunnel system. The various departments would have magical analogues of their current forms, and there would still be zombie profs lurching around.

[(Anonymous)]

"...there would still be zombie profs lurching around."

How do you tell which are which?

-Awesome Aud

[kedamono]

I remember this story, which I thought the premise was "what if magic is just another force of nature that can be studied like a science?" One scene in particular that stood out to me was the man using a "shield against snow" that vaporized it into steam. Then he walked under a low hanging, snow covered pine tree branch...

[ba_munronoe]

I think I vaguely recall that. Wasn't there a subplot about a volcanic eruption brought on by the side effects of farming-related magic?

[jbwoodford]

That was the main plot, IIRC. The fertility magic worked by rousing the earth elemental under Vesuvius, or something like that, and two of the three protagonists had to settle it down before the volcano erupted and wiped out the nearby spaceport. (The third protagonist had to go to the other side of the world to keep the backlash from causing a tsunami in the South Pacific.)

[ba_munronoe]

As I said, I don't remember it all that well (the tsunami entirely slipped my mind)

[scott_sanford]

I worked out the technical construction, but have not yet worked into a fantasy RPG adventure, for a fertility magic industrial disaster event. GURPS has the spell Create Earth, which is what it says on the tin, and plausibly minor tweaking might let a wizard perfect Create Manure.

Flash forward a few centuries, where farmland miles downhill from the Great Fertilizer is productive and pleasant, but nobody goes up to the site itself on account of the thing having been running nonstop for hundreds of years...

[dwight_benjamin_thieme]

"To Build a Fire". Good times.

[(Anonymous)]

"the University of Waterloo a centre thaumaturgical R&D."

That could be why the Dana Porter Library is sinking!

-Awesome Aud

PS Is the story available to read anywhere?

[james_davis_nicoll]

The collection Impact Parameter and Other Quantum Realities contains it.