The world that Card creates for Alvin Maker is recognizably our own world, but radically altered. ( Seventh Son was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1988, but did not win Card had won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1986 for Ender’s Game, and in 1987 for its sequel, Speaker for the Dead.) So far, Card has published six books in the “Alvin Maker” series The Crystal City was published in 2003 and the final book, to be titled Master Alvin, should be published soon. I will begin with the alternate America imagined by Orson Scott Card in Seventh Son, the first novel in his “Alvin Maker” series. In this series of articles, I will examine the rules for magic in a variety of fantasy and science fiction novels, what you might call “the ecology of magic” which these modern storytellers create for their imagined worlds.

Precisely because magic exceeds the normal limits of human ability, there must be limits on magic itself, if you want to have a good story to tell. There wouldn’t be much of a story if the hero could achieve his goal simply by saying the magic word, or perhaps just by wiggling her nose, like Samantha in Bewitched. These magical powers, however, have to be limited. Harry Potter gets his wand, Aladdin finds the genie in the lamp, the Little Mermaid buys her magic powers from the Sea Witch, and so on. There are endless variations of Vladimir Propp’s “donor sequence,” when a hero is tested or questioned and then receives a magical agent or object in return. Heroes may be born with magical powers, or they may acquire them as part of their quest. Magic is everywhere in myths and legends.

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