#syphon continuity

Swimming against the current and swept together by circumstance, these six strange bedfellows have everything to lose. 

(Sorry, Cam, you have some stereotypical MC vibes but you're more of an inciting incident.)

Swimming against the current and swept together by circumstance, these six strange bedfellows have everything to lose. 

(Give the people what they want!)

Swimming against the current and swept together by circumstance, these six strange bedfellows have everything to lose.

(But does one of them count as a main character?)

Swimming against the current and swept together by circumstance, these six strange bedfellows have everything to lose. 

(Luckily, we all know that being a main character means that you never do anything wrong.)

First, to set the scene, much (though obviously not all) of the writing for contemporary fantasy is urban fantasy/paranormal romance. In those stories, there is an allure to having something be hidden and powerful. Much of the enjoyment of reading them comes from a character finding themselves drawn into a secretive space and discovering the world. Another common genre for contemporary fantasy is magical realism, where the magical and factual blend in ways where it may not be clear what is description and what is metaphor. The lines become blurred in a way that allows for ambiguity.

These descriptions don't do full justice to either subgenre, and exclude many others like portal fiction. But they give us a little bit of a basis for identifying what we wanted to do that was not within those definitions. Specifically, we wanted to write about magic in a grounded way, where it's as a visible public good, something that capitalist entities had chewed up and swallowed, and how people live with these changes.

In creating the Syphon Continuity, we wanted to explore and interrogate questions about what magic is, why is something considered magic and not just another science, and how does the existence of magic in a modern world might fit within existing systems of power. How it might become a structure itself and enable/disable the agency of the characters?

Today, in our actual world, we have devices in our pockets made of stars that allow us to access much of human knowledge in seconds, to create amazing art, to share our lives with people across the globe. And yet, because it's our every day, it becomes mundane. So what is the line between magic and technology other than how many people have access to it? How it's framed in the sales pitch?

Doing this required that we be careful about when magic started to exist — insert it back too far and you'd end up with a very different set of countries and economic systems. Have it be too recent and it wouldn't be widespread enough to become common.

But now that magic exists, and it's on a product lifecycle offering updates to all your devices every year, so many questions become possible. Who has access to it? Who can afford it? Are there some people who are better at magic than others? Why is that? Can that access be changed? Who could make that change? Who might not want it to change? Why?

Also, our magic is a form of both literal power and the another type of capital (in the sense of financial, social, and cultural), giving people that increased agency in the world. They can do things that people who don't have it can't do. So, who is controlling that? Who creates these products? How is magic measured? And how does that measurement shape access? Shape the meaning of what magic is?

And then lastly, who are the people that we can include to explore this? Much of our story is told through the viewpoints of people experimenting with magic, and trying to create a new version that's more open. But some of the story is also told from the perspective of people where it doesn't seem all that important, or they don't have access to much of it, making it possible to see the contrast of the world within and the world without.

Swimming against the current and swept together by circumstance, these six strange bedfellows have everything to lose. 

(Because success beats being a main character any day.)