With your longer-running series (Recluce,... â€� L.E. Modesitt Jr. Q&A

Ben Cohen asked L.E. Modesitt Jr.:

With your longer-running series (Recluce, etc), how do you deal with needing to "evolve" the magic systems - compared with the earlier books? Clearly, later (prequel) books wind up with the various magic-users figuring out more and more interesting ways of doing what they do, but those skills then need to be "forgotten"? in the later (chronological) books.

L.E. Modesitt Jr. It's not necessarily the need to "evolve" the magic systems; it's the fact that as various countries fall, the skills needed to learn and develop magic are lost. Westwind lasts 500 years, every year precarious because of the bitter winters and the social structure, and in the end Creslin is the only true mage left, and he learns most of what he can do elsewhere because the marshals, including his mother, are skeptical of magery, especially by males.

The empire of Cyador falls to a greater power [or combination of powers] after roughly 700 years, but its greatest years are a century or so after its beginning and in the time of Lorn and shortly thereafter, when magery and technology work largely together. Its fall is at least partly caused by the failure to understand the limits of magery.

Fairhaven lasts almost a thousand years as a power, until it's brought down by a fusion of technology and magery, Recluce is still a functioning, if damaged, power at the end of The Death of Chaos, 900 years after its "founding," because it harnesses both magic and technology.

If you look closely, there's not that much difference in the overall use of magery in the long-lived nations of power, and in each there exists a structure for teaching and perpetuating magery. Within those nations, individuals manage to extend their individual powers beyond the norm, but going beyond the norm can have enormous costs, as shown by Lerris, Creslin, Nylan, and Lerial. Of those four, only Lerial is allowed, by circumstances, the "luxury" of not having to use the power he has discovered to its limits [of course, if he did, it would destroy him].

In the end, the magery is often similar across time; the way various mages develop those powers is individual, based on who they are and when and where they lived. But the same is true of technology. Skills and techniques do get forgotten, The Greeks developed a mechanical astronomical computer whose technology was lost [the Antikythera device] for more than 1500 years.

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