I’m currently trying to outline a Space Opera novel. This will be my 5th book; my other 4 were learning experiences, so I’ll likely start over with a new pen name.
I’m currently trying to outline a Space Opera novel. This will be my 5th book; my other 4 were learning experiences, so I’ll likely start over with a new pen name.
I haven’t got a great elevator pitch for it yet but essentially there are a number of different ways to do magic, split by culture. I’ve passed it through a number of filters to keep it from being too much of an anvil, but several of the forms of magic are stands-in for the labour theory of value. Magicians can become very powerful by effectively stealing and monopolizing magic from a larger group of people, or they can be individually quite weak but collectively strong. The ‘socialist’ magicians have learned that they can compete a bit with the stronger magicians by collectively agreeing on someone to share their magic with, but it’s hard to keep a power structure like that when all around them are people trying to steal all their magic.
This stuff is all a backdrop to a story that’s a more standard adventure journey, but those themes do recurrently crop up and will eventually be core to some of the conflict
Gotcha. I had an image in mind of a fantasy society trying to replace their monarchy with a socialist system of governance, but your idea sounds interesting, too.
There’s an element of that to it. The overarching villain represents a hostile monopolistic corpo in the analogy, and a continent-spanning emperor in the text, and “socialism” is going to be needed to defeat him.