FOR READERS & WRITERS
Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Lou Hoffman:
This is for both r and w. I’ve been listening to a lot of fantasy lately and it struck me that in nearly all of them, a major theme is the loss of magic. Perhaps a world or culture used t have magic but nobody knows how to make it work anymore, or it was crushed out of them by an aggressor, or in some cases certain types of magic are “lost,” or even one culture or type of being actively “steals” or “absorbs” the magic of others.
My question is, why? Why is this such a prevalent theme? What is “lost magic” a metaphor for in our daily lives. It does not seem to me that this was always a prevalent theme. Why now?