Writing a story with magic in it

the occult is anything that is mysterious or poorly understood. A wizard is a person who does understand this shit and can do things the average person can not.

Don't make your protagonist a wizard. No one will be able to relate to that. Have wizards in the story be distant and mysterious. Don't have them explain themselves or their magic.

this.

establish rules and never break them.

Magic can be literally anything you can think of, and because it's so liberal you need rules to keep it from being retarded. If people have always known about magic, there would be no need for science. Magic would be the excuse for why anything happens (physics, chemistry, medicine, farming). You wouldn't even be able to disprove magic in a world where it exists unless there are the proper limitations.

You could just group science and magic under the blanket term of the occult, but then you could basically apply the term of occult to anything learned that isn't based on blind faith or philosophy.

>you need rules to keep it from being retarded.
that being said, there's good reason to keep the rules themselves occult, occluded from sight, shrouded in rumor and hearsay.

This is correct. What is considered "law" would be completely different.

OP, you just have to use the old "show, don't tell" rule of writing. In that I mean, show that the people are interacting with magic in a way that is normal for them. Malazan does this and I think that's why some don't consider it entry level fantasy. Use simple examples at first so that we the outside can get a hang of how it works.

>basically, in a world with magic, what differentiates science and magic?
Read Ted Chiang's "72 letters" and "Tower of Babylon" and copy what he does there

This is sort of exactly what I'm exploring in my science fiction story atm

The first act is 'hard' sf or whatever about humans across space largely living under a hybrid form of feudalism and unbridled capitalism that reaches nearly the periphery of the two+ galaxies humankind has stretched across. The story revolves around a youth of nobility and the fall of space capitalism, but the plot and action is largely driven by the first appearances ever of super/magic powers and the MC's interactions w folk who have them, all leading to the expansion of the sf world to include a knownly 'heavenly realm' and even an annexation of the human realm by the King of the Demon Realm.

Yet the heavens and demon realm aren't really related to magic as much as they are matters of life, death, and temporal distortion. Magic only comes as the result of time travel, by which an individual is carried across worlds to an 'other' and not a next world that's essentially fantasy. It's an entirely flat world where all the matter in a universe like ours is instead one world with one sun and one moon, and time is entirely linear, so instead space becomes variable and nonlinear. All the regions of the human realm are mapped out as kingdoms on a small part of what's really an unimaginably large continent, but what's between and around them constantly shifts and distorts.

Only memories don't carry between worlds, so one returns to the familiar, sci fi world with no clue how or why youre a god now/have magic powers. I guess you essentially reposition yourself in altered (alterned?) space and transmit back elsewhere in time, although its not necessary. Its more like a function of two worlds achieving doubleness.

And all of this drives the plot through its creation of the real main villain. Capitalism collapses and the age of man in the stars end, but before the King of the Demon Realm can crush his unexpected opposition on Historic First Corinthians, the moon rips open into the first blood moon of the hunt, in which Laic accesses every moon so that they might be gates for the undead to cross over through at every respective cycle's new and full moon. It's the first endless human greatwar, and now the remaining armies of man have moonwide torrents of skeleton warriors and the superhuman folk have fodder they can decimate until they realize, despite the skeletons' frailty, the undead legions of Laic are strong enough to sink their blades into superhuman flesh with a good hit.

With only one moon in the flatworld world, however, Laic has less than a fraction of the reach, so instead of a full skeleton warrior build, Laic there has to distort the living into horrible ogres, trolls, etc.

And in the fantasy world, humans and the undead live in hopefully unimaginable harmony, which is the foundation of any sort of society and natural order the ppl there have.

All of this to answer the question how could a super saiyan land on Dune?

It depends. In some settings, magic is an extra part of reality, where you have the normal mundane stuff and then the part beyond that.

In others, it is entirely to do with how unexplainable it is.

Think of our own science, where we split things like theoretical physics from the rest, simply because it isn't something we can actually test or verify.

In my story magic isn't explained but the catalysts for its emergence are ritualized acts of sex and murder. And the narrator assumes it comes from pacts with demons/satan.

Any sufficiently sophisticated science is indistinguishable from magic in the mind of a pleb.

I like to think of magic as the science of a universe with different laws of physics. Even looney tunes cartoon physics could probably get the hard scifi treatment in the hands of someone like greg egan. In some ways the level of explanation of is what makes it magic in a fantasy novel or science 8n a scifi novel and whether the empasis uses our world's science or mostly occult elements of our world's superstitions.

>ctrl f Perdido
>0 results
Perdido Street Station deals with exactly that.
It is also the best Fantasy book I have ever read.

Its commie trash.

>Hurrrr you have to explain the magic. There has to be rules. hurrr
I really hate this meme.

aint that religion

You dont have to explain the rules, but you do need to have them in your mind so the magoc will be consistent.

It doesn't even have to be consistent. You can even call attention to the fact that what it does makes no coherent sense or that it's shitting all over various scientific principles.

That still requires rules, or you will end up with bullshit.

have you actually read the thing?

Magic has been used to communicate ideas about immortality as seen in vampires, or the primal animal instincts of civilised people as seen in werewolves. Magic is more than a set of rules and instructions on how to bring about an apocalypse, kill your enemies, or making a love potion.
Don't make it the equivalent of some scientific pursuit, all you would be demonstrating is your lack of creativity and writing skill by having to compensate for creations of the modern world in your pseudo medieval Europe, if that is what you are writing.
That isn't to say that it can't have rules and laws, you still want some internal consistency to your story, just don't limit yourself with them, use it to explore myths, themes and ideas which physics and other sciences couldn't.