The Magicians is about characters, it’s not about magic

„In deglamorizing the whole wand-waving world of Harry Potter, what strategies or tools did you employ to achieve a more realistic take on a fantasy novel?

It’s a super interesting question. I had great models. And I thought about this quite consciously and I looked at what John LeCarre had done to the spy novel, what he had done to the Bond archetype. In particular, I looked at what Alan Moore had done to the superhero archetype in Watchmen, and also Miracleman. To some extent, I looked at what William Gibson had done in Neuromancer too. And I thought, if you performed that operation on fantasy, on Harry Potter, what would it look like? In some ways, it was just pushing the logic a little bit further, weaving in things that would ordinarily be airbrushed out. There’s so much sex and drinking going on at Hogwarts, but it happens in the margins, it never gets described, they don’t point the camera at it.

What if you got that stuff into the frame? How would it change things? And then there’s just a level of specificity. If you use the kind of language more associated with literary fiction or think about how would Hemingway describe magic, how would Virginia Wolfe, or Sadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen? How would they describe magic if they were writing a fantasy novel, which they would never do. It looks a little bit different. And I thought about that every day. What if you used the tools of realism to write about these fantastical stories? That was my mandate every day when I worked on The Magicians.”