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Obsession is Magic in Flex
When we think of magic users in fiction, we tend to think of magicians like Dumbledore or Gandalf: wise, old graybeards whose professorial robes invoke their deep education into occult arcana. They are unflappable practitioners of their arts. Even less establishment sorcerers tend to have a sheen of coolness about them; think of Kate Daniels or Harry Dresden, swathed in black, working as mercenaries or detectives, out in the thick of it. Which is why it is so utterly charming to meet Paul Tsabo in Flex, the debut novel from Ferrett Steinmetz. Paul has the most tragically uncool magical power I’ve ever seen: he’s a bureaucromancer. He is a mid-level bureaucrat whose obsession with paperwork transmuted into magic, the “guy who turned the DMV into an art.”
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In the world of Flex, people become ‘mancers (or magic workers) when their personal obsessions become so focused as to bore a hole in reality itself. ‘Mancy is tragic, in a way, often an outward manifestation of defense mechanisms and avoidance behaviors that can bend physics and wreck lives. Europe is a howling void, its reality broken sometime during WWII by ‘mancers battling one another. As a consequence, all ‘mancers in the U.S. are rounded up and impressed into a military hive mind, SMASH, which strips them of their individuality and free will. Though magic workers exhibit all sorts powers—junkomancy, anarchomancy—they do have one thing in common: the ability to make the titular Flex, a drug that confers their magic onto mundane humans. The downside of Flex, like the downside of magic (and, you know, drugs) is that it comes with a cost: the flux. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Bend the universe to your will, and inevitably the universe is going to snap back.
Magic work isn’t all downside. ‘Mancers have the capacity for breathtaking, beautiful feats. What they do with their magic is as varied as anything people do, from selfish and hurtful to kind and compassionate. Once a police officer, Paul retired to work as an insurance investigator after a run-in with an illustromancer left him minus a foot, and the illustromancer dead. He’s haunted by the needless loss: she wouldn’t be dead, her beautiful magic lost, if he hadn’t been sent to arrest someone whose only crime was a power she did not choose to possess. Paul’s bureaucromancy develops out of his need to humanize the paperwork, to make the system work fairly, justly, and compassionately. Our first written documents were bureaucratic in nature—accounts, inventories—and on some level bureaucracy is the basis of civilization itself.
Unfortunately, Paul’s bureaucromancy develops in the worst place possible if he wants to stay hidden: an insurance company. Insurance companies can deny claims if magic is involved, so his job as an investigator is to ferret out ‘mancers and turn them into SMASH. Shortly after his powers manifest, before he can control them in any meaningful way, he is forced to use them to save his daughter from a fire started by another ‘mancer. The resulting flux nearly kills her anyway. The way he interacts with his daughter through her trauma is devastating. She hates the ‘mancers her father has always hunted. Now, he is one of them, twisted with guilt that magic is at least partially responsible for her condition, even if it did protect her, too. To add insult (and irony) to injury, his own insurance company denies the claim, sending Paul on a hunt for other magic users.
Like most flatfeet on a quest for revenge, Paul rapidly loses control of the situation, putting him into conflict with the police, his fellow insurance investigators, SMASH agents, local drug lords, his ex-wife, his daughter; you name it, he’s in trouble. He reluctantly allies with a gamemancer, a woman named Valentine, whose powers are based on her love of video games. Both because of their renegade status, and the often solitary nature of obsession, ‘mancers tend to be a lonely bunch. You can feel their rush as they learn about their own powers by learning about another’s, and how their separate talents can form a greater whole. Valentine also bonds with Paul’s daughter, video games serving as a wonderful distraction from the boredom and pain of a hospital bed. Despite their closeness, Valentine and Paul don’t sink into a love relationship, something I really appreciated. I love when books explore emotional registers of intimacy other than the romantic.
The magic in Flex can be read many ways: it’s an addiction, or an obsession, or a cruelly treated disease. Maybe it’s a talent, maybe a disability, maybe both. Unlike many magical systems in urban fantasy, ‘mancy isn’t rule-bound and rigid; it is as individual as the individual. I spent not an insignificant amount of time trying to decide what my readermancy would look like: already books protect me on mass transit, and transport me to other worlds. Like the best magical systems, the magic of Flex is no simple allegory, and the central power too complex to reduce to an easy interpretation.
Flex is available now.