Fletcher Pratt

“Magic?” asked Echegaray, pointing to the map.
“No. Just a map.”
“What?”
“A map. You know, a picture of the country with the roads and castles and things.”
“Magic,” said Echegaray flatly.
“Okay, it’s magic if you like it that way. Now, if you’ll show us just where we are on the map—”
“We aren’t,” said Echegaray.
“What do you mean, we aren’t? We can’t have walked far enough to get off the map.”
“Never on map. We’re on log.” He patted it to make sure.

The Castle of Iron, chapter 7

„Well, the laws of similarity and contagion hold. They appear to be the fundamantal Newtonian principles, in the field of magic. Obviously the next step is to discover a system of mathematics arising from these fundamentals. I was afraid I should have to invent my own, as Einstein was forced to adapt tensor analysis to handle his relativity equations. But I think I have discovered such a system ready made, in the calculus of classes, which is a branch of symbolic logic.”

The Mathematics of Magic, chapter 5

If he said that one could transport oneself to a different place and time by formula, it could be done. The complete escape from — well, from insignificance, Shea confessed to himself. He would be the Columbus of a new kind of journey!
…
Not the Iliad. The Slavic twilight? No; too full of man-eating witches and werewolves. Ireland! That was it — the Ireland of Cuchulinn and Queen Maev. Blood there, too, but what the hell, you can't have adventure without some danger. At least, the dangers were reasonable open-eye stuff you could handle. And the girls of that world — they were something pretty slick by all description.

Shea took half a dozen quick steps to the roadside. He addressed the man with the phrase he had composed in advance for his first human contact in the world of Irish myth:

„The top of the morning to you, my good man, and would it be far to the nearest hostel?”

He had meant to say more, but paused uncertainly as the man on the horse lifted his head to reveal a proud, unsmiling face in which the left eye socket was unpleasantly vacant.

Shea smiled weakly, then gathered his courage and plunged on: „it's a rare bitter December you do be having in Ireland.”

The stranger looked at him with much of the same clinical detachment he himself would have given to an interesting case of schizophrenia, and spoke in slow, deep tones: „I have no knowledge of hostels, nor of Ireland; but the month is not December. We are in May, and this is the Fimbulwinter.”

A little prickle of horror filled Harold Shea, though the last word was meaningless to him. Faint and far, his ear caught a sound that might be the howling of a dog — or a wolf. As he sought for words there was a flutter of movement. Two big black birds, like oversize crows, slid down the wind past him and came to rest on the the grass, looked at him for a second or two with bright, intelligent eyes, then took the air again.

„Well, where am I?”
„At the wings of the world, by Midgards border.”

„This is just a little applied psychology; to wit, setting up an androphiliac fixation in the libido of one female unicorn.”

The Mathematics of Magic, chapter 7

„The only . . . uh . . . certitude is that we got our decimal point off again. We got point oh oh oh one dragon instead of a hundred dragons.”

The Mathematics of Magic, chapter 8

“In sooth,” said he, “our pains are borne lightly for the sake of the pleasures to come, as we bore with joy the smell of the corpses the day Lord Roger slew the two thousand serfs at the gate of Pampeluna, forgetting in his warlike fury to leave any alive for the withdrawal of the bodies.”

The Castle of Iron, chapter 4

“Would you believe it, fair lady, and you, gentles? A hart of eight brought I home, as pricksome a bit of venison as ever a man saw before vespers. A meal for the Emperor’s own majesty, one might think; make it a pie, or what will you? Nay, these base varlets must even serve it up boiled, as though ’twere salt stockfish in Lent. I gagged, but our friend Roland put down the first two bits fairly enough. At the third, me seems he must have recovered a whit of the laws of cookery, for he gave a great howl like a lion and set upon the knaves, beating in their heads with his fists. But das, to what purpose? Not even a crack will let savor into such skulls.”

The Castle of Iron, chapter 8

„If you gentlemen are through with your joke, I'll go on. If one of these infinite other worlds — which up to now may be said to exist in a logical but not in an empirical sense — is governed by magic, you might expect to find a principle like that of dependence invalid, but principles of magic, such as the Law of Similarity, valid.”
„What's the Law of Similarity?” asked Bayard sharply.
„The Law of Similarity may be stated thus: Effects resemble causes. It's not valid for us, but primitive peoples firmly believe it. For instance, they think you can make it rain by pouring water on the ground with appropriate mumbo jumbo.”

„I didn't know you could have fixed principles of magic,” commented Shea.
„Certainly,” replied Chalmers solemnly. „Medicine men don't merely go through hocus-pocus. They believe they are working through natural laws. In a world where everyone firmly believed in these Laws, that is, in one where all minds were attuned to receive the proper impressions, the laws of magic would conceivably work, as one hears of witchdoctors' spells working in Africa today. Frazer and Seabrook have worked out some of these magical laws. Another is the Law of Contagion: Things once in contact continue to interact from a distance after separation. As you —”
Shea snapped his fingers for attention. „Just a second, Doctor. In a world such as you're conceiving, would the laws of magic work because people believed in them, or would people believe in them because they worked?”