Our year of Magic X Mayhem is about to kick into high gear, and our authors are more than ready.

We asked them: Magic or Mayhem? and the results are pretty wild. But then again, we expected no less.

Magic or Mayhem?

Andrew Bannister, author of Iron Gods

Definitely mayhem, because people are the cause and the cure (if it needs during) of mayhem, and people are my favorite thing. Magic, on the other hand, seems to me to be somehow detached from people. Also, let’s face it, mayhem is fun!

Sarah Gailey, author of Magic for Liars

Magic, because I’ve already had enough Mayhem to last me a little while.

Max Gladstone, author of Empress of Forever

Mayhem! Especially for Empress of Forever. Magic is many things to many people—it’s a tool for revolution or a technology for control. Mayhem is always and truly mayhem.

Cate Glass, author of An Illusion of Thieves

opens in a new windowMagic most definitely! Designing and writing magic is at least as cool as doing magic. It’s fun teaching it to your characters, especially in a world like the Chimera world, where there are no schools of magic, no books of lore, and asking questions about it can get you dead. I enjoy deciding what it feels like and watching them mess up and discover the cost. I do occasionally deprive my beloved characters of body parts—or at least the temporary use of them—and I’ve been known to stuff an extra soul into a person’s body, which I think would qualify as mayhem. That is the price of them having me write their stories. It is all for their own good.

Duncan Hamilton, author of Dragonslayer

Mayhem! Because, well, MAYHEM!!

Saad Z. Hossain, author of The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday

I gotta go with magic. Magic just gives us endless possibilities and fun. I think we spend our whole lives trying to actually find some magic, and this search for magic is what keeps us alive. Do you remember that childhood yearning for actual magic to exist, any little bit of it, that desperate wish for hidden worlds to exist, even if we can’t see them or be a part of them? The sense of wonder? The conviction that impossible things might happen any minute? We become beggars when we lose that, plodding along trying to get ahead of some useless drudgery.

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S.L. Huang, author of Null Set

Mayhem. Because let’s be real, if I had magic, I’d just use it to create more mayhem.

Andrew Bannister, author of Creation Machine

Magic or mayhem? Definitely mayhem, because people are the cause and the cure (if it needs curing) of mayhem, and people are my favourite thing. Magic, on the other hand, seems to me to be somehow detached from people. Also, let’s face it, mayhem is fun!

Tamsyn Muir, author of Gideon the Ninth

Magic, because I am aspirational and can already cause mayhem on my own.

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Brian Naslund, author of Blood of an Exile:

Mayhem! Spells and incantations are cool, but anarchy is far more interesting. Life’s always a little more colorful when the world is completely falling apart.