Title: Clarke's Law
Author: Isis
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis + Harry Potter crossover
Rating: PG
Genre: Action/Adventure (gen, ensemble; primarily Carson, Rodney, John, Hermione, Harry)
Length: 21,300 words (novella)
Summary: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Spoilers: Through Lost Boys (SGA) and Half-Blood Prince (HP). This story takes place from the end of Hide and Seek through post-canon for SGA, and 7-8 years after the presumed events of HP book 7.
Notes: This story is for ravurian, whose Not All Who Wander Are Lost manips gave me the idea. It took a village to write this story: extensive thanks are due my beta readers amanuensis1, fabularasa, kylielee1000, tryfanstone, and z_rayne, all of whom made this much better than it would have been without their suggestions, criticisms, and gentle corrections. Thanks also to cathexys and trobadora, whose comments on the beta version helped me see what I needed to do in the final.

Read the story on my website: Clarke's Law

Fandom cheat sheets for those of you unfamiliar with one of the fandoms:

I doubt there's anyone out there who doesn't at least know the basic premise of the Harry Potter series, but just in case, here's the (very few) things you need to know: In the HP books, the wizarding world exists somewhat parallel to the nonmagical (or "Muggle") world, with most people in each pretty much unaware of the other. There is some mixing - intermarriages seem to be a regular occurrence - and occasionally a Muggle couple has a magical child. Hermione is one of Harry's best friends, who was born to a Muggle couple and is "the brightest witch of her age." Now go read.

This might be a little harder to understand if you know nothing about Stargate: Atlantis, but my HP-only beta said she had no trouble. Here's a cheat sheet to make it a little easier: Atlantis is a floating city on an oceanic planet in the Pegasus galaxy - there is a mainland but it doesn't figure into this story - which was created tens of thousands of years ago by people referred to as the "Ancients." The Ancients built stargates which allow travel from one planet to another through wormholes. The Ancients fled to Earth ten thousand years ago when they were attacked by a race of a kind of "space vampires" called Wraith which feed on human life force (or Ancient - basically, all aliens are essentially human, other than the Wraith), leaving behind Atlantis and all sorts of strange and powerful technology, much of which can only be operated by a person who has a gene marking them as a descendant of the Ancients.

My story begins shortly after the Atlantis Expedition comes to Atlantis, unsure if they'll be able to return to Earth, not knowing what awaits them in the Pegasus galaxy and in the city of Atlantis. This story is told from the POV of Dr. Carson Beckett, who is a geneticist and the Chief Medical Officer in Atlantis. Other important characters are Dr. Rodney McKay, the head of the science operations in Atlantis; Major John Sheppard, who is the head of military operations; and Dr. Elizabeth Weir, who is the (civilian) commander of the entire expedition. Rodney and Carson were friends before the expedition began. Now go read.









Story notes and meta about my writing process - read this after you've read the story!

This story had its genesis back at the end of July, in this comment exchange between me and ravurian. He pointed me to his Not All Who Wander Are Lost challenge, which basically posits that characters from other fandoms might actually be witches and wizards.

Up until then I'd been thinking of crossovers in terms of distinct, separate universes. All of a sudden, I made the following leaps of intuition:

- The only major SGA character who could plausibly have been at Hogwarts would be the Scotsman, Beckett.
- Beckett has the ATA gene so he can operate Ancient technology.
- OMG the gene is what makes you magic!
- Who else has the gene? Sheppard's the only one who we canonically know for certain had it before the gene therapy was invented. I can explain him away by making him a Muggleborn who doesn't know he's a wizard.

Ok, that's a scenario, but it's not a story. For a story I need a plot, and for a plot I need conflict, and for conflict I need bad guys. Well, there are these bad guys known as the Wraith...

- OMG they suck out your SOUL! Just like Dementors!

And there was my story, just bubbling out all by itself.

Well, sort of. As some of you know, I am a linear writer. I begin at the beginning, and write through to the end; although I frequently go back and tweak earlier sections, I can only write a scene when I have at least a reasonable draft of everything before it. Also, I don't actually start writing until I have a pretty good idea of where things are going to go. Taken together, these things mean that when I begin a story, I have the first few scenes very clear in my head; the next bit figured out in a general sense; and then the last bit is extremely vague, but at least I have a direction.

When I started writing Clarke's Law, I had the initial scene and Carson asking John about Quidditch clear in my head, and the next scenes fairly thought out through the pillow-summoning scene. Then I had a general idea of the next part as far as Beckett's encounter with the Wraith, although the details were rather fuzzy. The rest was just a bullet-point sketch: he'd request wands from Diagon Alley, a bunch of witches and wizards would show up, some sort of battle against the Wraith, the end.

(By the way, I had to entirely rewrite that initial scene because two of my betas objected to it being in Rodney's POV rather than Carson's. I ended up moving it from the gate room to the infirmary and adding a bit of exposition and introspection, but I was able to save most of the dialogue. Since I'm a linear writer, redoing the beginning after already finishing to the end was very strange for me.)

So when I write, I trust that the fuzzy stuff will become clearer as I get there, and sure enough, that's what usually happens. When it doesn't happen, it means I've made a bad choice earlier that I need to fix before I can proceed. For example, I was dithering about whether Carson would go back to Hogwarts, or to the Ministry of Magic. I had written a transitional scene with him and his mother, but I was totally stuck there. It wasn't until I deleted that bit and just had him in Hogsmeade that it started making sense again, and the story flowed.

Even if I have something planned ahead of time, sometimes the story has other ideas. For example, I wasn't planning to have Rodney in the pillow-summoning scene, but he insisted on coming along, and in fact Rodney's attitude toward magic came out there and ended up driving much of the story.

And then, sometimes the arbitrary choices turn out to be important. Carson had to run into a Wraith somewhere, and I had no real plan for that scene - it might have happened in Atlantis, or on a mission, or something else. But as it happened, Instinct aired about the time I was writing this scene, and it made me think of the Wraith laboratory in The Gift, so I set the scene there (and wrote in references to his research). I decided this was good, because any new invented mission would detract from the primary plot.

But later in the story, I was bothered a bit by the diversion to the Wraith laboratory, because the only purpose of the scene, really, was to have Carson kill a Wraith using the Patronus. And yet he comes back with some Wraith equipment, talks about it...and then, nothing. I strongly believe that stories should be structured the way Chekov said that plays should be written: if there is a gun on the wall in the first act, it has to fire in the third. (And conversely, if someone shoots a gun in the third act, it should have been placed in the first; i.e., no pulling plot points out of thin air.) I'd hung the gun and just left it there.

At the time I was desperately trying to come up with an actual battle-plot, having realized that most of their fighting wasn't hand-to-hand combat, and the story was kind of stuck until I worked it out. So I was re-watching the early episodes with my husband, and I saw Rodney cut open the door in the hive ship, and I thought, "hmm, looks like flesh..." and suddenly I saw that I could solve both my problems by using the Wraith equipment found in the lab to show that the hive ships would be vulnerable to the Patronus. (And then Aurora aired, with their mention of a "weakness in the hive ships," and I was like, oh, BOY! I can use this!)

So in essence, I hung the gun on the wall without really thinking about using it; but then I needed a gun, and I looked up and said, "Hey, there's a gun on that wall of exactly the caliber I need!"

This happened multiple times in this story (and has happened in pretty much all of my longer stories). Rodney not being able to make a Patronus was an impulse decision, because it just seemed to me he'd be having a hard time accepting magic. (And I wanted only John, Hermione, and Carson in the jumper!) But then I wanted to bring the battle down to the personal - not just exploding things in space - and that foreshadowing gave me a perfect way to do this. I wasn't sure what to do in the denoument, and I was uncomfortably aware I'd never dealt with the gene therapy issue - suddenly Hermione started talking about Squibs (whenever I'm blocked, I try to get the characters in a conversation, and see what happens), and I was able to tie up that loose end.

A few other changes I made in beta process underlined this kind of plot serendipity. I originally had one of Carson's sentimental items be his medical school diploma, but my Britpicker objected to that, so I decided instead to make it the first fly he'd ever tied - which subtly foreshadows his happy memory. The wand-choosing scene was not in my original draft; it was suggested by another beta, who also mentioned that she'd find the story more realistic if some of the scientists 'washed out' of the process. By using Kavanagh (I love to write him!) I was able to draw a contrast between his inflexibility and Rodney's slow eventual acceptance.

By the way, adding a new scene in the middle was very difficult for me as a linear writer. But once it started flowing, it worked to such an extent that I realized that my betas were right, I'd glossed over too much, and this scene was important for showing how the rest of the ATA carriers coped with learning about magic.

I still feel there are so many details that are in my head that never made it into the story for one reason or another! For example, Sheppard's wand - I was going alphabetically, and I felt it was important to stop with McKay for emphasis on the first stage of his acceptance, but I just might write a ficlet about Sheppard receiving his own wand. And other characters - I wanted to talk more about Radek and his attitude toward the whole thing (since the gene therapy didn't work on him, but he's canonically the expert on jumpers so was involved in the weapons-to-spell adaptation), and about Harry's experiences and his attitude toward Atlantis, but I couldn't because this one was Carson's story, and I had to keep the focus on him. But for the first time I feel as though I want to keep writing in a sub-universe I've created - I want to write not a sequel, exactly, but peripheral, related stories.

Anyway, thanks very much for reading. I hope you enjoyed it.