Readers are already grilling this list of 7 best magic systems: Harry Potter made it with 1 book, 'Rivers of London' didn't at all

The list is fine. The comments are the real list. This is always how it goes.

Collider published a list of the seven low fantasy books with the greatest magic systems on Wednesday, and by Thursday the comment section had turned into exactly what every "best of" list secretly exists to create: a room full of people saying "um, excuse me" in the same tone. Let's go through the list, and then let's go through the grievances, because the grievances are better.

First, the rules

"Low fantasy," per Collider, means magic that happens on Earth, not in Narnia or Middle-earth, and the writer, Luc Haasbroek, frames the picks along the usual spectrum: "hard" magic with clear rules (think Mistborn) versus "soft" magic that's mysterious and vibes-based (think the weirder corners of Game of Thrones). With that established, the seven:

• Skulduggery Pleasant (2007), Derek Landy: a twelve-year-old inherits an estate and partners with a wisecracking skeleton detective in magical Ireland. Practitioners specialize in one branch of magic and get good at it through years of grind.
• Storm Front (2000), Jim Butcher: Harry Dresden, Chicago's only wizard-for-hire. Hard magic with staves, circles, potions, and a ruling White Council that does not mess around.
• The Magicians (2009), Lev Grossman: magic as a brutal academic discipline that leaves its graduates depressed and nihilistic anyway. Collider calls it an anti-Harry Potter.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000): more on this in a second.
• Piranesi (2020), Susanna Clarke: a man in an endless House of halls and tides, where the magic is never explained and that's the point.
• Babel (2022), R.F. Kuang: magic powered by the gaps in meaning between languages, etched into silver bars. Colonialism, Oxford, rage.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), Susanna Clarke again: an entire invented scholarly tradition of English magic, complete with footnotes and a Raven King.

Two Susanna Clarke books out of seven. She's the only author who got in twice, and nobody in the comments argued with that part, which tells you something.

Seven slots. Two went to one woman. One went to a skeleton. The internet had notes.

The Harry Potter loophole

Collider admits practically any Harry Potter book could have made the list, then picks Goblet of Fire specifically because it's the one that shows the machinery best: other wizarding schools, Portkeys that set up the graveyard finale, the Unforgivable Curses explained and then deployed. So the whole franchise got in on the strength of a single volume, which is a very efficient way to include Hogwarts without spending three slots on it. It's also the list's one pick where, if you said "that's not low fantasy, that's a separate hidden world," you'd have a case. Nobody in the comments made it. They were busy.

The grievances, ranked by how right they are

The comment section under the article is, as of this writing, a greatest hits of "where is." Paraphrasing:

1. Rivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch's urban-fantasy police procedural, got the first and most upvoted complaint, with a second commenter backing it up specifically on the strength of its Newtonian magic system. This is the correct complaint. Magic as a branch of physics, taught by a dude who learned it before the war, practiced by a Met constable who keeps blowing up his own phone. It should be on the list.
2. Shades of Magic, V.E. Schwab: one reader called the magic system magnificent. Fair, though the "four parallel Londons" premise makes the low-fantasy label a stretch.
3. Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko: the Moscow-set one. A genuinely good shout and a rarer one.
4. Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm (Robin Hobb under her other name): the deep-cut pick, from the same commenter, and the one most likely to send people to a used bookstore.
5. One commenter simply questioned whether the writer reads much fantasy, and took specific offense at Piranesi. I love Piranesi. I also understand that "the magic is a house and we never learn how it works" is a bold definition of "magic system."

A list of seven is not a statement about the best seven. It's a dare. The comments are people accepting it.

For what it's worth, the list holds up better than most: Babel and Jonathan Strange are airtight, Dresden is the obvious hard-magic pick, and Skulduggery is an underrated call. But the lesson, as always, is that a "7 best" headline is less a conclusion than an invitation, and the people of the internet never decline an invitation to tell you what you missed. Rivers of London. They missed Rivers of London.