The Prestige by Christopher Priest Page A

auditorium to heckle me, leaping to his feet at the very moment things started going
     wrong. But more significantly the perpetrator of these attacks revealed an approach to
     magic that I had learned was symptomatic of Angier. He was almost exclusively concerned
     with the magical secret, what magicians call the “gimac” or “gimmick”. If a trick depended
     on a concealed shelf behind the magician's table, that alone would be the focus of
     Angier's interest, not the imaginative use to which it might be put. No matter what else
     might cause strife between us, it was Angier's fundamentally flawed and limited
     understanding of magical technique that was at the heart of our dispute. The wonder of
     magic lies not in the technical secret, but in the skill with which it is performed.
    And it was for this reason that The New Transported Man was the one illusion of mine he
     never publicly attacked. It was beyond him. He simply could not work out how it was done,
     partly because I have kept the secret secure, but mostly because of the way in which I
     perform it.

The Prestige
    7
    An illusion has three stages.
    First there is the setup, in which the nature of what might be attempted is hinted at, or
     suggested, or explained. The apparatus is seen. Volunteers from the audience sometimes
     participate in the preparation. As the trick is being set up, the magician will make every
     possible use of misdirection.
    The performance is where the magician's lifetime of practice, and his innate skill as a
     performer, conjoin to produce the magical display.
    The third stage is sometimes called the effect, or the prestige, and this is the product
     of magic. If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit, which apparently did not exist
     before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick.
    The New Transported Man is fairly unusual among illusions in that the setup and
     performance are what most intrigue audiences, critics and my magical colleagues, while for
     me, the performer, the prestige is the main preoccupation.
    Illusions fall into different categories or types, of which there are only six (setting
     aside the specialist field of mentalist illusion). Every trick that has ever been
     performed falls into one or more of the following categories.
    1.
    
    
     Production
    
    
     : the magical creation of somebody or something out of nothing,
    2.
    
    
     Disappearance
    
    
     : the magical vanishing of somebody or something into nothing,
    3.
    
    
     Transformation
    
    
     : the apparent changing of one thing into another,
    4.
    
    
     Transposition
    
    
     : the apparent changing of place of two or more objects,
    5.
    
    
     Defiance of Natural Laws
    
    
     : for example, seeming to defeat gravity, making one solid object appear to pass through
     another, produce a large number of objects or people from a source apparently too small to
     have held them, and
    6.
    
    
     Secret Motive Power
    
    
     : causing objects to appear to move of their own will, such as making a chosen playing
     card rise mysteriously out of the pack.
    Again, The New Transported Man is not entirely typical, because it uses at least four of
     the above categories. Most stage illusions depend on only one or two. I once saw an
     elaborate effect on the Continent where five of the categories were employed.
    Finally, there are the techniques of magic.
    The methods available to magicians cannot be so neatly categorized as the other elements,
     because when it comes to technique a good magician will not disdain anything. Magical
     technique can be as simple as the placing of one object behind another so that it may no
     longer be seen by the audience, and it can be so complex that it requires advance setting
     up in the theatre and the collusion of a team of assistants and stooges.
    The magician can choose from an inventory of traditional techniques. The playing cards
     that have been “gimmicked” so that