"A Different Magic" represents the annual De Vries/Vander Kooy Memorial Lecture presented by E.M. Beekman at the University of Michigan on 28 October 1999, which links G.E. Rumphius, "the blind seer of Ambon," with the fiction of Maria Dermout, another treasure of Dutch colonial literature. Beekman points out the delicate appreciation of tropical nature that Dermout learned from Rumphius. She borrowed a large number of details and subtleties from him in order to weave a vision of the natural and supernatural worlds.