mad scientist magic

[marycatelli]

One reason I like fantasy is that while you have to finagle your world-building to get it, you can usually get all the plot devices you need out of the magic.  Massive infant mortality, rampant disease, wide-spread famine -- if they are not plot relevant, they are gone.


One setting I am working on is steampunk.  And while it has magic -- dragons, gryphons, and, I have finally decided, shape-shifters -- it has no wizards of any way, shape or kind.  Men can not manipulate magic.  Hardly need to, do they, when between steampunk gadgetry and mad scientism, I thought I could get all the plot devices I needed.

Then you start to wrestle.with the question of how much magic to put in the science.  You have a lot of leeway with mad scientists, but the flavor of the stuff has to be technological, not magical.  Sure, throw in a few Jacob's Ladders with the sparks flying, beakers and distilleries, but you still have keep it feeling techie, and there's only so much that local color and setting can do to make people think techie.  Cue technobabble, I suppose. . . though reading primary source is wise, since it gives the right sort of terms to use for the era. . . except they might not have the terms for the things I want to have. . . .

sigh

Comments

[headnoises.livejournal.com]

I find it helpful when steampunk treats magic like an odd physical property-- like magnetism-- rather than like, um, magic.

[marycatelli]

Yeah, the scientists will get after it. Just like they got after other magical stuff -- such as drinking willow bark tea for headaches.

[stefan11.livejournal.com]

"but the flavor of the stuff has to be technological, not magical. "

Perhaps but, also, there is another way to look at such matters.

Scientific approach and explanations assume that the laws of nature are unbreakable. That is, there are no miracles in science (for a miracle would be a violation of the laws of universe). Magic seems to assume that we can break the laws of nature.

I am not sure I am speaking to the issue you raise. But, perhaps, it is relevant.

[marycatelli]

A miracle would be an intervention in the law of the universe, which would no more break it than your putting three paperclips in a drawer, and then adding four more, and coming back to find five would be -- you would realize that someone had been at the drawer. Which could be established but not experimented on by scientists.

Magic, OTOH, is unexplained casuality. Drinking willow-bark tree was once magic. A lot of that, of course, has been slotted into "science" or the "supersition"/"sorcery slot (where if it works, it can only be by trafficking with spirits).

Of course, in fantasy it usually runs according to rules that have now been debunked but which are not called science even thought they work in that universe.

[stefan11.livejournal.com]

To clear a semantic issue, within philosophical circles, a certain kind of miracle (so called "violation miracle") is defined as an event that violates the laws of nature and brings about much good.

A separate question is whether we can know that events like this occur. Hume argued that this in not knowable even in principle (because there is always a better explanation of what has happened, e.g., that no law of nature was violated but rather we do not fully understand what the laws of nature are, or that we made an observational mistake, or...). Some philosophers argued however that, in principle, we can know that a miracle occurred. (E.g., that's the position of the Roman Catholic church).

[marycatelli]

Hume's argument is entirely predicated on the claim that since it is the least probable explanation, a miracle must always give way to other explanations.

Unfortunately, how can we know it's the least probable? By assuming that all apparent miracles are really natural events? But that is what he set out to argue for and so can't be the premise.

And perhaps more crucial, why would an intrusion that is not governed by the law of nature nevertheless be governed by laws of probability?