marycatelli: (Rapunzel)
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Was reflecting on a work that had operational magic and steam trains and other forms of technological advancement.  It even had a sect that rejected the use of magic as laziness; one member boasts of how they improved train engines by dedicating themselves to non-magical means.

Says the pondering thoughts, would they really distinguish like that?

It was, after all, a world in which magic was a regular course in school, and a routine in household chores.  I can see the contrast building up where magic involves trafficking with spirits -- L. Jagi Lamplighter has something like this in the Prospero's Daughter trilogy, where knowledge of magic is suppressed to encourage mankind to use science instead because it means they don't traffic with things they are better off leaving off alone.

Or a world in which it is an esoteric art.  But alchemy was an esoteric art, and that has not prevented its becoming the ever respectable chemistry.

Indeed, it would take advanced logic and reasoning about things even to split it off -- like the form of religion that never gets a name until another religion competes with it, but is woven into the warp of life.  Soap making was not a form of chemistry, though I learned about the reactions in high school chemistry.  So too a woman would not distinguish her lullaby -- a charm to keep off demons -- from anything else she did to keep the baby safe and secure.  It would blur into the religion too.  And when your natural philosophy came to hive things off, why would it be in opposition to other things?  There are works where biology and physics -- or rather the engineering based on them -- are treated as in opposition, owing to the natural living things vs. cold metal, but those are few besides the ones where both fall under Science.

Date: 2013-10-27 03:31 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] baron-waste.livejournal.com

One of the few times I was disappointed with Randall Garrett's wonderful 'Lord Darcy' stories was when the eponymous character produced a “magical” flashlight from his pocket. The ever-so-careful explanation for how this retread was supposedly produced did not help, for it left the real question of why all that effort was gone to. The reason was simple: The author's imagination failed him.

A similar thing happens with stories such as you describe: The author cannot imagine any other way of doing things than our own, so creates an absurd “epicycle arrangement” to rationalize it.

The only time I've ever seen this done cleverly was in a short story I'd have to really work to track down, where magic is the way of life but the main character's broomstick cannot be persuaded to climb high enough to reach the objective - so the character develops a Lilienthal-style glider to sit in, on the broomstick, which can and does provide the thrust for those wings to provide the lift, and away we go…



[The Lord Darcy stories really were clever, for how they used magic as an investigative tool rather than a deus ex machina. I remember, for example, a story wherein the victim had “gone out for some air” without bothering to open the window first. The body had been removed, but at the sorcerer's insistence nothing else had been disturbed. He drew a BIG magic circle around the affair, said bibbetty-bobbetty boo, and all the glass that had showered down in countless thousands of shards and pieces rose into the air en masse, to reform at the window where they'd each and all been at the first moment of shattering. The impact of the victim's head was clearly visible - he'd not hit head-first, but chin-first, that is, he'd been propelled against the window with violent force from behind. Not suicide - murder. But by whom? Why? Ah, well, that would require investigation…]

Date: 2013-10-27 05:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] baron-waste.livejournal.com

Well you know, that does make a species of sense - after all, nothing dropped falls UP, fires burn always the same way, &c. Magic would almost certainly take this into account in its own way as does the technology resulting from science. The fundamental difference is that science provides a workable explanation for why these things happen, which magic probably couldn't, whatever practical use it makes of it.

[One of the better science fiction executions of this is Harry Turtledove's “The Road Not Taken” stories, where it seems that Newton missed one: There's a scientific principle which, properly utilized, provides both antigravity and hyperdrive. It's butt simple - there's one race which flies in spacecraft made of bronze, because they never had any reason to develop iron-working… Only we fools missed it, so we sat on this one rock fighting for resources and developing machine guns and electronics and manned flight and computers and atomic bombs… Then an alien ship lands to “conquer” us with their fearsome muskets. Oops.

The problem is that this principle is so simple and its effects so radical that it derails scientific thought - it cannot be explained by the people who discover it, so they tend to lose interest in the impractical, obviously futile idea of finding explanations for things.]

Date: 2013-10-27 06:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] baron-waste.livejournal.com

I'd say it's a matter of emphasis. You work magic - it's a process, like driving a car. Or firing a musket - the drill of arms is basically working a spell, where you have to measure the powder, charge the piece, ram the charge, load the shot, ram the wadding - then replace the ramrod, prime the pan, aim the piece and pull the trigger. If you've done everything correctly, it goes click-flash-BOOM and a hole appears, hopefully in your target. If you make a muddle, if you're lucky it simply won't fire. If you're not lucky you'll suffer ghastly burns, maybe lose your eyes.

But nowhere in all that is the atomic structure of metals discussed, nor the chemistry of combustion, nor the engineering of the expansion of gasses. All you know is how to cause click-flash-BOOM.


… Within this circle is Jehovah's name,
Forward and backward anagrammatiz'd,
Th' abbreviated names of holy saints,
Figures of every adjunct to the heavens,
And characters of signs and erring stars,
By which the spirits are enforc'd to rise:
Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute,
And try the uttermost magic can perform.—

Sint mihi dei Acherontis propitii! Valeat numen triplex Jehovoe!
Ignei, aerii, aquatani spiritus, salvete! Orientis princeps
Belzebub, inferni ardentis monarcha, et Demogorgon, propitiamus
vos, ut appareat et surgat Mephistophilis, quod tumeraris:
per Jehovam, Gehennam, et consecratam aquam quam nunc spargo,
signumque crucis quod nunc facio, et per vota nostra, ipse nunc
surgat nobis dicatus Mephistophilis!


Enter MEPHISTOPHILIS…


…Hold, take this book, peruse it thoroughly:
The iterating of these lines brings gold;
The framing of this circle on the ground
Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder, and lightning;
Pronounce this thrice devoutly to thyself,
And men in armour shall appear to thee,
Ready to execute what thou desir'st…


- but Faustus still had no conception of WHY it worked, only how to do it.

Edited Date: 2013-10-27 06:40 pm (UTC)

Date: 2013-10-29 09:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] baron-waste.livejournal.com

WABAC Machine Dept:

By the bye, I have a performance of Marlowe's The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus on cassette, and so for a while the outgoing message on my answering machine was that conjuration, whereby the caller is invoked! - Messages left on the machine tended to begin with a long, nonplussed silence.

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