technology and magic

[marycatelli]

Was reminded of the trope that "technology" and magic are inverse, and the restart of magic could mean the end of 'technology"

grouse.

It's a frankly magical view of technology.  Lightning still strikes, fires still burn, nerves still react, when the kettle boils its lid clatters -- it makes no sense that "electronics" or "steam engines" fail.

The closest I've seen to working is Ben Aaronovitch's theory that electronics fail for the same reasons sacrifices work -- the electronic fields are similar. But electronics are not complicated enough to hold onto their field, as living beings can unless they are killed.

Most don't even try to attempt logic like that.

Comments

[whitefangedwolf.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, if spellcasting caused powerful electromagnetic pulses and spells generated strong electromagnetic interference while active, a wide range of electronic technology would have issues or fail to work at all. There would be major issues when magic returned, but eventually technological work-arounds and new unaffected technologies would be developed.

[marycatelli]

True!

But steam engines would continue just fine. . . .

There's something like that in the Romulus Buckle books, where we have been shoved back to a steampunk technology -- though there, the author also eliminated lightning.

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

*contemplates* In contrast to having magic essentially overlaid on a universe where physics works the way it does in real life, I could see doing it as a case of... basically assuming that for magic to work would mean a transformation of the world entire, that a lot of things look the same but the nature of it all is fundamentally altered, and not everything is compatible with the new rules.

It would be difficult to write much of a story if the changes kill your characters, so perhaps these new principles, for whatever reason, preserve the forms and functions of life. You'd probably still need the nerves. But perhaps fire does not burn and lightning strike, at least not the same way, if fire is now a capricious spirit and lightning the spears of the gods at war.

And now I'm trying to remember how Pamela Service did it, because I was just reminded the New Magic series is longer than when I first found it and I should try it again. *g* Magic comes back, but I think technology is just low because the whole series is set after a catastrophic nuclear war and it's been hard to rebuild, not because it arbitrarily wouldn't function given the attempt.

[marycatelli]

Yeah. That would be tricky to pull off. A scientist observing that our nerves no longer function the same way. . . .

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Well, that'd be an option. But unless you're going in with a particularly hard-sf attitude toward the fantasy, at least one character in biological research, a sufficient time-lapse to allow the research fields to recover (a lot of equipment is probably going to break, and the stuff that's still working probably should be retested from scratch), and some particular idea for a new way for them to work and what that would change, delving into the biochemistry strikes me as something that would be hard to make interesting and easy to get tangled up in without particularly adding to the story. And I spent twelve years in biochemical research!

Hmm. Although if you are going with something about the mechanisms of living things as an integral part of your story, you could probably do something interesting either with the hair-tearing resulting from, say, the four humors suddenly being accurate; or if living things get a lot of exceptions to stuff-not-working-the-same, the realization that isolated enzymes and genetic engineering are still an option.

[marycatelli]

The thing is -- if you don't have something like that, at least off-stage, perhaps a headline in a paper -- we get back to the treatment of technology as a mystical category, because the reader doesn't see the reason.

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

It's certainly fair to insert some hair-tearing over chemistry and physics rewriting themselves and how weird it is that a lot of things do appear to be working similarly at all even on a surface level when they ought to be relying on the same principles as the stuff that broke.

I suppose, though, that a lot of the foundation of this trope is in authors wanting to change the aesthetic of how humans interact with the world, which is the real reason "technology" gets treated as a lump and as if it didn't rely on the same causes as (for instance) biology. In which case the most honest approach may be "something there is that doesn't love a wall" -- or rather, to say that the world has gotten a lot more arbitrary and something about it doesn't like electronics, or whatever.

[marycatelli]

Well, except for those who just don't think. . . .

[persephone-kore.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not suggesting they've necessarily thought it out. I think that's what the ones who don't think out the principles are probably going for by feel.

[marycatelli]

There's an art to doing that in a way that doesn't jar the persnickety reader.

Or bore the uninterested one. . . life is full of trade-offs.