Can Technology Evolve in a Fantasy World?

Discussion in 'Fantasy' started by AndrewB, Nov 21, 2017.

  1. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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  2. MythMachine

    MythMachine Active Member

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    I think it's entirely dependent on how you base the relationship between tech and magic. In my fantasy world, technology and magic react violently with one another. "Magic" is generated by the earth as would a body produce antibodies or white blood cells. By mankind producing technology, they are reaping the planet, so in defense, it produces "magic" to purify itself. If this power comes into contact with anything man-made or processed my man, it reacts violently, usually in waves of radiation or heat. Strangely enough, humanity still finds a way to counteract the negative effects and ends up using the magic to power their technology instead. A notable element in all this, is that the magic is independent in my story, meaning humans don't naturally have the ability to wield it (at first). Eventually, the nature of the magic changes (also similar to how a body might adapt to different infections), and some humans become able to harness it. There's more to it, but essentially it depends on the formula you want to use for your magic system vs. technology. I think you can write it out in any way you see fit, so long as you're not ignoring plot holes and blatant contradictions.
     
  3. John-Wayne

    John-Wayne Madman Extradinor Contributor

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    I don't see why not, it's your world.
     
  4. Spacer

    Spacer Active Member

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    It’s a thesis I’ve promoted for a few years, so I just pasted a summary from another post. I really ought to write it up nicely as a blog post or something.

    Some time ago, someone wanted to figure out a scenario where Magic, Tech, and Religion were three mutually incompatible lifestyles. I figured Magic and Tech were naturally incompatible for a number of reasons. I’ve been trying to explain what I mean by “teleological laws” ever since (as opposed to the simple rules on the lowest level we enjoy as physics).
     
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  5. Azuresun

    Azuresun Senior Member

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    Some questions that occur to me on this subject:

    What is the nature of magicians? Is magical talent passed on by blood? Is it something anyone can learn given enough time and education? Does it just randomly manifest? Do the practitioners need to be chosen by an nonhuman entity? How common are magic users, and how are they regarded in the world? If there's only a few, they might hoard their power to preserve a privileged status. If it's rare, then even the best mages can't be everywhere at once, solving every problem.

    What is the nature of magic? Is it a parallel set of physics that will produce consistent, testable results? If so, then it pretty much is science already, even if it's poorly understood or only experts can manipulate it? But if it's a chaotic and unpredictable force that may well have a will of its own (as in shamanic magic) and is used in a "aim here, hope you get some result like what you wanted", then it's far less compatible with technology or a technological mindset. If magic is a corrupting and dangerous force (like, say, Warhammer Fantasy) that's liable to blow up in your face or turn you into a mutant, people are likely to look for something more controllable.

    Is technology actually needed to solve problems? If magic has mostly eliminated hunger by making the soil super-fertile or blessing orchards so one apple can feed a person for a week, there's far less incentive to research crop rotation and fertilisers.
     
  6. Night Herald

    Night Herald The Fool Contributor

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    Of course it can!

    A good example is found in an old video game, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (my favorite game of its kind) which depicts a Tolkienesque setting in the middle of its own Industrial Revolution. The central conceit is that magic and tech not only coexists, but are directly opposed to one another; for example, a sufficiently powerful mage (or any mage at all, I can't quite remember) isn't allowed on the train, because it mucks up the works. This state of segregation leads to all kinds of unrest and paranoia. I recommend researching it.

    Anyway, yeah, you can have tech, any kind of tech that you want, but you need to consider the magic (if there's any) which will be sharing its habitat. Are there any spells, perhaps entire categories of spells, threatened by the emergence of technology, or even just a single revolutionary invention? Which potential inventions are made redundant by established magics? Has tech been around for a while, or since yesterday? Maybe magic is the more recent? Do they exist in the same world without really overlapping, due to geography, religion, other factors? Is it possible that they may compliment and augment each other, instead of butting heads?

    Perhaps most importantly, who stands to gain on the predominence of either? Who stands to lose? What happens when the Guild of Mages & Warlocks decides the steam golems took their jerbs?
     
    Last edited: Nov 23, 2017
  7. Not Ready to Say

    Not Ready to Say Active Member

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    Just a question, how exactly are magic and technology incompatible? Is there some force that prevents them from being compatible? Just to put something in perspective, the clothes on our back is technology, anything created by using scientific knowledge is by its own right, technology. So a simple cart would be incompatible with magic? How so?

    If I took your meaning wrong, I'm sorry, I just don't understand how something so fundamental in life can be messed with.
     
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  8. MythMachine

    MythMachine Active Member

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    That's just it.... magic and technology are only as incompatible in a story as you make them to be. If you design magic as a force that is superior to advancing technology in just about every feasible way, then yeah, technology is probably going to go out the window.... if you design magic with a complex system of prerequisites and limited diversity, then it probably won't make as much of an impact on a culture's advancement of tech. That's the key difference between magic and technology actually. Magic isn't inherently bound by any logic of the real world, unless we as the writers see fit to infuse it with real-world logic. It's something that can change in meaning in the course of a few sentences. Hell, you can even write about a magic that CREATES everyday objects normally manufactured through technological means, and the end result could still end up different if you wanted to. Magic is a tool for fantasy writers to do whatever the hell they want, essentially.

    The definition of magic by google:

    noun
    1. 1.
      the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces.
    That's exactly how ambiguous magic is. By this definition, magic could be anything from an inebriated poltergeist haunting a liquor store, to a two-headed Australian cyclops (would that still be considered a cyclops?) cyborg powered by love and tootsie rolls.
    Would these two things inherently shatter the advancement of technology? That could be arguable, but that's precisely the beauty of magic, is that just about anything about it is arguable and open to interpretation...
     
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  9. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    Yup. In Dies the Fire, by S.M. Stirling, there's an event that stops all internal combustion, gunpowder, and electricity. No idea what caused it, but it takes the world suddenly back to before those things were invented. Magic? Alien attack? Who knows, but suddenly all tech beyond the waterwheel and bellows is turned into paperweights. In The Practice Effect (a thoroughly amusing book) David Brin has a world where everything new is rough-worked crap that barely holds together, but everything of quality and functionality is very old.

    The MC gets suddenly transported there from our present, and at first suspects that he's living in a post-apocalypse situation where humanity has lost the ability to make anything decent. He later learns (this is the spoiler) that things, inanimate objects, now get better with practice. Bash out a rough lump of iron, tie it to the end of a stick, and after a few hundred or thousand hours of swinging it at trees it will eventually "learn" to be a good, well-balanced and sharp steel axe. Don't use it every day, however, and it won't only get dull and rusty, it'll devolve. A magic system like that kills technology in a heartbeat.
     
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  10. Gadock

    Gadock Active Member

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    Wow, I definitely need to read those two as I use both ideas in my own work (except for the devolve part). So, thanks a lot! :D

    If you care; my world magic has been ever present and was the drive force of the, now ancient, society. Magic got banished and the world fell apart as no-one could use magic anymore. I also have artifacts that when used with magic over and over they become more used to the action and is able to preform it more, better, and longer.
     
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  11. Azuresun

    Azuresun Senior Member

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    Well, the supernatural is by definition unscientific (ie, beyond the natural), but a lot of the time magic is presented as a subset of physics, which can produce predictable results--so sometimes, magic isn't technically magic. :)
     
  12. Gadock

    Gadock Active Member

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    Oh no, is it getting philosophical? Does this mean that, if you have an technology far beyond the current technology and therefor unable to be proven scientifically how it works, be magic? :eek:
     
  13. Simpson17866

    Simpson17866 Contributor Contributor

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    Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science :D
     
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  14. Azuresun

    Azuresun Senior Member

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    Since presumably, the people who came up with the technology understood how it works, that would still be scientific, vs something that cannot be understood rationally.
     
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  15. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    We still don't really understand how anaesthesia works.
     
  16. orangefire

    orangefire Active Member

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    In my fantasy setting I'm working on, the people of the world have learned to use magic as a part of technology. For example, instead of fueling something with coal or electricity, they use Arcane Crystal, which is basically solidified magical energy, for fuel. Instead of light bulbs, they use magical lighting.

    It all depends how you want to set up the setting though.
     
  17. Gadock

    Gadock Active Member

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    Well there you have it folks, anaesthetics is real proof of magic.
     
  18. 123456789

    123456789 Contributor Contributor

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    Let's say for example that in out world, right now, all of a sudden, some people have the ability to lift objects with their minds.

    What do you think the brightest scientists would do? Would they call it magic? Would they want to dissect the brains of "magic" users? Would they try to determine when, where, and why the first instance of it occurred? Would they perform experiments on the levitation act itself in search of some physical explanation? If they found no physical explanation, would they expand our world view to something more metaphysical, or perhaps conclude that maybe we do live in a simulation? What would it say about our world if no one attempted these things?
     
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  19. animagus_kitty

    animagus_kitty Senior Member

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    Alright, I stopped reading (it's late for me) after the turn of the second page, but this:
    is a big deal and basically what I had in mind.

    In my novel, which is space-age and FTL travel AND a galactic conglomerate of magic-users, AND a single, unified priesthood, science runs the ships; magic runs the cities. Not everyone has magic, but it's fairly common. We (the humans and other races who live in this universe) evolved the tech at the same time as magic; so you have flamethrowers that use sparks to ignite gas or other fuel, as well as devices which utilize the runes for immolation and distance. Some people can fly; some use clothes 'enchanted' to fly; others use jetpacks the way you'd expect them to work.

    But at the start of it all, a society with both magic and tech would use tech to make up for magic's shortcomings. Bob the Mage may be able to lift things with his mind, but Billy the Non-mage can't afford to pay mages to move everything in his warehouse. He needs conveyors; he needs machines.
    Terry the Mage may be able to light a candle with his mind, but Billy can't and needs a lighter. Someone's got to invent a lighter.
    A mage can teleport; but the Muggles still need to invent cars. Now, they may be floating cars, because a vehicle that works regardless of terrain thanks to runes of levitation is much more useful than one that requires wheels, but the Muggles can't just carry around a bunch of flying runes and make it work. It needs to be invented to be run by normal people.
     
  20. Spacer

    Spacer Active Member

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    Check the link I posted to some of my posts on WorldBuilding Stack Exchange.

    Using scientific knowledge: experiments are not repeatable, and laws are not such simple things to figure out. So what scientific knowledge? Learning how the world works will be more like our psychology or economics, not the pure simplicity that Galileo and Newton realized.

    Simple cart: well, how simple? How performant? If a high-performance cart relies on the material of the axle and bearing to be hard and tough, and the lubricant has properties that make it useful as such. If the material you used decided to behave differently because — because the laws are inconsistent and not based on the most primitive details building up — then it will not stay so performant and may not work as well as you hoped.

    A cart is really an example of a physics simple machine. It’s simple enough that altering it somewhat will not completely destroy its functionality. But a complex system of many individual primitive machines would be more seriously affected.

    Think of making a cart from local wood. Wood varies in property from log to log, and it’s affected by temperature and humidity and who knows what else. So such simple designs need to have a wide tolerance on what is acceptable.

    A modern axle is made from precisely engineered materials that are extremely consistent in their properties. In a magic world, you would not be able to do that. Any carefully made advanced material would still be as variable and imprecise as the old-fashion wood.

    The bedrock of science is that rules are consistent. Our understanding of nature is greatly helped by the fact that rules are defined on the smallest components and everything else emerges from that.

    With magic, rules are not consistent. Rules are necessarily teleological in nature. The stuff powering nature has to understand higher-level constructs and symbolism that match human perceptions. This is exactly the opposite of what makes for science and technology.
     
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  21. X Equestris

    X Equestris Contributor Contributor

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    That's a big assertion for something that doesn't exist. What magic's rules are is up to the individual author to decide. There is absolutely nothing else stopping magic from working on consistent rules to the point that it's just another field of science, or a way of applying scientific principles to get a result you want.
     
  22. MythMachine

    MythMachine Active Member

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    I think Spacer's claim is based on the fact that technology has inherent structure and is reliant on factual statistics and science, while magic does not. However, magic can be GIVEN structure at the behest of the author, because it is a construct of the imagination, not an actual everyday application with real world basis (unless you're spiritual of course). Even the name itself is nothing set in stone, and can be changed to suit the story in which it is used. I'd wager to say that magic is a device that authors use to explain things that couldn't be justified without it. I think a lot of forms of time travel and advanced technology found in science fiction could also be considered a type of magic, rather than technology, or perhaps in addition to it, because it most of the time incorporates forces or ideas that have no real world counterpart, or only work in theory.
     
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  23. Not Ready to Say

    Not Ready to Say Active Member

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    This, I agree with. When there are basic rules for something, consistencies, like say a fireball spell will travel this far and explode with this much force based on the strength of the caster. There is a science behind it, let's use an order system. A caster of the first order has an approximate strength of one, a caster of the second order has an approximate strength of two and so on. If the first order's spell travels exactly 30 feet and explodes with a force of say 10 lbs of force per square inch, then a second order's spell travels 35 feet and explodes with a force of 12 lbs of force, you could say, after more experimentation, that a caster of each increasing order can cast a fireball 5 feet further with an increase of 2lbs in explosive force. Yes, that isn't exact because each caster will have slightly differing strengths or maybe they specialize in other spells, but you can find a number on it. This caster is more overall more powerful because he can shoot a fireball that travels 60 feet and explodes with 22 lbs of force, but this caster's fireball only travels 45 feet and explodes with a force of 18 lbs of force. Sure, there could be other variables involved, but the author decides that, I'm just stating that magic and science aren't so far apart, because magic can have constants as well.

    To be quite honest, technology and science mixing is entirely the author's choice and it doesn't really matter what we think. If he wants to get super complicated and have an internal combustion engine run using fire spells cast by a wizard or a sorceress, they can, or if they want magic to be big, flashy, and inconsistent, then go for it.

    Talking about this, this isn't correct. Sorry if I'm blunt, but wouldn't magic improve scientific discovery as @Iain Aschendale said. Hard to cast magical spells will prompt people to replicate the results. Like a fly spell, which has pretty consistent results, so people might create, as Iain said, a hot air balloon. And as for the forum you used, they agree that magic and technology can go hand in hand and that magic can even lead to brand new scientific discoveries, such as tech that can consistently work that uses magic as a power source. Saying magic would inhibit scientific discoveries is like saying the ability to fly would inhibit travel. It would exponentially make it easier as it provides physics breaking abilities such as creating flame without any physical catalyst, or binding two items together with a magical force.
     
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  24. IHaveNoName

    IHaveNoName Senior Member Community Volunteer

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    My setting uses magitek. When I was searching for similar works, I came across an interesting post. It's rather long, but the author summed it up well: "So in a world without pre-existing technology, like one where magic is innate or common, the drive for progress would have to be fundamentally different to make any headway." Basically: If it's easier to do it with magic, there's little incentive to develop other methods.

    So, what Iain said, but with fewer words. :)
     
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  25. Simpson17866

    Simpson17866 Contributor Contributor

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    If I could just say one more thing, and then I'll be on my pedantic way: technology is anything you use to accomplish a task.

    Crystal balls that work are technology. Magic wands that work are technology. Flying chariots powered by unicorn farts are technology :)
     

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