ann_leckie | (no subject)

rachel_swirsky has placed me under an obligation to post this.

Long ago, on a message board far away, someone posted something that nearly sent me to the emergency room with the burning of the epic stupid. It went like this: the poster was working on a novel set in a world where magic worked, instead of science.

Okay. So. When queried, the poster further explained that you know, magic worked! And not, like, machines and stuff.

In vain did one explain that machines work because the universe is fundamentally the way it is, and a universe where machines did not work would be so alien as to be, perhaps, not inhabitable by humans. Machines do not function because of some mystical "scientific" or "machine" property they possess.

And, furthermore--the thing Rachel says I ought to post--Clarke's law works in both directions.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Yes?

Sufficiently comprehensible magic is indistinguishable from technology. If you know magic works, and can wield it reliably, then it's susceptible to scientific investigation, and susceptible to use as technology.

Which makes a problem for fantasy, actually--if the universe is made so that magic works, then it's not magic, is it?

I would elaborate, as it is an issue I have pondered more than once, but I'm brain-ached at the moment, and must return to my perusal of The Unholy Grail: A Social Reading of Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal

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I always loved the Borderlands books and anthologies. Both magic and technology worked...sometimes. They were both unreliable, because of the local environment on a magic/tech border. Basically, you could never be sure which laws of physics were applicable at any given moment.

Edited 2010-03-24 02:04 (UTC)

And the implication was that Elfland was pretty alien as a consequence; perhaps as a result, humans couldn't go there at all.

I don't have a problem where things are thought through, where the author set up something that made sense beyond "magic and science are opposed and can't co-exist!"

But I wonder what changed laws of physics will stop a watch or a computer from working that won't also stop a human body from working?

Well, one way out of that dilemma is to say that human bodies do stop working.

I mean, human bodies don't work very well under water or in space, but that doesn't stop us from telling stories in which humans do stuff under water or in space... we simply posit additional structures that keep people alive (aqualungs, space suits, genetically engineered gills, yadda yadda).

In a similar way, if I want to posit that the use of magic causes "machines" to stop working (for whatever reason, or no reason at all), I can posit additional non-"machine" structures that keep people alive.

So, you ask, what are those structures, and what makes them not "machines"? Cuz if they have reliable effects on the world, that makes them machines by any coherent definition in the real world.

And I answer, either I construct my universe in a painstaking way that genuinely supports non-machines (cf our other discussion), or I handwave in some way (e.g., the reason "machines" don't work is that the Great God Whatzit has declared it so and enforces it via divine magic we never explain in the story, and a "machine" for purposes of this story is whatever Whatzit says it is... in which case I can just declare that Whatzit doesn't consider bodies machines. This is most often simply bad writing, but it can be done well.).