ann_leckie | (no subject)

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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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In other words, in any universe where magic works, magic is going to be observable and testable

-->That's a hell of an assumption right there.

This is why it's called "fantasy." Because you can make up the rules. And the rules might include "There are reasons things don't work at seemingly random times, but the denizens of this world haven't figured those reasons out." If it's something at an atomic level and they don't have particle accellerators, it's going to be a little hard for them to study.

I mean, science is not just about new discoveries; it's also about refinements of old discoveries. People were able to design and use mass-throwers (catapults, trebuchets, etc) long before Newton sussed out his equations. And at nonrelatavistic speeds, folks nowadays are perfectly happy to use Newton's good-enough equations rather than breaking out the more accurate, but square-root-laden, Einsteinian equations.

So why should it seem so strange that people would say, "Hey, this magic works most of the time, but sometimes it doesn't"? If it works often enough, well enough, then that'll do. If magic is rare, and the economy doesn't have a lot of extra resources, then who's going to bother establishing research facilities for it? I mean, it might be more sensible to accept that magic is a little wobbly, but right now we need to work on the more dependable issue of growing enough food to support the peasantry.

And if they do establish research facilities, are they necessarily interested in sharing that knowledge? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep that for themselves, and continue to promulgate the "magic is mysterious and hard" line amongst everyone else?

So why should it seem so strange that people would say, "Hey, this magic works most of the time, but sometimes it doesn't"? If it works often enough, well enough, then that'll do. If magic is rare, and the economy doesn't have a lot of extra resources, then who's going to bother establishing research facilities for it? I mean, it might be more sensible to accept that magic is a little wobbly, but right now we need to work on the more dependable issue of growing enough food to support the peasantry.

It doesn't seem strange at all. And, in fact, that was, I think, more or less the position of lots of people and cultures for a very long time--not coincidentally those people and cultures include the very societies fantasy authors like to draw on for stories.

And if they do establish research facilities, are they necessarily interested in sharing that knowledge? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep that for themselves, and continue to promulgate the "magic is mysterious and hard" line amongst everyone else?

Sure, why not? I never said otherwise. My point is not that fantasy is bad, or magic in fantasy is bad. Nor was my point that everyone in any given fantasy world ought to understand the mechanisms of whatever it is they're calling magic.

My point was, basing an entire world on the opposition of magic and technology is a fundamentally flawed idea, for really basic reasons. Clarke's Law is just a tidy, easily quoted explanation of why that is.

Okay, I think I see what you mean.

So then the question becomes, does tech really not work, or have the locals simply not developed it? Or does the tech work differently?

Someone upstream noted the Zelazny thing: gunpowder doesn't burn in Amber, but Earth's jeweler's rouge burns quick and works as an adequate substitute. One could say it handwaves away because Amber and all its Shadows are created on the basis of chaos--there literally are no rules, no physical constants, just local conditions.

I think I might understand your point more if you could provide me a concrete example. Have you read something lately where the writer declared, "Magic works here and tech doesn't"? Was this just the writer talking, or was it the narrator or a character?

Why would someone in a fantasy world know about our tech? Sixty years ago, the idea that someday ordinary people would be carrying around cheap devices that have more computing power than existed in the entire 1950s world was wild fantasy.

I haven't actually read much published work with the premise that "magic works instead of science." Partly because, I suspect, it's not tenable. The conversation I mention in the post happened on a message board, where the members were all working on novels, and people were describing the premise of their stories. One poster announced they were working on a story set in a world where "magic works instead of science," and when they were questioned answered that they'd meant that science=technology. So that, say, airplanes wouldn't fly, but vehicles powered by mana, or demons, or whatever, would. (I don't think the poster specified the nature of the magic, only that cars and planes and such would work by magic "instead of" science.)

I strongly suspect this author has never been published--subsequent conversation showed that they were...not in the habit of thinking out the implications of their ideas.

I don't mind handwaving, like in Amber. The existence of the handwaving tells me the issue was at least considered.

And I'm not criticizing fantasy, or some body of published work. Lots of fantasy has holes in its worldbuilding--including philosophical/scientific holes related to this issue--and I have no problem with it, so long as I enjoy reading it. Mithras knows, I've got a worldbuilding kink and I would be utterly unsurprised to have someone point out holes in my own worldbuilding. That's the breaks.

No, the post is really just a random indignant rant triggered by that memory, triggered by Rachel telling me I should post my reversed Clarke's Law (which was, I gather, triggered by her own thinking about the issue as she's working on a "magic is real in this world" fantasy). I tossed it off and went to bed and then...woah! :)

Why would someone in a fantasy world know about our tech? Sixty years ago, the idea that someday ordinary people would be carrying around cheap devices that have more computing power than existed in the entire 1950s world was wild fantasy.

This is, of course, an additional problem. In a society where "magical" means are preferred to mechanical ones (because it's really not possible that mechanical means won't work at all, not as a general principle) there's no real reason why magical tech would take forms that looked particularly similar to "real world" mechanical tech. Working that out could be really interesting, IMO--in a world where magic works, technological development will have taken a very different course than ours, and tech will look very different. That could be some really cool worldbuilding.

Specifically, space travel in such a world would be a wicked cool thing to ponder!

Actually, I'm writing book three of a trilogy with magic used to go to outerspace right now. It's probably another unpublishable flight of fantasy of mine, and in some ways a serious pain in the ass, because if magic is that reliable (you damn well don't want life-support spells failing while in a freezing cold near vacuum filled with solar radiation) and advanced, what is life like? Once I have the rough draft of book three finished, I'll start pitching the trilogy to agents and see if anyone bites. As I've been writing books 2 and 3, I have to keep going back to book 1 and making minor changes for the sake of continuity and foreshadowing.

Yeah, that's a real worldbuilding poser, isn't it. :)

Oh, I see what you're getting at, now. Yes, I quite agree--those sort of worlds are untenable unless the author specifically postulates that Randomness Happens Here. That tends to lead to surrealistic things, such as Alice in Wonderland or other "dream sequence" sort of stories.

It can also work if the author avoids the question altogether while remaining internally consistent, e.g. all those comic strips or cartoons with a talking animal character, but there are no other talking animals. It's one small change, and the fact that none of the characters notices it's weird is not asking too much of the reader/viewer's ability to suspend disbelief. I suspect that sort of thing works much better in a visual medium than in prose.

This may be semi-related to a conversation that happened a while back--I can't remember on whose blog--discussing magic being plentiful or rare in a fantasy world. I think if it's rare, an author can get away with a lot more handwaving and a lot fewer ripples in the worldbuilding. If it's common, the writer has a lot of work to make things internally consistent and follow their postulations to their logical conclusions.

That might well be why theology (which in the Middle Ages included science, philosophy, law...) reached its peak in the High Middle Ages. It was such a prosperous time that monks had to convince people to quit their jobs and be poor so they could fulfill their vows of charity. That was when Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, three of the top brains in Catholic theology, did their work. To find a theologian more important than them, you have to go all the way back to Augustine, who had the benefit of a (literally) classical education. It was such a safe time that Albertus walked all over Europe interviewing herbalists (a less theologically confident future would call them witches) to collect data on local cures.

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