(no subject)

[ann_leckie]

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

Comments

[dpolicar]

I think a lot of surrealism plays with the concept of a fundamentally non-predictable universe.

Yeah, I suppose. At some point I guess it becomes a question of authorial voice more than anything else... if you write a story that hinges on the unpredictability of life, it arguably doesn't matter whether you're positing it as a fundamental objective ontological fact or whether you're just sympathizing with the subjective experience of not being able to predict what comes next.

I'm wondering about something like Alice in Wonderland. Of course, we can also read that as allegory or character-driven.

Sure, or as a dream story. (Which is kind of like an allegory, I guess, but lacks quite so clear a sense of what it's an allegory for.)

Then again, AinW never really gets into the underlying ontology of Wonderland... it simply doesn't matter to Alice, so it doesn't come up. Stuff just happens, and it doesn't make a lot of sense, and that's OK.

I'm reminded of Larry Niven's Inferno, in which an SF writer winds up traveling through Hell as portrayed by Dante. The protagonist spends most of the book trying to work out the underlying physics of what he assumes is some kind of Inferno-themed Disneyworld, and the underlying motives of what he assumes are the aliens who put him there, and finally just gives up in disgust and accepts the universe he's in at face value.