I'm going to define magitech for my purposes here as technology (in the sense of items that appear industrial, mechanical, or electronic) that is powered by magic. I tend to like magitech when it is done well, but I find it often isn't done well, in my judgement. I've spent some time thinking about what for me constitutes "doing it well" versus not.
There are, I think, different types of magitech in media, and the one that almost always works for me is what I would call naive. Naive magitech occurs when the portrayal of something mythic, fairytale-like (and I think those are the two most common modes) just happens to feature some trappings of technology. Stories with naive magitech give the impression the technology they feature is just assumed in the same way Medieval or early modern tech is just assumed in traditional fairytales. Baum's Oz includes elements of this, but so do the New Gods related series from Kirby, or other works of later creators working in a Kirby mode.
I revisited the Blackstar (1981) cartoon series not too long ago, and it has a great example in the episode "Lightning City of the Clouds." Crios the Ice-King is trying to stop Spring from coming to the Planet Sagar, keeping the planet in eternal winter. He attempts to steal the key to springtime with his fortress that flies on a cloud and appears to be made of ice. That fortress also has a futuristic-appearing control room (draped with icicles) complete with a video screen where he can talk to his boss, Overlord.
It's a setting that makes no attempt separate science fiction and fantasy. We might well call it science fantasy, though that term also covers works that include things clearly defined diegetically as scientific, but are utterly implausible. What I'm interest in here is fantastic technology that is understood within the story as magical or at least implicitly such.
Other examples of magitech, what is more traditional meant by that term, occur when magic is used to replicate something close to modern or science fictional technology. Unlike the naive magitech, it is often part of a rationalized or systemized portrayal of magic, but not necessarily. It's this sort of magitech that can often go wrong because it ends up with obvious cliches (magic carpet taxis, magic wands for guns) or the Rube Goldbergian devices on Flintstones or Gilligan's Island where it becomes a joke based around, "just how are they gonna build this device?"
I find both of these approaches unsatisfying because not only are they often silly (intentionally or unintentionally) but because they make the fantastic mundane.
I think good magitech ought to aim to do the opposite: make the mundane fantastic.
How does that work? Well, I think magitech should general not be identical to a scientific technical solution to the problem. There ought to be new (and interesting) complications and implications. I'll give a couple of examples: In the comic book series The Outer Darkness, the starship is powered by a captive god who demands sacrifice. This has all sorts of implications for how one might coax more power from the engines or what an engine breakdown looks like. A containment breach becomes a whole different sort of danger.
In my Weird Adventures setting there are radio para-elementals. Their existence suggests something about the physics of the setting, making it more aligned with fantasy, but also brings up interesting complications for radio operation.
There are lots of other examples, but you get the idea. In summary, I guess my pitch is: if you are going to include magitech, think about what it implies about how the world is different from the one we know. That doesn't mean you need a rigorously worked out "magic system." It just means putting though into how technology and the world it exists in are of a piece.
5 comments:
I disagree about categorizing New Gods as featuring magitech (naive or otherwise), or magic at all for that matter. It's all Clarke-tech, and Mother Boxes are a prime example of such. The closest you get to outright magic would be manifestations of the Source, but that's more mysticism than a system of magic, and can just as easily be interpreted as what Clarke-tech looks like to a culture that uses what we'd call Clarke-tech in everyday life. There are levels to that broad category, even if poor everyday mundane humans may not be able to discern a difference.
I don't think that's clear in the text. I would agree it can be interpreted as Clarketech, but the mythic origins of Apokolips and New Genesis (materially from the remains of old gods), and the existence of avatars of death like Black Racer, and the very fact that they are gods makes me lean in the magitech direction, much in the same way I would with the Asgardian tech at Marvel.
I am also fond of the "magitech" (though only the "naive" variety, as you describe it).
Great for Halloween, when the "veil" is thinner than usual, apparently. I like where this takes us. For me, the line between "magic," magitech and technology is more of a venn diagram (or maybe more to the point, a veve or semiconductor map):
1. Just about everybody wants to engineer outcomes. We want stuff.
2. Some outcomes are excluded from the methods available in an assumed baseline level of scientific development: "you just can't do that" or you can't do that in a way that satisfies your situation (economics, access, education, vibes).
3. Any methodology distinguishable from technology is "magic," which means this is the universe of activity that includes everything excluded from the scientific mainstream: ritual, cargo cult style emulation, art, psychoanalysis, cosplay, fringe or rejected science. (Hey, these are the "traditions" in Mage.)
4. Some magic works to the point where its outcomes are indistinguishable from technology: you get what you want or you get what you need by a variant route.
5. Some technology works so well that the observer would be hard pressed to explain how it works or what it did. This may engender an emotional response (awe, fear, even love) or simply reveal itself as boredom, we get what we want (fantastic) and the mechanisms are not worth investigating (mundane).
6. Explanations that aim to suspend the pressure of disbelief tend to be magical even in an ostensibly technological environment: Scotty checks the slide rule, tweaks the crystal and the nacelle goes hum. This is because we are telling a story to render a fantastic experience mundane enough for a mass audience to accept. Other stories are effectively thought experiments: how would life think different, what if. When the babble emulates technical vocabulary it verges on magic. When the babble becomes structured like technical discourse it becomes a Harold Shea story.
7. When multiple conflicting explanations exist, some will be rejected and become "magic." This doesn't mean they're wrong.
8. There will always be specialists. Whether you call one a technician or a magician is a matter of taste and etiquette. For specialists, this stuff is predictable, mundane. For their public, it can get mystifying but as long as it works few care that much. Every story has its audience.
Good points all around, though the thing that real resonates here is the implication of a "folk consensus." How does Scott's actions in your explain render the fantastic mundane and in what sense is it mundane? His ritual there gives the audience the scientific figleaf they need to view this magical (and unscientific ultimately) business as acceptable or plausible within the arena of science fiction.
It doesn't require much. Regular readers of sci-fi or all but the most skeptical novices accept things like FTL and force shields readily regardless of the scientific implausibility or at times logical problems, if they thought about hard enough. In fact, Star Wars easily passes the bar of science fiction whereas Garfinkle's rigorous and logically derived Aristotlean physics in Celestial Matters would seem to many readers to be fantasy, because it of its unconventionality.
This is, I think, the core difference between so many rigorously thought out magic systems and the magitech that I like. Most of those magic systems work like concepts the reader is already familiar with just with a few novel rules that are easy to understand. Magitech I like often comes from work that are often rigorous in their systemization, but begin at an unfamiliar point and often go to interesting ends. In a way, Keyes' Children of the Changeling duology is perhaps more science fictional in the strictest sense than any of Sanderson's well-thought out magic systems, but Sanderson's systems are more "plug and play" with the Western readers' existing schema.
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