Musings on magitech
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19 December 2018

Some speculative fiction authors like high-tech. Others prefer fantasy. Quite a few write both. Not nearly enough combine them, for reasons I can only guess at. It's kind of silly, considering the two biggest franchises ever mix them together freely: Star Wars more blatantly with its Force ghosts and prophecies, Star Trek disguising its gods and spirits as omnipotent beings and energy-based life forms, respectively. But to each their own.

Recently I've been following a couple of fantasy webcomics that rely heavily on magitech. To spare you a trip to TVTropes, that's when magic is so commonplace and reliable it can provide all the modern comforts, such as smartphones and computers, while still being based on glowy runes and wand-waving. (Presumably they have refrigeration as well, not that fantasy authors ever seem to remember one of the most disruptive inventions in the modern era.) It's kind of Clarke's Third Law in reverse, though most such settings settle for less advancement. And something about it puzzles me.

Isn't the whole point of magic in fiction to be a mysterious, fickle force people may be able to use, but never truly master? If you want high-tech, why not use actual tech? Fine, so you'd rather not mix flavors (see Star Trek above), but when your fantasy characters carry glowy screens in their pockets they can use to chat across the planet and look stuff up in magical libraries... I'd say you've already mixed things up. Might as well own up to it.

Better yet, unless it's important for the story, why bother explaining what all those advances happen to be based on in your setting, one way or the other? I tried, and it wasn't at all hard to write the first two chapters of a story without once mentioning a technical or magical term. The setting did end up resembling Dune, not that anyone remarked on it, but I even managed to have obvious elves and dwarfs without using either word once.

For some reason, it's Japanese creators who usually come up with these "weird Earth" settings that are almost, but not entirely unlike the real world. And we only seem to notice the giant robots, or else the magical girls.