Sufficiently advanced fantasy is indistinguishable from SF?

[Shinova]

We know the common saying of the inverse. Now I've had personal thoughts about how many fantasy universes are still depicted with people living mostly medieval lifestyles. So I've been thinking what if magic were advanced enough in a fictional society?

Where they have magical candles that function just like advanced lightbulbs, or building material that's been magically crafted so that it's way stronger than modern construction materials. Carriages that are magically powered so they're like hovering/flying cars. And magical viewportals or something that basically are the equivalent of television, and perhaps function as visual communication devices like videophones. And weapon-wise perhaps something like guns but shooting magic bolts, or high-powered spells for the equivalent of cannons?

Etc, etc. If a magical society were advanced enough I think it would develop physically and somewhat aesthetically to become, with perhaps some exceptions, identical to an advanced sci-fi civilization.

What do you guys think?

[Chaotic Neutral]

The major difference would be the difficulty in mass production. A car factory might be able to make cars with a ton of robots and a few people, but a magical car factory would need hundreds or perhaps thousands of wizards to fill the cars with enough energy to work.

[Shinova]

What if they built something like a magical conduit to automatically imbue each car with energy? If you needed automated labor you could use something like golems or other construct.

[Bakustra]

That depends on whether the writer is using the terminology for comic effect (as in Turtledove's Case of the Toxic Spell Dump) or not. Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos mixes and matches fantastic aspects (the Seal of Solomon, the powers of Hell) with reskinned modern devices (flying carpets for airplanes and cars, etc.) and hybrids (the main character is a werewolf who uses a camera flash designed to simulate the light of a full moon to transform).

On the other hand, somebody that is more interested in how magic would transform society probably would not make his society converge on sci-fi chic or even modernity. China Mieville's Bas-lag novels are somewhat of an example, though most 'high-magic' societies have little screentime within them. Even then, you have common magic tropes (elementals, golems) being pushed to the limit (moonlight elementals, history elementals, light golems, a golem of time and sound) on-page and allusions to even stranger concepts (mossomancy as one example that sticks out). His societies were more high-tech in older times, with weather-control devices, but society has decayed back to the Industrial Revolution.

The major difference would be the difficulty in mass production. A car factory might be able to make cars with a ton of robots and a few people, but a magical car factory would need hundreds or perhaps thousands of wizards to fill the cars with enough energy to work.

You have a very limited imagination.

[Bakustra]

Thinking a little more about this, and setting aside authorial desires, leads me to conclude that it depends entirely on how magic works.
Let's take Harry Potter. You're not going to see the wizards develop sci-fi tech-esque magic (even assuming it's even possible) on their own, since the magic-using population is small, and cannot grow except through birth, and they seem to keep roughly even pace with the non-magic-using population in terms of technological replacements and incorporate bits of their technology. So you'd probably see in a cyberpocalyptic future altered cybernetics rather than home-developed wizard ones.

But to contrast, let's take Dungeons and Dragons (extrapolating from 4e rules), home to some of the most banal fantasy settings. Magic here is a skill that can be learned, and more importantly, it can be learned at a basic level with relative ease. In addition, magic-users are not necessarily gods among men who could be expected to establish oligarchies. So you'd expect that the average person would, as society becomes more literate, pick up basic magic rituals, such as the magic-lock spell, the universal-translator spell, and so on, but in addition, people would also pick up the magic-unlock spell, and so on. You'd then probably see a race between people trying to improve each spell.

In fact, you could quickly extrapolate this to information technology and corporate espionage. Granted, this would be difficult to do without making it a farce.

However, the major change would come with resurrection. Spells for reviving the dead are available. Now imagine that the dead can be revived for a nominal fee- and you'd have constant effort to push costs down. Suddenly, society changes significantly. Death through misadventure would no longer be permanent- the only permanent deaths would come from old age, massive bodily harm, or rare magical effects (or divine intervention). Life insurance would become much more specialized, if it even took off at all. Murder would become less serious of a crime unless it brought permanent death. There'd probably be other implications that I can't see. That's somewhat similar to transhumanist stuff about uploading, but without any of the debate- you legitimately die and are brought back.

The shape of the world is dependent on how magic works within it. But in general, where magic is capable of being used by a wide range of society, then it probably would converge upon sci-fi chic, for a give value of sci-fi. But it probably wouldn't go through the same steps along the way.

[Majin Gojira]

Mahou Shojo Lyrical Nanoha. That is all that needs to be said.

That franchise takes "Sufficiently Advanced" and runs with it to very different places, combining Giant Robot show sensibilities and aesthetics with magical girl trappings. The characters use magic to power their technology. It's a part of them and all member worlds in their Federation-like Dimensional Administration Bureau (or Time-Space Administration Bureau, the recent movie has the former) have magic users as part of the regular population. Hell, the costumes they wear as mages are actually part of their magic shielding/armor.

Dragon Summoners, clones with the magical imprinted memories of a dead child, combat cyborgs, wielders of Tomes of Eldritch Lore, Werewolf-like familiars, fairy-like "unison devices" and life forms composed entirely of data exist peacefully together on the same team.

Hell, look at the last opening for Nanoha Strikers. Laser swords, dragons, combat cyborgs, fairies, nuns-knights, space ships, magical girls, giant monsters and combat drones. All powered and used via magic.

[Gunhead]

I think this has been discussed before and it usually boils down to magic becoming just another part of the universe we need to understand. For example this is just what the mages in Ars Magica are doing. They're attempting to create a unified theory of magic that would explain how and why their spells work, so they can replicate the results every time. The key point here being able to get the same result consistently.
Magic should be applied in applications where it provides capabilities made impossible by normal physics or is otherwise superior to more mundane methods (cost, ease of use, resources etc.)
How introduction of magic would affect the study of the natural world and the natural world itself is a sum of so many variables, it would be good to have a baseline on just how sci-fi are we going for here and what kind magic are we talking about?

-Gunhead

[xt828]

The Age of Legends from the Wheel of Time is suggested to have been along those lines, iirc - there was mention at one point of the "Standing Weaves" of magical energy, with a modern bad-guy wondering why on earth they'd want to let the little people have magic.

[Connor MacLeod]

If you disregard alot of semantics over definitions and word meanings, and actually look at and measure the capabilities, you probably could see alot of "magical" analogues to "advanced technology" - although for the most part they'll functionally be the same (high tech stuff is as "magical" as magic is, or psionics, or whatever, it's just different labels.) The usual bar to some really high tech stuff is the implied power balance - if you have wizards who can routinely throw around nuclear level energies that would cause a problem wouldn't it (imagine how that would influence politics and the like.) Wands and staves could stand in for rayguns. Magical crossbows or bows and arrows (like that magic bow from RA Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels) that appear to do firearm-level damage, and so on. If that stuff is common enough then it could emulate supposedly "modern" or "sci fi" capabilities. Or even exceed (teleportation spells tend to be a more commonly accepted feature in fantasy than neccesarily in sci fi, for example, yet imagine how they impact things like mobility.)

Of course, that tends to be a big problem with making any ral conclusions based off this - fantasy authors will not neccesarily put any more "depth" into their fantasy than sci fi authors might put into fiction. (now I have this mental image of a "hard fantasy" genre, where there is little or no magic.. hehehe.) But fantasy is definitely prone to lots of recycling of concepts (especially Tolkien standbys, but D&D gets recycled sometimes as well, as well as recylcing bits from elsewhere itself.)

[Zor]

In this regard, Golems are probably the biggest example of Fantasy used in a science fiction sense because when you get down to it they are a catagory of Robot. Especially if you don't have to make them anthropomorphic or be selective, these things could drive an Industrial Revolution on their own.

Zor

[Guardsman Bass]

now I have this mental image of a "hard fantasy" genre, where there is little or no magic.. hehehe.

That would basically be like historical fiction in a fictional setting. Some fantasy authors get close to that, like Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarentine Mosaic (which is a thinly veiled analogy to the eastern Roman Empire).

In this regard, Golems are probably the biggest example of Fantasy used in a science fiction sense because when you get down to it they are a catagory of Robot. Especially if you don't have to make them anthropomorphic or be selective, these things could drive an Industrial Revolution on their own.

They'd do wonders on assembly lines.

[SAMAS]

Mahou Shojo Lyrical Nanoha. That is all that needs to be said.

That franchise takes "Sufficiently Advanced" and runs with it to very different places, combining Giant Robot show sensibilities and aesthetics with magical girl trappings. The characters use magic to power their technology. It's a part of them and all member worlds in their Federation-like Dimensional Administration Bureau (or Time-Space Administration Bureau, the recent movie has the former) have magic users as part of the regular population. Hell, the costumes they wear as mages are actually part of their magic shielding/armor.

Dragon Summoners, clones with the magical imprinted memories of a dead child, combat cyborgs, wielders of Tomes of Eldritch Lore, Werewolf-like familiars, fairy-like "unison devices" and life forms composed entirely of data exist peacefully together on the same team.

Hell, look at the last opening for Nanoha Strikers. Laser swords, dragons, combat cyborgs, fairies, nuns-knights, space ships, magical girls, giant monsters and combat drones. All powered and used via magic.

However, evidence seems to point that Mid-Chlidia was a technology-oriented world that later discovered magic, then eventually used it to basically replace the mundane stuff where applicable. So you basically have a Gundam-UFP where everything is run by magic instead of/providing electricity.

But I think you would need to define the capabilities and limitations of magic a little more thoroughly. In Nanoha, for example, they have a pretty much scientific understanding of how Magic works about as extensive as we do with electricity or nuclear physics (somewhere between the two, I would think). Stuff like how easy is it to learn magic (is it only a certain portion of the population with an innate talent/link, or can anybody learn with enough training?), are stuff like transmutation and resurrection possible/easy, can magic be shaped into simple patterns (basically, can you program/automate it?), things like that. For example, in both The Sword in the Stone and Negima, a wizard is shown using magic to enchant normal objects to automatically perform a single task (washing dishes/Asuna respectively), with varying levels of success. Such magic could easily be used to create an unceasing assembly line.

Or let's take something simple like Flight. If anyone can do magic of that level, the civilization probably wouldn't ever develop things like cars or airplanes. They'd probably also take to three-dimensional thinking a lot easier.

On the other hand, if not everyone can become a mage, or if magic levels vary greatly within the population, the civilization may end up developing into a Magocracy (Rule by users of Magic) or a form of Mage-Meritocracy where one's social position is influenced by how much magic they can wield.

In this regard, Golems are probably the biggest example of Fantasy used in a science fiction sense because when you get down to it they are a catagory of Robot. Especially if you don't have to make them anthropomorphic or be selective, these things could drive an Industrial Revolution on their own.

Zor

As I recall, Golems preceded robots. So it's the other way around.

now I have this mental image of a "hard fantasy" genre, where there is little or no magic.. hehehe.

A few Low Fantasy worlds are like that.

[Sarevok]

I think Warhammer 40000 would be the perfect example of sufficiently advanced fantasy masquerading as science fiction. Its a high fantasy world with interplanetary travel. No offense to 40Kers intended. I think the setting actually works better if you see it from that point of view instead of treating it like Star Trek or Wars.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I think Warhammer 40000 would be the perfect example of sufficiently advanced fantasy masquerading as science fiction. Its a high fantasy world with interplanetary travel. No offense to 40Kers intended. I think the setting actually works better if you see it from that point of view instead of treating it like Star Trek or Wars.

Except of course there has been an established genre for the likes of W40k since the 1960s and that is science fantasy. Star Wars original trilogy could also be classified as science fantasy, although it has less fantasy than W40k, so most people just classified it as science fiction for simplicity. Now with prequels and midichlorians the science fantasy argument has become even weaker than it was, albeit that is a blatant retcon. Some people also seem to take offense on classifying Star Wars as science fantasy, like it would make it any less valuable.

Is still think the mark of true fantasy is that the magic is somewhat unpredictable and requires arcane knowledge or good relationships with gods, elementals and the like to use. In other words magic is essentially unquantifiable. If it can be understood as a mechanistic force with repeatable effects that can be observed with scientific empirical methods, we are talking more about alternate reality scifi than fantasy.

This is of course a philosophic question and in some ways the overall feel of the text or show is more important for genre classification than what actually happens. For example D&D feels like fatty nerd bullshit, which is still cozy for anyone with nerd sensibilities and can be great fun because of that

[Bakustra]

I've always been pretty leery about using the mechanistic/mystical divide to define fantasy, because, just as an example, you'd have to reclassify Lord of the Rings , China Mieville, Ursula LeGuin if you wanted to apply it strictly. I'd venture to guess that the majority of fantasy would be declassified as such if we took the divide seriously. Of the works I'm familiar with, only The King of Elfland's Daughter might fit the classification. But classifying speculative fiction in general is difficult at best.

We could salvage it to be whether we have a scientific approach to inquiry or not, and then together with the basic trappings and terminology create a fairly robust four-category system for sci-fi and fantasy, but even then I suspect that it would be faulty at some critical junction.

I mainly brought up D&D because it's such a mess and hodgepodge of ideas and so banal in its 'high fantasy' settings (its minor ones are much better, though.).

[Vendetta]

However, evidence seems to point that Mid-Chlidia was a technology-oriented world that later discovered magic, then eventually used it to basically replace the mundane stuff where applicable. So you basically have a Gundam-UFP where everything is run by magic instead of/providing electricity.

We've not seen much to indicate how Mid-Childa developed technologically, though apparently quite a lot of it's more serious magical technology is handed down from Belka, and through them from Al-Hazard.

Their day to day technology (ie. everything except dimension hopping starships) isn't really that much advanced beyond that of Earth.

For instance, by the time of StrikerS large sections of Cranagan are still all blowed up from Precia's little accident that happened a decade or more before the events of the first season (so 20 years in total), so there's obviously not a simple magical fix for a half ruined major modern city.

[Darth Hoth]

I think Warhammer 40000 would be the perfect example of sufficiently advanced fantasy masquerading as science fiction. Its a high fantasy world with interplanetary travel. No offense to 40Kers intended. I think the setting actually works better if you see it from that point of view instead of treating it like Star Trek or Wars.

This.

[Broomstick]

We know the common saying of the inverse. Now I've had personal thoughts about how many fantasy universes are still depicted with people living mostly medieval lifestyles. So I've been thinking what if magic were advanced enough in a fictional society?

Where they have magical candles that function just like advanced lightbulbs, or building material that's been magically crafted so that it's way stronger than modern construction materials. Carriages that are magically powered so they're like hovering/flying cars. And magical viewportals or something that basically are the equivalent of television, and perhaps function as visual communication devices like videophones. And weapon-wise perhaps something like guns but shooting magic bolts, or high-powered spells for the equivalent of cannons?

Etc, etc. If a magical society were advanced enough I think it would develop physically and somewhat aesthetically to become, with perhaps some exceptions, identical to an advanced sci-fi civilization.

What do you guys think?

I think Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series is a fine example of what you're talking about, including things like magical lighting equivalent to electrical lighting, magically crafted building materials, flying carriages, magical communication systems, and Holy Fuck! levels of magical weapons.

The various alien races are just a bonus.

[lance]

I was going to say Scrapped Princess, but that is the complete opposite.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I think Warhammer 40000 would be the perfect example of sufficiently advanced fantasy masquerading as science fiction. Its a high fantasy world with interplanetary travel. No offense to 40Kers intended. I think the setting actually works better if you see it from that point of view instead of treating it like Star Trek or Wars.

This.

It does not fit the OP description. In W40k technology based on science and magic live side-by-side, therefore it is science fantasy. Even if you go by Bakustra's idea that mysticism and unpredictability is not a good way to tell the difference between science and fantasy (which is quite debatable: why is LotR or Earthsea magic mechanistic and therefore comparable to science? I don't see it.), the 40k universe internally has two different traditions, the science and technology coming from the Dark Age of Science (and also the pre-fall Eldar empire) and the Warp/Chaos stuff, which is fantasy.

[SAMAS]

Well, there's always going to be the question of Technology. That is to say, what the civilization's level of technology was before it switched to Magic.

[Gunhead]

I don't see it as switch to or from magic, it's more of a parallel development with one area taking dominant role, in this case magic. I'm reminded of a magic system where mages just momentarily "borrow" the laws of physics from another world existing somewhere in time and space to make their "spells" happen. Of course, the more you want to make physics your bitch, the "farther" you have to go in order to find a place that meets your requirements.

-Gunhead

[Bakustra]

I think Warhammer 40000 would be the perfect example of sufficiently advanced fantasy masquerading as science fiction. Its a high fantasy world with interplanetary travel. No offense to 40Kers intended. I think the setting actually works better if you see it from that point of view instead of treating it like Star Trek or Wars.

This.

It does not fit the OP description. In W40k technology based on science and magic live side-by-side, therefore it is science fantasy. Even if you go by Bakustra's idea that mysticism and unpredictability is not a good way to tell the difference between science and fantasy (which is quite debatable: why is LotR or Earthsea magic mechanistic and therefore comparable to science? I don't see it.), the 40k universe internally has two different traditions, the science and technology coming from the Dark Age of Science (and also the pre-fall Eldar empire) and the Warp/Chaos stuff, which is fantasy.

I call them mechanistic because they are predictable in their effects. In LOTR, you speak the password to a Dwarven door and it will open. Speak a spell of fire aloud and you can set a pinecone alight. Earthsea is the same way, but with true names instead. A non-mechanistic magic cannot be called a system at all, and would be native to a remote and alien universe and/or set of assumptions. You could write a story like that, or incorporate something like it into a larger setting (Mieville's Torque from his Bas-lag novels is probably the closest that I'm familiar with), but such stories don't really make up a meaningful percentage of fantasy.

Well, there's always going to be the question of Technology. That is to say, what the civilization's level of technology was before it switched to Magic.

That's an unusual method of thinking. In, say, Lord of the Rings or Earthsea, magic is essential to the fabric of the universe, and it is highly unlikely that any civilization in either 'switched' to magic. Magic was always there and the society developed with it. Very few fantasy worlds are about magic just dropping in one day.

[The Grim Squeaker]

I call them mechanistic because they are predictable in their effects. In LOTR, you speak the password to a Dwarven door and it will open. Speak a spell of fire aloud and you can set a pinecone alight. Earthsea is the same way, but with true names instead. A non-mechanistic magic cannot be called a system at all, and would be native to a remote and alien universe and/or set of assumptions. You could write a story like that, or incorporate something like it into a larger setting (Mieville's Torque from his Bas-lag novels is probably the closest that I'm familiar with), but such stories don't really make up a meaningful percentage of fantasy.
.

I'm not sure if that's correct to say,
Meiville's system as a whole is EXTREMELY Mechanistic (magic is energy, right down to Thaumatorgon radiation, and batteries replacing blood sacrifices), and while Torque is chaotic in the extreme, that doesn't mean it's not mechanistic - just incredibly dangerous & unpredictable. But it does have a few rules associated, common effects (there were multiple Cockroach trees for example), and doesn't manifest "magically" for no reason, as opposed to magic being "magic" .
It's been a while since I read PErdido street station, so I might be confusing warnings (He was focused on explaining why Torque was A Bad Idea (tm)) with outright reliableobjective descriptions.

Another example of high magic would be the Malazan books - The K'Chain Che'Malle (Giant lizards) had giant interdimensional floating city fortresses - that either used technology or gravitic magic. It's hard to say. They made a continent (or other huge landmass, I forget) flat like steel, either with magic or their technology, and had genetic engineering combined with genealogy wide magical "concentration" (They remade an older sub-species -(Short tails), who also apparently used some sort of energy gun for combat.).
Descriptions of them focus on magic, and their matrons, making it hard to distinguish technology from magic, which seems to be the point here.

(Waits for someone to Ream him on his crappy memory of the books & Dust of Dreams in particular)

[mr friendly guy]

Other fantasy worlds which behave like an equivalent to tech base ones is

a) Harry Turtledove's "Darkness" series down to having the magical equivalent of a nuke in a WWII like setting.

b) Red Star - not that I read it, but apparently the Soviet analogues use magic which has been industrialised and they are defeated by the Afghanistan analogue when their holy leader unleashes some awesome magic, which leads into the beginning of the series.

c) So called science fantasy things like Rifts, Shadowrun, Masters of the universe where magic and science are separate might fall into this category, in the sense that the tech does similar things to tech in sci fi worlds, but they also have the added power of magic

d) one of my favourites, the world of Ciress from the comic book "Mystic." They have the magical equivalent of flying cars, guns, television (viewed through a crystal ball), airforce etc. Oh, and they have humongous golems. Too bad CG comics went bust, because I really liked that series.