All these youngsters forgetting about He-man
Do you think a story that mixes magic with super advanced technology can work?
Submitted 10 months ago by Hickak@lemmy.world to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Comments
FenrirIII@lemmy.world 10 months ago
MITM0@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Anime does this all the time; Especially the ISEKAI-Genre
Jarix@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yes. Many wireless already exist.
Comic books do this all the time.
And Wandavision is about as nail on head as you are going to get
Magic is Supermans only real weakness aside from kryptonite
Warhamer 40k
Starcraft
League of Legends
Final fantasy
The Palladium Rifts RPG
Dune
Starwars
_core@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Tad Williams did a decent job in “War of the flowers” There was tech comparable to early 2000’s (smartphones, electricity, cars, etc) but was powered by magic, and magic itself was still capable of being used.
shaggyb@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Star Wars did for a while.
drmoose@lemmy.world 10 months ago
As in entertainment - yes. But when it comes to realistic representation and imagination as sci-fi then no.
it’s really difficult as all magic that we understand is just science. To create this artificial gap the world has to answer - why can’t science understand, reverse engineer and bend magic?
Most scientific progression is very rapid. If fireballs exist then there will be a giant 1,000 rpm fireball machine by the end of the week and that’s no longer magic ad we see it.
So there has to be a strong artificial limitation why magic exists and cannot be understood and harvested which is really hard to write in scifi. You have to introduce religion, spiritual mysticism or some sort of societal control mechanism that prevents reverse engineering magic which is really hard to do in a way that satisfies the readers cognitive dissonance.
Personally I have found stories like that like Warhammer 40k, Star Wars etc. But without a big, establishrd name it’s so hard to convince the reader. I recently finished the wheel of time and really couldn’t get over this which ruined the entire presume of the show for me.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 10 months ago
DCEU/MCU does this alot. Klarion the chaos lord use chaos magic(different from wanda’s magic) to control starro nanotech, they call it techno-sorcery/magic-tech. but this will never occurs in sci-fi though, since magic isnt really a thing(maginery) when technology and science is used to explain the nature of the universe is involved.
theTarrasque@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Shadowrun… yeah it works
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Sure. Maybe the advanced tech is powered by magic, maybe the “magic” is just lost advanced technology.
psion1369@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Isn’t that what SheRa used? Magic was an energy to be harnessed by the technology.
djgenesis@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Arcane
I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I always liked the Dresden Files take on technology and magic. It’s not that they can’t exist in the same universe, it’s that magic causes absolute haywire with circuitry. So you can use technology, or you can use magic, but not both.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 10 months ago
It becomes less of a thing as the series progresses.
IhaveCrabs111@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Definitely not. I give no reason.
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This was super common in the 1960s and 70s when hippies where the ones writing sci fi and the thought was that technological advancement would also come along with spiritual advancement to the point of supernatural powers. Star Wars, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many others freely blend the supernatural with the technological. Sure it’s not D&D magic with fireballs and shit but it’s still magic. Further, if you want to look at a modern IP with this vibe look at World of Warcraft, where there are aliens from space with spaceships and shit with one of the most stereotypical fantasy settings you can imagine.
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
In Attack on Titan, magic (titan powers) had historically an edge over humanity, but the story is in part about how Humanity’s technology has advanced to almost surpass those magical powers and shift the power balance.
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld the wizards of the Unseen University built a possibly sentient supercomputer out of an ant farm (much faster and more powerful than previous druid-built computers based on standing stones, which were mostly limited to calendar calculations and required regular human sacrifices).
The Agathean Empire at the edge of the disc has little boxes with little imps inside which can paint a picture of what you point the box at in mere seconds.
Later, some Ankh-Morpork entrepreneurs trained imps to paint even faster on highly flammable nitrocellulose reels and, moving them very fast and lighting them from behind with excited salamanders, invented moving pictures (and promptly accidentally almost let the Things from the Dungeon Dimensions enter the disc).
Even later, some other Ankh-Morpork entrepreneurs created a continent-spanning network of semaphore telegraphs, even managing to send pictures through it.
All while some Dwarves in Ankh-Morpork invented movable type, while getting in trouble with the wizards, who’re well aware that you can’t use that to print magic books, for the type will remember…
And, all along, deep under their mountains, the Überwaldian dwarves have been digging up and using ancient Devices to power whole cities…
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Absolutely, there are lots of examples, but the first that comes to mind is Warhammer 40k, they have super advanced technology and magic coexisting and sometimes intermingling.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 10 months ago
It’s not magic, it’s extra-dimensional energy!
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sure, and by that definition it’s also not magic in LoTR
Talonflame@lemmy.cafe 10 months ago
Yes. It’s worked very well in the recent Zelda games
pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
Absolutely. Read the nightlord series, just skip through the first half of book one, it’s the first thing the author ever wrote and could have used better editing for sure. High tech kicks in at book 3
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Yes. Do a time travel story and new tech will be seen as miraculous magic by those pesky Elizabethans.
rekabis@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
We have high technology because we don’t have anything else to leverage.
I suspect a world with strong magic is liable to leverage that to the exclusion of technology.
A now-ended iseki story on Reddit’s HFY subreddit called “Wait, is this just GATE?” Asks the question of what would happen if a universe of only technology and no magic (ours) made contact with a universe of pretty much only magic and almost no technology beyond that found in the Middle Ages. It contains some tropes (used mainly as comedic relief or irony) and plenty of references to current magical-universe plot elements from games and novels, but is a surprisingly fresh and compelling examination of the cross-universe idea.
LilB0kChoy@lemm.ee 10 months ago
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
-Arthur C. Clarke
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. — Pratchett, maybe…?
hotdogthud@lemmy.world 10 months ago
it exists, and is phenomenal:
LordGimp@lemm.ee 10 months ago
You know what, basically any SCP will have varying levels of scifi and fantasy tropes, or sometimes none at all. Bottom line with SCPs is that anything is possible.
Dagwood222@lemm.ee 10 months ago
MCU does a good job. Iron Man is supposed to be science based, and Thor is a Norse god.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 10 months ago
I think a better example than Thor would be Dr. Strange. Thor is just an alien, and his people have advanced technology, not actually magic.
LordGimp@lemm.ee 10 months ago
royalroad.com/…/dungeon-planet-the-healer-always-…
Found that little gem a few weeks ago and I believe it fits your ask pretty well 1:1
Honestly almost as good as my other favorite the past few years, www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive, but the latter seems to be more active than the former.
slazer2au@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Techomages from Babylon 5 come to mind.
slingstone@lemmy.world 10 months ago
“I do think there are some things we don’t understand. If we’d be back in time a thousand years, trying to explain this place to people, they could only accept it in terms of magic.”
“Then perhaps it is magic. The magic of the human heart, focused and made manifest by technology. Every day you here create greater miracles than a burning bush.”
And then…
“We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ and we know many things.”
I love B5 so much.
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
I apologize if this sounds flippant, but it’s FICTION.
Literally ANYTHING works if its written well enough…
scarabic@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think you inevitably face the whole “magic IS advanced technology” thing. If you actually want them to be different things, you have to have some answer to this.
okamiueru@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Isn’t it always different things? “Magic” being a different set of rules for how the world works. Technology being the things that can be achieved given the rules. And, whether advanced technology is influenced and how, depend on those rules.
If for example magic is only available to some people with the ability or what not. Technology will always be available regardless.
scarabic@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Stargate SG-1 is a great example where no matter what the magic is, it’s eventually revealed to be technology underneath - just really advanced technology. If you take all limits off science, it’s easy for the two to begin blending. They even do the “only available to some people” thing as technology: certain people share a gene with the ancient ancestors who made the high-technology, and so it recognizes and activates for them and not others.
isekaihero@ani.social 10 months ago
Absolutely yes. One of my favorite anime is GATE. It has a portal open from a alternate world at Roman level technology with legions and classical architecture, but it has dragons, elves, and magic and they send an army through to invade modern day Japan. The counter-attack is insane. Do a google search for “massacre of alnus hill”