Once this connection occurred to me it seemed obvious, but I haven’t seen it discussed before. Am I completely off base on this?
The Flintstones live in a world without any modern technology but they still live typical 20th-century, suburban American lives. Where we would use machines and modern materials they do the same things with rocks, skins, sticks, and animal power.
The wizards and witches in Harry Potter’s world similarly live recognizably British lives despite making little or no use of muggle technology. They do pretty much the same things with magical substitutes.
While the story line in Harry Potter is dark, the books still contain a lot of humor, much of which comes from presenting the magical world as a parody of 20th-century Britain - just as the Flintstones was a humorous parody of the America of its time.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell: the world has magic of a relatively high order…but still goes through an exact parallel of the Napoleonic Wars.
The Harry Dresden books by Jim Butcher are also marvels at dodging the full implications of the world-altering effects of the magic involved. You have wizards, and angels, and vampires, and demons, and elves…and lots and lots of murders…and only one Chicago police officer is in on the secret. Not unseelie likely!
And Buffy the Vampire Slayer… And Ben Aaronovitch’s “Rivers of London…” And Esther Friesner’s “New York by Knight…” And half a thousand others!
To be fair, it is one of the signal drawbacks of the Urban Fantasy genre. The author (and readers!) want really big “sense of awe” “gosh wow” magical stuff…but they also don’t want to break the universe. They want to keep it all secret. (Otherwise it turns into a top-level political intrigue novel.)
I think HP is in the 90s, but even sending an email over Gopher has got to be more efficient than sending an owl. Plus their equivalent of porn sites has got to involve some uncomfortable situations where you are ogling a trapped ghost or something.
The Flintstones are the Honeymooners with rock-based puns.
Okay, but have you seen Chicago’s murder rate lately?
Magic has almost always been considered an alternative to technology. I always figured that’s why most fantasies are still stuck with horses and swords; With magic you don’t need to invent the steam engine or matchlock.
This is one reason I’m kind of ambivalent about “urban fantasies,” particularly those like Dresden or the Anita Blake books, or similar, which posit that basically every myth, fairy tale, or horror story trope you ever heard of are actually true, but hidden from us mundane mortal types. Especially when we’re told that vampires, werewolves, elves, fae, and every other fantasy being all have their own elaborate societies, complete with dedicated shopping districts, bars, and happening nightclubs, where hideous and grisly murders and/or running gun battles are liable to break out at any moment, while the general public remains blissfully unaware.
I seem to recall H.G. Wells saying something about allowing himself only one impossible thing per story. I sometimes feel that’s a better approach. It strikes me as somewhat more believable (for certain values of “believable”) that vampires secretly walk among us, if we don’t also have to believe that werewolves, zombies, ghosts, witches, pixies, and dryads are also walking among us at the same time.
To be fair, in the Dresden books, there’s a fairly sizeable chunk of the Chicago police force who knows that the supernatural exists, and there has been such a sizeable chunk for at least a generation. Most of them don’t know nearly as much detail about it as Murphy does, but they do know enough that when something weird comes up, they know that Murphy is the one to call. And at least one other highly-skilled-but-mundane human, after getting caught up in a supernatural scheme, decided to learn more… and reported that once she started making an actual effort, the information was a lot easier to come by than one would expect.
How does it work in that world? Are all the supernaturals"together", or are they all separate societies? Do the vampires believe that ghosts don’t exist? Do the pixies think werewolves are just legends? Do any of them not believe humans really exist? Because that would be interesting!
Depends on the author, but most of them tend to assume that the different types of supernaturals are aware of each other, but don’t really socialize that much. Most of these type of stories portray the various societies as quite insular, with a Keep-To-Our-Own-Kind sort of attitude. Vampires and werewolves may grudgingly accept each others existence, and even cooperate on occasion, but they usually don’t really like each other that much. Sometimes, like in the Underworld movies, they’re engaged in outright war with each other. Leading to those somehow unnoticed running gunfights that I mentioned.
On the other hand, there are books like Tanya Huff’s “Blood” series, that portrays a vampire whose closest friends are a family of werewolves. That friendship goes back to when he (the vampire) was working as an agent for the Allies during World War II, and one of his contacts turned out to be a werewolf. They exchange quick greetings, “They didn’t tell me you were a werewolf.” “They didn’t tell me you were a vampire.” Then they shake hands, and get on with the business of killing Nazis.
In the Dresden books, inter-supernatural relations are quite complex. Not only are there vampires and werewolves, for instance, but there are at least four different kinds of vampire who cooperate only when faced with a common enemy, and at least five different varieties of werewolf who have nothing to do with each other if they can avoid it. Most of the major movers and shakers of the supernatural world (and many minor movers and shakers who hope to become major, for that matter) are signatories to a treaty called the Unseelie Accords, which operates sort of like the Geneva Convention does for mortals. Everyone knows of the fey and the vampires and the fallen angels and so on, but there are also smaller groups that most others might not have heard of, or who they might suspect of being mere legends.
I’ve always wondered about technology in the Naruto universe. Naruto basically lives off of instant ramen but you never see anything remotely technological in the series. (Unless tabletop cookers count)
Where does Tim Powers fit into this? All his secret histories posit unknown reasons for real-world events and timelines. Then, of course, there’s the ones that are only tangentially related to the real world and don’t need to line up a timeline.
You’re talking about The Masquerade that hides the magic world. OP is talking about humorous parallels to the author’s contemporary world within the magic world, or even within a completely different time and setting.
I have not read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. I don’t know where that one falls.
Okay, fair enough… Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell actually does the latter: although it’s a magical world, the Napoleonic Wars unfold with the same historical pathway: Wellington through Spain, etc. So, though it’s a magical world, it parallels real history – in a way I think it wouldn’t really.
(The “Temeraire” series – Napoleonics with dragons – has the same problem. Although a vastly history-changing alteration has been made – dragons! – the battles continue to unfold exactly as in our history. Trafalgar happens on the same day, with the same ships, and the same outcome!)
How could the same ships even exist in a world with dragons? Fire-based weapons are devastating to wooden ships, and the only reason they weren’t used more often was that nobody wanted one mounted on their own ship for fear that it’d destroy themselves. Given a fire-delivery mechanism that is not itself vulnerable to fire, though, and all sailing navies in the world simply cease to exist.
