It’s “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology.”
One of the the core features of magic is it’s secret knowledge passed along since time immemorial. Nobody knows why it works or how it works, just that it works. Once you learn from an elder initiate how to perform the rituals or mix the potions, well, magic happens.
Which of course neatly sidesteps the question of who back in time immemorial came up with this knowledge how. Cue ominous voice: Do not ask about the chicken from whence this egg arose!
Which does afford the idea, cargo cult style, of ancient real tech which is durable enough that despite the current society having forgotten how to design it, maintain it, or make more of it, what they have still “just works” and is used.
In that sense, “Any ridiculously durable tech from a now lost civilization is indistinguishable from magic to the civilization using it now.”
The ordinary Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy is almost that kind of artifact.
This is another distinction on the science fiction and fantasy continuum. In science fiction people in the future know more than people in the present. Whether that is the reader’s present or the characters’ present, technology and knowledge advances. Most sci-fi fits this trope, with the exception of the occasional dystopian setting.
Fantasy is often the reverse. The ancients had more knowledge and more advanced “technology” than characters in the story. Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Harry Potter (to a degree), and lots of other fantasy follows this design. Certainly not all, and a drop of a bunch of exceptions doesn’t invalidate the general idea.
Star Wars has a nice interaction going on here. Technology advances, though slowly and it isn’t a focus of the movies, but there are new tie fighters and such introduced. However magic used to be more powerful, and much of the knowledge has been lost.
Of course this whole discussion is (in my opinion) based on a false premise, that things need to fit in one, and only one, category.
This is really important. Science Fiction/Fantasy tend to be literature of ideas more than, say, Westerns or mysteries or mimetic fiction; and authors love messing around with boundaries and genre tropes. So you’ve got A Canticle for Leibowitz, which is basically science fiction of a future dark age; and you’ve got Brandon Sanderson, who loves to write fantasy with extremely clearly-defined magical rules. There are definitely tendencies, but there are plenty of exceptions as well.
Interesting. So what do you recommend? (like The Martian just better)
I’m not sure I agree that this is a core feature of magic. Certainly, the idea that there was a previous, more advanced civilization is common in fantasy, because most fantasy is based off of medieval Europe, which was defined in so many ways by the collapse of the Roman Empire. But a major part of the archetypal wizard is, essentially, a medieval scholar - someone who researches and experiments with magic, in an attempt to replicate the knowledge of the ancients. The progress of knowledge is still a background part of these stories, even if it’s recovered knowledge, and not wholly new. And it’s often moved to the foreground when the resolution involves the protagonist properly understanding and implementing some part of the forgotten lore.
I really don’t like the notion of considering some select subset of works to be “literature”. Yes, Bradbury and Shakespeare are literature. So are Twilight and The Eye of Argon. “Literature” is not a value judgement.
And for what it’s worth, I liked Artemis and found Jazz to be an interesting character.
Huh? That’s exactly was literature is.
How about, instead of saying that something “is literature”, we say that something “has literary value”?
That makes me wonder if you’ve watched much Trek if at all. I mean, I figure that you have, but, damn, I can think of dozens of eps off of the top of my head, unless you want to nitpick these away with a highly narrow definition:
Measure of a Man, where they debate about whether Data is a full sentient being (i.e. has sufficient human characteristics to qualify as such).
[TNG] The one where Barclay becomes a holodeck addict.
“Charlie X”, a young boy raised by highly advanced aliens and how the power of his mind has stunted his moral development.
[TNG] Where the three refugees from the 20th century have to adjust to the 24th.
All of the encounters with the Landru’s & Baal’s which warped their societies all to hades.
Now, if you wish to argue that the society depicted didn’t sufficiently alter the psyches of the series regulars, you’d of course have a point. That likely can be chalked up to Roddenberry’s original series writer’s bible, which made it clear for audience identification purposes that these were to basically be 20th century humans living in the 24th.
Vernor Vinge’s “A Fire Upon the Deep” is an interesting case - about half the book involves action on a planet that is pretty hard SF, looking at how an intelligent species in which each individual is comprised of four to six bodies would think (and how their society would differ from ours) - but the other half involves space adventures in a deliberately non-hard SF universe full of FTL, superhuman entities with powers that seem magical, etc.
One thing the TOS regulars did have was lots more racial / species tolerance. Chekhov, Uhuru, and Spock showed their physical and cultural differences in every scene. But those differences never mattered; nobody ever treated them even slightly differently as a result.
The tech didn’t directly alter their “morality brain cells” to make this happen. It was just that advancing tech created ubiqitous contact with the Other until those Other were recognized as not really other-full any more.
The show never explicitly talked about how this came about. The change vs 1965 was simply shown as a fait accompli, totally unremarkable to the 24th Century characters living it.
Overall, this is a pretty indirect argument for #3, but not zero.
I know so little about any ST other than TOS that I’ll have stop right here.
I don’t know anyone who would consider Apollo 13 to be SF, any more than The Right Stuff or First Man
Tell that to the guy who used to work at Blockbuster.
Discovering that this isn’t so is a big part of the last trilogy, IMO. So, it’s very much about the discovery of a more scientific view of the Force, from a certain point of view. (The midichlorian thing from the prequels wasn’t a scientific view, more like homeopathy or humoural theory). Hence - Star Wars is Sci Fi.
I am only half-joking 
There were a number of episodes where the crew (McCoy in particular) explicitly treated Spock as different (and they didn’t like it).
[mild digression]
This is not true of the books, and not necessarily true of the TV show.
From Cibola Burn (which I happen to be reading right now):
“She’s too young,” Basia said …
“She won’t be by the time she gets there,” Lucia said. “If she went with the first shipment and transferred at Medina, she could be on Ganymede or Ceres Station in nineteen months.”
The books make it clear just how long space travel takes — even with the super special “Epstein Drive” they invented.
The TV show doesn’t generally stress that point, but it doesn’t often violate it, either. Any given trip could have taken 18 months or whatever. They never point out how long travel takes, nor do they state that’s it’s shorter than what’s described in the books.
(Yes, there are times when I have to stick my fingers in my ears and shout “La la la!” to believe this … but I continue to do so.)
[/mild digression]
Heh. My wife’s book group, all older women, chose it to read. I told her they were going to hate it. They all hated it, for much the same reasons you didn’t like it. I liked it fine because I liked his voice and the puzzle solving. But I definitely get why people don’t like it.
I have a whole boatload of books from the '50s and early '60s about the first trip to the moon. Prelude to Space, Rocket Ship Galileo, and on down. None of these are science fiction to you?
Except that Astounding/Analog in the '50s and '60s were full of stories with mental powers. Not hard sf, but not fantasy. Possibly because Campbell thought some of this stuff was real.