I’m reminded of the (excellent) Lord Darcy series; Darcy is a Sherlock Holmes expy in an alternate world where magic has been systematized and is well understood, but “materialist” science lags far behind. He can figure out how crimes involving magic could or could not have been committed because magic does follow rules. Also his “Watson” is a sorcerer who can explain the details of anything he doesn’t know on the subject.
Thanks for the tip, never heard of the series or the author but will check it out.
My local gaming club’s weekly game night usually hosts a couple D&D tables and a Savage Worlds table. Savage Rifts has been in the rotation for several months. My character is a dwarven power armor jock with a mithral shield and a disintegrator pistol.
My last SW Rifts campaign, I was a Dog Boy cat burglar.
That is the challenge, isn’t it? Our mundane detective has a few things going for them: like Rowling’s Wizarding World, the magic users have a few blind spots that an experienced homicide mundane would spot that they wouldn’t. Such as being unfamiliar with tech ways of doing things: the wizards might be familiar with casting scrying spells but not with DNA evidence. Also homicide cops have more experience with sniffing out hidden motives– one of the premises is that while duels to the death or open assassination are not unknown amongst the magic users, murder in the clandestine sense is rare; almost all killings are obvious. Finally it’s a case of realizing when dogs didn’t bark, so to speak.
The Dresden Files series of books has plotlines like that. The hero is a wizard who is also a licensed Chicago P.I., and he solves cases using both skillsets; he’s helped by friends and allies from both worlds, magical and mundane, including his closest friend, a police detective.
Heh. Now I’m picturing a gloating crook monologuing about his perfect crime — to a homicide cop, who quietly thinks to himself that mundane detective work could trip up this blindspot dipshit in at least three different ways — and that’s when the wizard points out that he’s not really into scrying or teleportation but mentalism…
That reminds me, a related genre is May’s Galactic Milieu and related Many-Colored Land books, which involve advanced psionic techniques and technology nearly indistinguishable from magic.
The combination of such, along with introduced alien-introduced technologies combine into a new world order (and yes, at times that comparison was made) where the psionic elite have almost all the power and influence, including over reproductive rights. It’s not particularly dystopian, in that psionic education involves a great deal of inculcated idealism and service to a greater good (and eventual racial psionic unity), but it would be a very good match to the OP’s scenario from the POV of many, as long as substituting “psionics” for magic is acceptable.
The California Bones series, IIRC takes place in a real world where types of magic are omnipresent and those in power have it in their arsenal the way they would have money and influence–but it is the most important part of their aresenal. I think Southern California was ruled over by a kind of Wizard King. I can’t remember if the books covered anything outside of California to say what the wider world was like. (ETA-- this inspired me to look at a synopsis and yeah they cover what the rest of the country at least is like)
Stephen R. Boyett’s Ariel: A Book of the Change and its sequel, Elegy Beach, are exactly what you’re looking for.
Magic suddenly appears in the world and all technology fails, and… it doesn’t go well for the world.
Fred Saberhagen Empire of the East and his later Swords series were set on Earth where the US and USSR, in order to prevent nuclear Armageddon, create doomsday devices that make magic work and break physics.
I’ve not read them in some time, so I’m not sure how well they’ve held up.
I’ve read them more recently, and speaking only to the Empire of the East (not Swords), it’s a future earth based on the levels of tech involved. Each side has a device that was supposed to temporarily alter the rules of physics to prevent a nuclear shield, but neither knew each side had done so, with the resulting interaction of the two creating the new world of magic. But working technology continued to do so in some cases (such as the Elephant, and other minor artifacts) and some began to work in conjunction with magic (Draffut and his devices).
It’s a cool, weird hybrid, and I love the setting, though the storytelling isn’t Saberhagen’s best IMHO.
More or less doing what Warehouse 13 used to do- a weird occurrence is caused by a magic item, the team tracks it down.
Very excellent series. Re=readable also. Garrett was a great writer.
Another writer did a follow up novel in the universe- worth reading but not as good as the originals.
Yep- Butcher’s’ Dresden Files counts. Magic gets more and more powerful.
And Friday the 13th the series before them.
Peter Dickinsons YA novel The Weathermonger sort of fits here. He wrote two prequels and together they’re called The Changes trilogy, but I’ve only read WM, and many years ago.
As I remember, a Change happens and most people in Britain either get a sudden distaste for technology or flee the country. Some technology still works, some doesn’t. Recon planes from the continent stop working and crash. In the 2nd act our main characters have a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost taken from an abandoned car museum as their mode of transportation, after careful planning in act 1. I suspect Dickinson decided to have that car in his book, and then fudged the rules to make this sensible and practical.
The narrator is Geoffrey, a 16 year old Weathermonger, a position which gives him wealth and prestige, so sort of the magical aristocracy the OP mentions. When he monges (?) the weather we hear his inner monologue, he sort of gently nudges the clouds, warm/cold fronts, vapor etc. to do his will.
Geoffreys position, however, isn’t more prestigious than, when he is caught tinkering with an old boat engine, he is banged over the head, and left to drown on a reef in the abandoned harbor. Where he awakens, right at page 1 in the book, with amnesia about everything that happened after the Change. So what he and the reader get to know about the Change is filtered through what his 12 year old sister Sally understands/remembers and what he is told by a somewhat cagey french general after they manage to escape across the channel in their boat.
Towards the end of the book, they discover the reason for the Change. Merlin has awoken and been addicted to opiates. This part of the book is weaker than the rest, but all in all the book made a great impression on me when I read it as a kid.
I just came across this review of a book with a similar theme:
Oh, but they have the BEST-named Ray Guns!
Very late ETA, but on reflection the title of the thread should have been ‘“Magicians take over the world”– has this been done’
In that case, there is the setting for the Dragon Aage games. In ancient times, the world was ruled by magic-users. Things were… not good.
I’m indebted to you for that reference because it led to the exact term for what I was trying to postulate: Magocracy