SF stories or series where the 'science' was basically magic?

I’m thinking of Blish’s Cities in Flight books, which I loved when much younger.
Lots of ‘sciency’ names, like Dirac and Bethe in the narrative

But the Spindizzy breaks… well, conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, and all of relativity.

I still want one, though…

Star Wars

Unfortunately, most every popular sci fi has something in the tech that “magically” works. All the power goes out on the Enterprise - except the artificial gravity. And don’t get me started on transporters!

In Niven’s Known Space, stasis fields can’t work as described, yet their use drives a lot of stories. Still like them, though.

Dare I add 2001? At least, it is indistinguishable from magic. :slight_smile:

The Artifact

If I remember right, there’s a lot of hard sci-fi with respect to the human technology, some heavy handed PTSD, interplanetary politics / intrigue, and an alien artifact that breaks all the rules of everything.

That description probably fits more science fiction than it doesn’t. But I’ll play along with an example: Iain Banks’s Culture books.

Oh, and Doctor Who. They give him a friggin’ magic wand, for cripe’s sake!

Heinlein’s Sixth Column. The technology is so clearly magic, that the characters actually disguise it as magic in the story…

Heinlein’s work on Campbell’s “All” was considerably more than just a re-slanting; Campbell’s story was felt to be unpublishable as it stood, written in a pseudo-archaic dialect (sometimes inconsistently), and provided no scientific explanations for miraculous powers of the American super-weapons, which the PanAsians have no explanation for other than to conclude that weapons’ powers must be divine.

I had this discussion awhile ago here. Is there really anything that qualifies as “hard” science fiction?

Any story with faster-than-light spaceships is fantasy.

But our heroes use wormholes not only to travel faster-than-light but also through time and into parallel universes!

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress would seem to qualify as “mundane”.

It has to be said:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - Arthur C Clarke

For an example of what the OP is looking for, I just read Dune for the first time, and the whole ecosystem of Arrakis, with the spice and the sandworms, is totally magical.

Unsong by Scott Alexander fits the bill, I think.

Someone already did (post 2)

The TV show Century City was basically “LA Law in the future!” It featured court cases raised by new technologies, that were usually quite plausible. The effects of self-driving cars; what happens when you can tell which in vitro embryo you might implant will be gay, based on genetic analyses; A teenager suing their parents because they use technology to track her every movement, stuff like that.

There’s no such thing as “totally realistic” science fiction. Even if something is theoretically possible, theory will only get you so far - there’s no way you can ever know anything will work until you actually try it. So any piece of invented technology involves a leap of faith to one degree or another, and that means magic.

From the Wikipedia page it states:

In a time when lawyers can go before judges as holograms

That doesn’t sound very different than doing it over Zoom, which became extremely common due to the pandemic starting in 2020, 10 years before the year that show was supposed to take place. Kind of funny to me. :slight_smile:

Ach. Read it but did not register it.

The point is still worth emphasizing: not being consistent with science as we currently understand it is not a problem for me as long as the “science” stays consistent with in universe. I shouldn’t be able to understand how very advanced technology works any more than someone a thousand years ago would understand what a black hole is, or about gravitational waves.

I more go the other way. In Fantasy isn’t magic just the same as science that we as readers don’t understand? As long as it follows consistent rules they are the rules of nature in that world, using forces that are real in that world. Any true “magic” is science not yet understood.

Pretty much.

IMO, the only reason it’s considered science fiction at all is that it takes place in space, and there’s energy weapons. It’s “space opera,” with no pretensions of being anything approaching hard SF, and the Jedi and Sith are effectively wizards with energy swords.

Yes. Sci-fi/fantasy requires a suspension of disbelief from the audience (book, movie, TV show, whatever medium it’s in). When a work can be internally consistent, that suspension of disbelief can be maintained. It’s when it contradicts itself that the whole thing breaks down.