… Or, why so many fantasy worlds with magic in it seem to be stuck in the Middle Ages.
Basically, the author theorizes that in a world with magic, the long, tedious, and sometimes punishing process of technological and scientific experimentation seems pointless when you (or someone with magical talent) could get instant results (or screw everything up on a whim) just by waving a wand and saying a few words.
It’s something I hadn’t thought of before, myself.
Or is magic stuck in medieval or prior eras because with Enlightenment (mostly) eliminated the impetus to explain the actions of natural phenomena in terms of supernatural forces or the direct action of divine beings?
Stranger
Oh my.
A story is not a simulation. Nor is it history.
Medieval tropes are deployed because they suggest a particular timelessness. Fairy tales are set in the middle ages because it makes them feel atemporal and primal. There has always been a king on the throne and there will always be a king on the throne. Values are fixed and permanent. Good is always good. Evil is always evil. If you want a particular sort of epic feel to the tale you’re telling, you need to eliminate the idea of progress (or cast it as something bad, a fall from grace). And setting the story in a medieval fantasy world is a great way to achieve it.
That’s why Game of Thrones doesn’t have cars. If you stuck cars in Game of Thrones you’d be undermining the whole point of setting the story in the Middle Ages.
There’s actually an interesting example of this precise effect – the third book of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. The first two books – Titus Groan and Gormenghast – are lovely gothic fantasies about a very dysfunctional family occupying a crumbling mansion far off in the country. It’s impossible to tell when they’re set – they feel like they take place in a pocket universe, completely divorced from normal history. Then, in the lesser third book Titus Alone, the titular character leaves Gormenghast, and promptly meets someone driving a motorcar. That single image completely punctures the air of timelessness and ritual that had suffused the first two books, and the story never recovers from it.
I’ve seen it addressed directly at least once or twice. One of Christopher Stasheff’s Warlock series–The Warlock Enraged, I think–mentioned it in passing. The protagonist, dumped into an alternate universe where real magic exists (as opposed to the psychic “magic” of his native sci-fi setting), noted that there’s not much reason to develop fertilizer if you can get the same result from a priest saying a blessing over your field. It was published in 1986, so the idea’s been around a while.
By contrast, Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar setting has advanced into the beginnings of an industrial revolution, and is experimenting with steam power. Magic is relatively scarce there, though, and is explicitly not “free”. Her mages often claim that it requires more effort to do things magically than to just do them by mundane means; magic just makes it possible to do it faster, or to do things that can’t be accomplished mundanely.
Far more of an indictment of the Harry Potter universe I’d say. Admittedly we’re only shown the situation from the viewpoint of schoolchildren, but there seems to be no curiosity or research into why magic works at all, just endless repetition of known spells. It’s telling that magic has not only failed to improve at anything like the rate technology has, but may actually be getting weaker over time, with various magical artifacts around that are impossible to reproduce in modern times.
Well, why from the writer’s point of view is because having two competing systems of power - technology and magic - are extremely hard to manage in a consistent manner, let alone combining them in a way that is internally consistent and doesn’t stretch the suspension of disbelief.
Also, most fantasy writers really, really like medieval, pre-Englightenment settings. Steampunk occasionally incorporates magic, so that setting is becoming more popular. But you almost never see low or high fantasy set in, say, the Roman Empire, or dynastic China. I’ve read a handful of books set in Regency England, but none in, say, Napoleonic France, or the US during the American Revolution or the Civil War. I think I’ve come across at least one novel that was set in the Vietnam War. Piers Anthony, hack though he is, has done at least one series set in modern America with magic (the Incarnation series). There’s a detective/wizard series set in modern day Chicago (blanking on the name). Even in those series, there either no attempt to determine how technology would affect magic, or the way in which it’s done is glossed over.
That’s too bad. I think some fine speculative fiction could be written on how the two would interplay.
Great post, Hamster King.
I’d also say that, in some fantasy worlds, magic is technology, in the sense that all the magic you actually see was, at some point, the result of some painstaking research into the theory and practice of how and why it works. The Harry Potter world may be an example of this. I thought the article’s example was actually a bad one:
What goes on in some of those Hogwarts classes may well be quite similar to the flashlight experiment the article describes. We don’t know what kind of cycle of observation and experimentation went into the development of that “lumos” spell. And in our world, all we have to do is flip a switch and we can light up a room, or an actual goddamn searchlight. I am of course reminded of Arthur Clarke’s famous remark that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This only applies to some fantasies. In others, magic is deliberately mysterious, uncontrollable, and “magical,” and that’s the point.
True enough, in terms of reasons why an author would choose to use those tropes. However, in stories in which it is evident that an element of the culture in the setting has remained stagnant for a very long period, it’s good worldbuilding to have a plausible explanation for that stagnation within the context of the setting–even if it’s never mentioned explicitly. It’s possible to be taken out of a story by an apparently implausible lack of progress as well as by seeming anachronisms.
There are many possible reasons, anything from “a wizard did it” (i.e. someone powerful is opposing change) to a strongly conservative culture resisting change out of sheer inertia. It’s something an author should at least consider, however, if they’re going to use a setting like that–again, this doesn’t apply if the story just happens to occur during a medieval-esque period, only if there is evidence in the story that the culture has been “stuck” in that period for a long time.
I wonder if your assumption that progress should be inevitable or normal in any society is itself an anachronism.
It’s only recently that I’ve started to read a lot of fantasy novels with elements of magic. It began when I discovered Brandon Sanderson.
One of the things I enjoy about his books, especially the Mistborn trilogy, is that he doesn’t just inject random magic events of the Abracadabra, Hocus Pocus variety–where things just magically happen. He constructs complete systems of magic with some explanation of the principles they are based on. I find this much more enjoyable.
Well put.
Randall Garrett created a magic-based scientific world in his Lord Darcy. In it, spells were limited in what they could do and were recognized as being not the best way to solve a problem. One story I recall had someone who wanted something better than the usual food preservation spells and was working on the idea of a box that would keep food fresh by merely putting them inside.
But it is very difficult to create a world with fantasy and science on equal footing. One way is to have the magic being severely limited, with only a few people having the ability, or making it erratic and undependable.
However, fantasy does not require a medieval setting. The entire urban fantasy genre takes place in the present, and shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer managed to combine fantasy in a modern setting. Tim Powers did The Anubis Gates, set in the early 19th century, and, of course, steampunk has been around since the 80s. Jonathan Carroll and Charles de Lint manage it in a modern setting, as does most modern horror.
I don’t think so, given that I’m not assuming any sort of explosive growth or major breakthroughs. In human society, in the absence of opposition to change, stuff tends to change. Customs change, people find slightly easier or better ways to do things, and so forth. Over long periods of time, those changes accumulate into some form of “progress”–whether we, from our modern perspective, would approve of the form that progress takes is another matter. Perhaps “evolution” would be a better term, as it places no value judgment on the nature of the changes.
If, over the course of several centuries, there’s no substantial change in a society at all, I would look for reasons why there hasn’t been. As I said, there are plenty of plausible reasons (and no few implausible ones), and there have been real-world cultures that have remained relatively static for long periods. I simply argue that it’s useful for an author to consider the matter; it has the potential to inform the more visible elements of the setting, making for a richer story.
The Dresden Files, featuring modern-day wizard (he’s in the yellow pages!) Harry Dresden. Harry’s magic takes a lot out of him and it’s mentioned repeatedly that magic and technology don’t get along so well. Harry drives an ancient VW, has no electric appliances in the house and avoids elevators whenever possible. He’s also not allowed anywhere near his friend’s computers.
This point has sort of been addressed in Bill Willingham’s Fables series. The Fables series is based on the idea that the characters from fairy tales are real and are living hidden lives here in modern Earth. (It’s not a ripoff of Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Those shows ripped off Fables.)
The origin is that these characters used to live in a fairy tale world where magic was routine. But the big bad guy took over and started killing people, so the story’s characters fled and ended up hiding on Earth. They’d like to go back and defeat the big bad but he’s got them vastly outnumbered and has more powerful magic.
Like the OP noted, their magic homeworld was stopped at a certain technological level. But Earth isn’t. We don’t have magic and our technology keeps moving forward. So at some point, the characters notice that Earth technology has moved well past the level of anything their enemies back home have. So they equip themselves with modern military equipment and easily retake their homeworld.
There’s a bit of a cheat in the Forgotten Realms setting: gunpowder doesn’t work (I never found out the exact reason for this). Alchemists can make something called “smoke powder” which works the same way, except it’s much, much more expensive to produce. The arquebus has been invented, but it would be insane to equip large numbers of soldiers with them. Muskets would likewise be prohibitively expensive, if they were to be invented. As a result, armies never modernize.
Medical technology never advances because magic-based medical care is much, much better than what we have today. Not only can broken bones and other grievous injuries be mended instantly by a cleric, diseases can be completely cured as well. Tuberculosis? Easily curable. Cancer? Easily curable. AIDS? Easily curable. The catch is that only members of the clergy can perform these miracles.
Add in the fact that society’s best and brightest are much more likely to become wizards or clerics than engineers or doctors, and you can see why technology wouldn’t advance the way ours has.
If you want to read a story that postulates how magic (and magicians) might plausibly work in a technological society, read James Blish’s Black Easter. The black magician makes it very clear where magic is better than a technological solution and vice versa.
I recall an old sci-fi short story that had an interesting take on it. Two explorers landed on a planet that had “magic” - it was actually psionic powers, but it worked like magic because that’s how the natives thought it was supposed to work. After escaping one character is panicky over what will happen when the locals invent space travel and expand into the wider universe. The other character on the other hand says that’ll never happen because their magic means that they will never even be able to conceive of science much less advance in it.
A central part of science is the assumption that the universe is the same for everyone, that there’s an objective reality that can be discovered. On a world with “magic”, where even subconscious belief affects the world, that isn’t how people will think*. That isn’t a thought that would even occur to these people - if two of these people perform the same experiment, they’ll each get different results based on what they assume will happen. they’ll never develop science if they don’t even realize that there are natural laws to discover, and can’t even perform repeatable experiments to figure those laws out even if it did occur to them.
*It wasn’t even how we thought until Newton - one of his insights was treating the planets as if they obeyed the same laws that exist on Earth.
I don’t think that this is, in fact, true of the Harry Potter Universe. Things that work get repeated. This is only natural. There is progress, and new spells. Half-Blood Prince explicitly has a spell that Professor Snape had invented/created. Lots of Wizards and Witches are involved in researching new stuff. Luna’s mother was killed in the act of doing research. Arthur Weasley made the flying car. The twins created a ton of stuff.
The real failure is Voldemort’s. If he was such a great Wizard, he would be quite capable of making his own artifacts, not searching for three mythical ones made by others. Instead he was just a(nother) narcissistic power-mad psychopath.
Also, the Lord Darcy stories depicted a world in a late Renaissance stage of technology – advanced sailing ships, gunpowder weapons, etc. This in addition to the magic. The magic seems to have slowed technology – and why not? So many of the best and most brilliant minds would be distracted and would study magic. It would slow down both avenues of discovery!
Brilliant books and stories; Garrett was a genius!