Most fantasy stories (at least that I’ve read) are set in a kind of medieval/dark ages society. Warrior/Philosopher Kings rule pretty much absolutely. Guilds control the economy. Swords and longbows are where it’s at in military technology. Anything that we would have to do ‘technologically’ is achieved by magic (flying, bloody big explosions, viewing things from far away, immidiate communication over distance).
Is there any fantasy that uses technology such as internal combustion, gunpowger, nuclear physics, intersteller travel AND magic? I know that Pratchett has touched on some of these, but these ars intermittant and ‘one-offs’ for each book.
Or failing that, what is the technological ‘line’ between fantasy and Sci-fi?
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
-Arthur C. Clarke.
I like Jakob Nielsen’s take on this:
I think there is no limit to the level our imagination will get us. (Now, reality is another matter, but this is fiction no?) AFAICR Larry Niven’s sfi-fi tale of Ringworld has several ideas that can be only be considered magic.
[sub]I am still working in a sfi-fi tale that actually blurs that line, trouble is other projects and job hunting are getting in the way.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein was a fantasy novel wrapped in a hard SF world complete with interstellar travel and galactic civilizations, wth a Vietnam veteran as the hero. Damned fine book, too.
In Kenneth Flint’s version of the Lugh Lamfada legend (Riders of the Sidhe et al), Balor One-Eye was a sort of robot battlesuit that shot a laser-like heat ray out of its eye. His mutated Fomor warriors used vehicles that ran on some sort of engine. Of course, the magic of Mannanan MacLir and the Tuatha de Dannan turned out to be more powerful.
As long as it is well written, tech can be worked into fantasy quite well.
I don’t think there’s any limit. Granted, many fantasies are low-tech, but they don’t have to be. Examples do exist of fantasy in today’s world. Consider Charles de Lint.
A fantasy story need only depend on magical elements; including non-magical elements hardly invalidates the fantastic nature of the whole story.
Science Fiction depends on plausible, but as-yet undiscovered, scientific elements.
I guess a story can have both. Star Wars seems to try and balance the two.
I recall reading somewhere that werewolves are usually considered fantasy and time travel is considered SF, but there’s more hard science in the idea of werewolves than in time travel.
A friend of mine once had a “story universe” (that’s what we amateur writers who never get anything published call it…) that was, essentially, a typical fantasy - elves, dragons, dwarves, magic, wizards, mana, etc. - with spaceships. Mana Cores were used for power, starships fired guns that used magic spells to attack, dragons had GIGANTIC starships that were the terror of the universe, etc.
It was pretty cool. Similar to Calvin’s “Tyranosaurs in F-16’s!” idea.
Generally, with magic you don’t really need a lot of technology in the first place. Leonardo Da Vinci could have easilly built a working airplane if he’d had magic to provide a strong, compact power source. likewise you don’t need an autopilot if you can enchant your vessel to be self navigating. Everything we use electricity for, heat, light, navigation, computing, motors, all of these would be supplied by magic.
Another plug for the fascinating Randall Garrett Lord D’Arcy stories, set in an alternative universe in which Richard the Lion-Hearted recovered from that little crossbow wound at the seige of Chaluz and turned into a wise and just king. John Lackland never made it to the throne, and the Plantagenets rule to this day (i.e., the 1960s, when the stories were written). The Anglo-French empire is the paramount power in the world, (North America and South America are New England and New France, in this world) challenged only by the Kingdom of Poland
Since the lead character and his sidekick are wondrful Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson pastiches, it’s only logical that the technological level in their 1960s London is equivalent to Victorian England. So you have trains and steamships, as well as horse-drawn carriages. They have a telephone equivalent called a teleson, but can’t figure how to get it across the English Channel
Since this is a fantasy, it’s a place where magic works, though with well thought-out laws like the Law of Contagian and the Law of Similarity, which are rigorously applied to the situation.
Well worth hunting up his stuff, or the pair of novels Michael Kurland wrote in the same universe after Garrett died.
Take science to the logical extreme, and the magic that wizards do look pretty poor in comparison… the gods of the Orion’s Arm shared universe were once computers, but now hold the power of life death and happiness over their human worshippers.
Another book that deals with themes of technology and magic:
There’s a short novel by Jack Vance called The Miracle Workers that explores a (future?) world where such things as voodoo dolls are commonplace, used alongside the swords and horsemen of a medieval-earth-like culture. The most advanced masters of these tools even understand vaguely that their power derives from psychology and the power of suggestion. But remnants of a previous civilization remain, among them such things as small vehicles and weapons that shoots bolts of fire. Lacking the physics and engineering, these people naturally see these artifacts as magic, in true Clarke fashion. The story adds kind of an interesting mirror image to Clarke’s famous idea, along the lines of (and please pardon my awkward phrasing) “any metaphysical hogwash that produces sufficiently satisfactory results is indistiguishable from reality”.
The story can be found in The Arbor House Treasury Of Great Science Fiction Short Novels, 1980, compiled by Robert Silverberg and Martin Greenberg, and probably other places as well.
After writing this question this afternoon, what was on TV tonight but Star Wars? I’d say that it strikes a pretty good balance between sci-fi and fantasy… except for that psudeo-scientific midichlorian crap in Ep1. That took the magic right out of it and gave it a ‘scientific’ explanation.
I agree with Sock Munkey and I think that maybe the ‘swords and scourcey’ image of fantasy came into being because you don’t really need guns if you can fire a bolt of lightning out of your fingertips and fry your enimies. But magic is usually the domain of magicians and wizards, not your everyday soldier. Guns in our world developed because teaching someone to use a gun was easier than a bow, so presumably they’d develop on fantasy worlds in the same way. However, a number of fantasy books I have read state, more or less, that the same magic/technology/society have existed relatively unchanged for thousands of years. It just strikes me as weird that things would remain unchanged for so long. Maybe thats a property of magic, though. Or just a writer copping out on developing an social/tech evolutionary history of their universe.
In Piers Anthony’s series * The Incarnations of Immortality * science and magic existed side by side.
I remember a part from early in the 1st book about an advertising war between cars and magic carpets. The car advertisers would show a carpet above a car with the people on the carpet exposed to the elements. The carpet advertisers had the some sort of picture but the folks in the car were stuck in traffic.
Both Gandalf and Saruman know that “white light can be broken” into its colors, a most un-medieval notion. The hobbits smoked tobacco (Tolkien makes it clear in his intro that they really are – it ain’t tree bark they’re putting in their pipes) and eat “taters”, both American crops. The flying Nazgul ride what seems to be pterosaurs and the giant elephants of the southrons seem like Mammoths or some other extinct variety. In other words, Tolkien knew and incorporated too much stuff that became known after medieval times.
Too much fantasy is written and set in pseudo-medieval times, or pseudo “ancient world” times, kinda like the Roman Empire (Conan the Barbarian). There is no need for any of this – as has been noted, fantasy is an attitude and a willingness to change natural laws and allow in mythology and magic. So fantasy stories can take place at any time. THere are plenty of fantasy stories set in the modern day, or even in the future. Science fiction Conventions regularly have panel discussions bemoaning the fact that the popular perception of fantasy is set in a “fairy tale” universe.
hmmm…interesting thread…
In answer to the OP I reckon the limits are only bound by the extent of the authour’s imagination, especially after reading the various replies.
However I suppose it also depends on what the authour wants to attribute so-called ‘magical’ stuff to - Clarke’s advanced technology (or in the case of Star Wars ep. 1 advanced biology it would seem :)) or the mystical, magical stuff.
I always find it interesting how in a lot of fantasy books featuring magic, wizards etc., there always tend to be limits or restrictions on the use of magic…the Earthsea books and Discworld are good examples. In fact in the Discworld books, the introduction of a firearm was a massive event as it had massive destructive power with NO limits.
Dune is another example of high-tech fantasy. You’ve got noble houses fighting each other and the church and guild playing them against one another, poison, melee weapons, and such.
