How about Anubis Gates by Tim Powers?
I learned here at the Dope that this book is from a subgenre called Steam Punk.
I hit submit too fast, and wanted to add something else.
I always found good cyberpunk to have a fantasy edge to it. There’s a role-playing game called “Shadowrun” in which high-tech (in a cyberpunk vein) and magic exist side-by-side. I’ve never had a taste for it, because I think that’s redundant. For me, what distinguished cyberpunk is that, in it, technology has so outpaced the average person that it may as well be magic. Mankind can augment itself to the point where there may as well be monsters. Adding magic and monsters is gilding the lily there, it’s overwriting the metaphor with unnecessary realism, if that makes sense.
Neuromancer is very much a fantasy book. A team of heroes with certain special “magical” powers is assembled to rescue the powerful supernatural being from the villain’s lair, in a world full of unfathomable wizardry that allows amazing things to happen. That’s a straight-up D&D adventure.
For me, “fantasy” is a genre, but also a flavor. I think you can have a “fantasy” book set in any time period, with any technology.
Dungeons & Dragons touched on this with their Spelljammer and Ravenloft settings.
Spelljammer I don’t know much about, but it involved magically driven spaceships that looked more like animal-themed sailing ships. (kinda like Treasure Planet.)
Ravenloft is the world of fantasy gothic horror, and so it incorporates some more advanced tech from beyond the renaissance. Guns, clockworks, early-modern medicine (sanitariums, transfusions, leeches, anathesia, surgery). A few places in the world even have rudimentary electric generators for lightbulbs, electroshock therapy, or bringing flesh golems to life.
If the structure of the society is very rigid and stable it can inhibit innovation. Take the chinese for example, they remained relatively unchanged for centuries up untill a few centuries ago despite having an excelent grasp of mathematics, metalurgy, and structural engineering.
That’s one of my favorites 
His Apprentice Adept series did a pretty good job of it too.
That’s why I hated Dune. A technologically advanced society that has mastered space travel and antigravity was being run by chest-pounding medieval psycology and ethics.
Usually, I don’t much care for mixing technology and magic unless the technology is limited to mechanical things like watches and other mechanisms. You want to have a plane powered by a magic crystal that makes its prop spin but have mechanical controll linkages for the flaps and stuff? No problem.
Any level:
Black Canaan by Robert E. Howard was set in the Texas of the 1870’s so there were plenty of guns.
Operation Chaos and its sequel (I’m embarassed to admit I can’t remember the title considering I read it over the summer) by Poul Anderson features a world in which magic works and the tech level is roughly equal to our own.
Same goes for Gossamer Axe by Ms. Baudino and Black Easter by James Blish
Andre Norton wrote several novels, notably Dread Companion & Voodoo Planet (believe me, it’s much better than the title would indicate), in which magic works in star-spanning civilizations that have hyperspace, stasis belts and other advanced scientific devices.
Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny assumes a world in which magic co-exists with a civilization at least as scientifically as our own or slightly more so.
These are just a few off the top of my head.
The game Thiefhad a quirky mix of magic and technology. The City was basically mideval (or maybe early Renaissance), but electricity existed, and there were electric lights all over the place. The lights and other electric devices all had little antennae on them, so it would seem as if the power was being broadcast through the air. They also had steam-powered machines, and their metalworking technology was probably equivalent to about 18th century Earth.
Side-by-side with this were mages, magic-using priests, magic potions and weapons, and other standard fantasy-mideval fare.
I can’t believe that nobody else has mentioned the Dragonriders of Pern novels. Pern is superficially an SF setting (planet colonized by humans in starships, using genetically-engineered creatures to fight off parasitic aliens), but it’s highly fantasized. The dragons can breath fire, communicate telepathically, and teleport instantly through space and time, and gifted humans can empathically influence animals and other humans to the point that a single girl can economically ruin an entire Holding.
At the time that the stories take place, they’ve forgotten almost all of the technology they once had, but they’re slowly rediscovering it. The animal-drawn plow is the state of the art in agriculture, but they can synthesize nitric acid, and they’re just beginning to build a primitive telegraph. They don’t know any of the theory of optics, but have found old lenses and used them to make a telescope, and have only just realized again that those three bright stars in a particular part of the sky are actually man-made artifacts.
Gary Wolf’s Who Censored Roger Rabbit is obviously a fantasy, even though it is set in 40s Hollywood. Jonathan Lethem’s similarly premised Gun, With Occasional Music is set in the near future. Walter Jon Williams’ Metropolitan is set in a much more distant future. China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station is more fantasy than sf, though it shares characteristics of both. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods may be classified as fantasy or as horror.
Fantasies can be set in any time period with any technology. There is no good dividing line between fantasy and sf and fantasy and horror so assigning a book to one of these categories or another is sometimes difficult.
But fantasy and medieval times or fantasy and castles, gnomes, and elves are not in any way synomymous. There are hundreds of fantasies set in technological times out there. A google search on “urban fantasy” or “modern fantasy” will give you a bazillion hits.
Even if we limit the question to “good fantasy with a well-developed background”, there’s a lot of scope for technology. The only reliable answer to “How much tech in a fantasy story?” is “As much as is reasonable”, IMHO. On a case-by-case basis, I think it depends on the availability and limitations of magic and tech in the setting. The more powerful and widely available magic is, the less technology you’re likely to see. To use an example from Christopher Stasheff, “Why develop fertilizer when the local priest can get the same results with a simple blessing?” Conversely, if only one guy in the world can work magic, then technology could be expected to develop as if magic did not exist (assuming that one guy was unable/disinclined to stifle it). Alternatively, a world in which everyone could work a tiny bit of magic might be very like ours, except in certain limited areas. If everyone could conjure light, we’d still have cars…but maybe not headlights.
Forgot some very key examples:
the Skaith trilogy by Leigh Brackett. Humans visit, by FTL spaceships, a world where magic exists. A very good trilogy, IMO.
C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner (with and without each other) played around with settings in which modern technology co-existed with magical powers, notably “The Dark World.”
H.P. Lovecraft: The Cthulhu Mythos are set in 1920’s and 1930’s earth and Eich-Pi-Ell used science fictional techniques in several of the Mythos stories, most notably “At the Mountains of Madness (this incorporated plenty of scientific knowledge about paleotonology),” “Dreams in the Witch-House,” and “The Shadow out of Time.”
Robert A. Heinlein’s novella “Magic, Inc.” Magic co-exists with early 1940’s technology and an arch-demon in Hell tries to use modern legal and business tactics to control American magicians.
The AD&D Spelljammer setting used magic to power spaceships, which could be virtually any structure- the only limitations were size, limited to 100 tons for the most part, and maneuverability, which was handled through sail, rudder, and shape. The tinker gnomes built unreliable technologies, and many other sci-fi concepts (like macrolife) were used. Only a few of us really got into the setting; its main drawback was that ship combat took away from individual combat- players who did not control a ship got bored waiting for their turn.
I have to agree about the limitations of the “fantasy” label. I read sci-fi; the fantasy stories based on medieval or “fairy” tales tend to be bland and formulaic, as if the authors put the same old cliches into the book and published it for a non-discriminating audience.
I think that David Brin’s The Practice Effect might qualify.
Another note about H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, is while their are a variety of spells, and magical beings, a number of alien species do use sci-fi devices, as well as magic. For example, the Great Race of Yith has guns that fire electricity, but uses magic to transport their minds through time, and the Mi-Go could transplant human brains into boxes with artificial input/output devices, while they flew(with wings) through space.
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Walter Jon Williams Metropolitan and sequel: Architecture generates pools of magic (so big cities have huge pools of manna underneath) and our heroine discovers an ancient untapped pool. Near future setting.
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Heinlein’s “Magic, Inc”. A nice look at unions, PACs and politics in the '40s in a world where magic is a form of engineering (If you like Piers Anthony’s semi-dreadful “Incarnations” series, you MUST try this)
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In the same vein, Harry Turtledove’s The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, featuring a hero who’s from the Environmental Perfection Agency who’s trying to determine if all these birth defects (vampirism, soulless births, etc) are a result of a Spell Dump site. Much fun and well thought out.
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Melissa Scott’s 3 book series that starts with 5/12ths of Heaven. One can travel between the stars by moving ships into the astral plane. The “higher” one goes on the astral plane, the faster one goes. Excellent stuff, marred by a so-so ending.
And Chronos, ol’ pal, but I gotta disagree with you! :). The Pern stuff is Science Fiction with some fantasy misdirection, not the other way round. 1) Even in the original story (“Weyr Search”) there were hints that there was lost tech, 2) The whole plot hinges on orbital mechanics and more importantly e) John W. Campbell said it was SF and put it in Analog, the hard SF magazine of the time. She may have been playing with fantasy tropes as a distraction, but to me, I’ve always categorized Pern as SF. Think of it this way: replace the “dragons” with airplanes fitted with flamethrowers (erm…and time-travelling engines) and the story doesn’t change much at all (except the dragon-choosing scenes). However, take away the time-travel, the lost tech, the orbital mechanics, the genetic engineering (with the Firelizards) and the book becomes unrecognizable.
Fenris
I’ve only read the original novella, but would it have made a huge difference if thread fell from the sky thanks to an ancient curse instead of orbital mechanics? If the dragons just were instead of being genetically engineered? If things weren’t explained would the story itself be different? I don’t think so.
Perhaps the dividing line between fantasy and SF is that fantasy doesn’t bother with any explaination other than “It’s magic.”
Then you need to reread Dune. It goes a lot deeper than that.
Storm Constantine writes a sort of gothic fantasy. Her Wraeththu series takes place in a dystopian near-future, where a new race (wraeththu) have superseded humanity. Since wraeththu are essentially magical hermaphrodites, the previous technological civilization fades away in a return to a typical fantasy setting. Humans are still present, but declining; technology like guns and cars still exist, but in continually rarer use.
Her Magravandias Chronicles take place in a much more traditional fantasy setting (castles and magic and royal lines fighting for power), but advanced enough to include timepieces and guns in widespread military use–16th rather than 13th century, say.
Stephen R. Donaldson also has two books set in the world of Mordant, which is classic fantasy. There is a recurring but distant character who shows up only at the end for a small role, who is some kind of space marine. After his laser rifle destroys a few catapults, he’s just another guy in armor.
In all these cases, I’d say the introduction of non-classical fantasy technology doesn’t hurt the narratives or their placement in the genre.
Larry Niven maintains that Time Travel stories must all be fantasy. He mixes his with werewolves (and other “normal” fantasy creatures).
Re: Dune
Modern technology can definately coexist with medieval psychology, just witness Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or any of the various brutal dictatorships around the globe. And Dune protrays a society in the grip of dictatorships…the average person is at the mercy of the aristocrats, Bene Gesserit or guildmasters. All technological advance is stifled, in order to maintain the aristocratic system. You think Paul Atreides was a “good guy”? Nope, he used his victory over the evil Emperor and the evil Harkonens to establish an even more ruthless and complete dictatorship for himself. He’s a complete Bastard, you just don’t notice because he’s the protagonist.
I can imagine a lot of fantasy/SF universes that would be nice to live in, but living in the Dune universe would be only slightly more pleasant than Orwell’s 1984.
If only it were something short of the pencil…
Not that they’re good, but Patricia Kaneally-Morrison writes books about the Arthurian/Celtic myths in space. But, she is nuts.