The Mythcreant Podcast 539 – Mixing Magic and Technology
Wizards with smartphones, sorcerers with MRI machines, what’s going on here? It’s our episode about mixing magic and technology! Specifically, how to do it without weirding your audience out. Also, why you shouldn’t make a big deal about whether magic in your setting is specifically called “magic” or not. That one really bugs us. And also the reason historical Japanese stuff is at home in cyberpunk, but you’ll have a hard time if you show up with a halberd.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Oren: And, welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren. With me today is…
Chris: …Chris…
Oren: …and…
Bunny: …Bunny.
Oren: Magic and technology, they can be difficult to balance and mix together, which is why my fantasy world has no technology. [Chris and Bunny laugh] All magic, wizards are just running around naked, eating raw food and freezing at night.
Chris: Oh no, they haven’t even used rocks or sticks!
Oren: No, we don’t do stone scrapers around here. That’s too advanced. That’s some high muckety-muck tech that we don’t need. We have magic for that. Which, honestly, it’s not hard to imagine a magic spell being better at cleaning an animal hide than a stone scraper, but you get by with what you’ve got.
Bunny: The crows are laughing at us.
Chris: Some settings basically have technology, but it’s all made out of magic, instead. So maybe you have cave paintings with magic, and, you know, furs with magic.
Bunny: Chris, a paintbrush is pretty high tech. [laughter]
Chris: It would be pretty funny to have a super magic kind of tech setting, but nobody knows what a wheel is.
Oren: It’s like, okay, so instead of inventing the atlatl, we have summoned a magical force projection that extends our arm long enough to put a magic arrow into it, and then that goes farther. It just makes way more sense than inventing an atlatl, come on. [Chris laughs]
Bunny: We have a spell that makes our fingers sharp, and a spell that extends our arm really far, really fast. So we’re doing the same thing as an archer, but it is just our sharp arm. [laughter]
Oren: Sharp Arm is the stretchy guy they did not put on the Marvel team. [Bunny laughs] No, sorry, that’s a little too creepy for us. We’re gonna stick with Mr. Fantastic and the several other stretchy guys.
Chris: You know, Sharp Arm would make a good creepy villain.
Bunny: You’ve heard of Stretch Armstrong. You’ve never heard of Stretch Arm Sharp.
Oren: They show up on the occasional superhero episode that’s like more of a horror episode, kind of out of nowhere. And then a few years later, you remember it and you’re like, that was weirdly dark. That was not what I was expecting from watching that show. [laughter]
Bunny: They’ll make a movie out of it soon enough.
Oren: So, the biggest issue when we are looking at settings that have both magic and technology is making sure that there is still a reason to use magic, when technology exists. That’s not the only reason, but it is the biggest reason, the one I have found that gives the most trouble. Partly just because our conception of what magic can do is anchored so heavily in medieval-ish fantasy that when we create magic even for modern settings, we end up making it as if it’s balanced for swords and horses. But it’s a modern setting now, so now we’ve got planes, and machine guns, and it doesn’t quite work out.
Chris: I will say, there are some instances where you can make the magic more powerful than technology we have, but you don’t necessarily want to. Like guns. Guns are always the problem. They’re too lethal, so it makes it hard to choreograph good fights when they’re involved. So making magic more lethal than that is just a bad idea.
Oren: Authors are already having to de-emphasize how lethal modern firearm technology is when they script fight scenes in modern settings. So making more lethal magic than that is like, “Oh, okay, now we’re creating some trouble for ourselves.”
Bunny: What was that book that had the ninjas in the same setting as fighter planes? I think it’s a similar idea.
Oren: There are actually a lot of books that do that. It’s the entire cyberpunk genre. [everyone laughs] The Sword of Kaigen is the one that I talked about recently, which has that problem of, this is a group of magical Samurai, and they have cool elemental magic, which is neat, but like is no match for close air support, which does happen in the book. And then we just kind of keep going and don’t worry about it.
That’s happened going so far back as Neuromancer. There’s a guy who seems like he’s gonna be the final boss as this super badass, just like ninja guy. He’s not a tech ninja. He is just a normal ninja, and his superpower is that he can fight without being able to see, which ends up being really important because the bad guy’s main weapon turns out to be a blinding gun, and then the ninja joins Team Good and goes and kills the bad guy for them, because he can fight with his eyes closed.
Bunny: Well, that’s a convenient matchup.
Chris: So the enemy uses a blinding gun, instead of just…a gun?
Oren: Yeah. Because, you know, guns are kind of hard to get in this setting. [laughter] The funniest thing about Neuromancer is that there are several paragraphs of loving description of the weapon the main character gets, and how it’s perfectly weighted to deliver all of the force to its pyramid shaped tip. It’s a baton. It’s a collapsible baton. [laughter]
Bunny: Is it a sword?
Oren: No, it’s even sillier.
Chris: No, the swordiest sword?
Oren: It’s even sillier than the swordiest sword.
Bunny: It’s the baton-iest baton.
Oren: This is way too much description for a collapsible baton.
Chris: Does the character actually use it, then?
Oren: I honestly don’t remember.
Chris: I remember you complaining about the character getting this important weapon and then never using it.
Oren: You’re partially right. I was complaining that the second most important character, the lady who the protagonist ends up working with, she’s called a razor girl, because she’s like specially tuned for combat, and she has metal claws and shit, and she has super-enhanced reflexes, and it really feels like she’s gonna fight the ninja, because nobody else in the story can possibly give her a problem in a personal fight. So she’s gotta fight the ninja. But no, instead the ninja just joins them and takes care of the bad guy, and she never gets to fight anybody.
Chris: There’s like a whole library of books that I only know by Oren’s complaints about them. [Chris and Bunny laugh]
Bunny: Oh, me too.
Oren: It’s not my fault that I’m a prodigious complainer. I have no control over that behavior.
Bunny: That’s why we have a podcast
Chris: [laughing] Neuromancer being one of those books. I have never read Neuromancer. I only have a vague memory of complaints Oren has made about it, and I know it by those complaints.
Oren: What color is a dead channel, though? I have questions. [laughing] Okay, so Neuromancer doesn’t actually have magic, but a lot of cyberpunk settings do.
Bunny: What is technology?
Chris: Also, what is magic?
Oren: Yeah, who is magic?
Chris: I think especially when we get into space opera, or space fantasy, there’s a lot of things that are like, “Okay, well, is that magic? Is that magic?” as soon as you start adding some fantasy aesthetics.
Oren: Technically speaking, the supernatural is something that doesn’t exist. So, once it exists, it’s not magic anymore. There, I’ve solved your problem. That’s not a magical fireball. That person just has some kind of ability to create flames using their mind. We don’t understand how they do it yet, but it’s not supernatural, because it’s happening. [all laugh] That’s the Avatar strategy because at one point in the first episode, Katara said, “It’s not magic, it’s bending.” And then a bunch of weirdos decided this was the hill they were gonna die on, when you’re talking about magic in the Avatar setting. [laughter]
Chris: People, please just don’t do that. If you have like an alternate world, just have it so none of them have ever heard of the word magic, and they just say bending or whatever instead. You don’t need to call attention to whether or not it uses the label magic. Please don’t.
Oren: Broken Earth did the same thing.
Chris: Didn’t Broken Earth actually have magic-magic, and then named something else magic?
Oren: Yes, it did!
Chris: I know this from the complaints that Oren has made about this book. [Chris and Bunny laugh] Just to be clear.
Oren: Broken Earth has a magic system called orogeny, which is a real term, but sounds a little bit inappropriate. [laughter]
Bunny: It’s spelled “o-r-o.”
Oren: Yes. It’s only when you pronounce it. But it’s a real geological term, so it’s a kind of earth magic. They don’t use the word magic throughout the book, which is fine. There’s no issue with that. It just gets weird that at the end they discover a new kind of magic, which the protagonist says, “This is magic. But the old one, that’s not magic.” And yeah, okay. You can make the argument that she would see it that way, but also I don’t think she would, because this new thing seems to be sort of a variation on what she was already doing, so I don’t know why she would consider that magic.
It’s sort of like an airplane pilot seeing a helicopter and being like, “Magic! It must be magic! It’s different than my fixed-wing airplane.” Seems a little too similar. But regardless, it just made a lot of people very weird about the magic system in that book, because the moment you start talking about magic, they’ll be like, no, it’s not magic. They said it wasn’t.
Bunny: Mistborn handily sidesteps this by simply having Allomancy and Feruchemy just be things that are there, and not someone being like, “Rawr, magic.”
Oren: According to the Mistborn roleplaying game, I can dual-wield catapults, so I don’t actually need magic in that setting. Magic has actually been outmoded by catapults.
Bunny: [laughs] I will say one of the least interesting things that you can do with magic – with melding magic and technology, I should say – is make technology work the exact same way it works normally, but say it’s magic. Like, there are cell phones, and they work like cell phones, but it’s a communication spell. It works just like phone calls do, but it’s a speeell.
Chris: I guess that’s a question of what impression do you wanna leave the reader with. Because normally I would deter an editing client, for instance, from doing that, because generally if they’re doing that, they actually want it to feel like magic, and they’re just not differentiating it enough from using a phone.
Now, I think it would kind of be a joke, right? You could definitely make a setting where it’s like, “No, no, it’s all magic, we swear,” and then somebody just pulls out a phone, and it’s like,
“This is a very magic phone, I swear.”
Oren: I would generally say that you want magic to feel different than technology. That’s not to say that magic cannot mimic, or provide the same utility that a piece of technology could. Lots of settings do that. And you can see in the Temeraire books, we start to see them using dragons the same way that modern armies use helicopters, to drop troops behind enemy lines and stuff like that, for transport and logistics. But that’s not to say that the dragons are exactly like helicopters. They have notable differences, like they are alive is the first one you might notice.
So I would generally say that you want it to feel different, even if it is performing a similar role. Otherwise we’re gonna start to wonder, why did you bother making it magic if everything is the same, but we add magic at the end of the word. “Here’s your mobile magic-phone!” Does it do anything different than a normal phone? Like, no, but we say that it’s running on an ether crystal or something.
Chris: Also, magic has more novelty than a piece of technology people use every day, and it’s going to lose that novelty if it doesn’t feel different in some way.
Oren: Which is why you want to make sure you actually have reasons to use magic, because it’s boring if you’re like, yeah, we have all these spells that we could use, but they’re all less efficient than just getting in the car and driving somewhere. That’s funny for a joke once, that’s like a subversive thing to do, but then afterwards you’re like, “Oh, right. Magic is cool, actually. I wanted magic.”
Bunny: Magic cooler than car. [Chris laughs]
Oren: Yeah. More interesting than car, hot take. So that’s why you should think about this sort of thing, rather than just being like, “Oh, well, why does it matter? Why can’t I just build my world organically? And if the technology is more powerful, then we’ll just use the technology.” It’s like, well, you can. It’s just gonna be sad.
Chris: It’s worth pointing out, technology can be used by anyone. That’s one of its defining features, and that’s why you can’t balance out a magic faction by giving a different faction tech. Technically they could invent a new tech and then temporarily get the jump on the other side or something like that. But generally, if there’s advanced tech, the magical people will also have it if it’s useful.
Oren: You can create isolated situations where that is temporarily not true. Like if you have a setting where magical beings arrive from another dimension or whatever, and they haven’t gotten situated yet, they don’t understand the technology of the world they’ve just arrived at. But they can learn. If there’s any amount of time, they’ll figure it out.
Chris: And because storytellers are always looking for ways to oppress their mages, even though they shouldn’t, there’s a lot of stories – like X-Men has this – with the magical get-rid-of-magic collar. And even if the tech neutralizes magic, it’s still not as good as magic, because if you look at it, that means the non-magical people are on the defensive.
Oren: My favorite thing about the magic-canceling collars in the X-Men universe is that there are multiple X-Men for whom their abilities are kind of a curse, at least to have them on all the time. So can they make a version of this collar that’s a little less obtrusive, like, I don’t know, something that would be a little subtle, like maybe a wristband or something that you could put on so that Rogue can have sex without killing somebody? [Chris and Bunny laugh] I know she wants that. She keeps talking about it. [laughter]
Or like Cyclops can take off his glasses without causing a mass casualty event. It’s so weird to hear them angsting about that when there is an assistive device that exists in the world that could accomplish that for them. And they’re all like, “No, that’s evil. It’s evil that you made this.”
Chris: The other thing I can think of is you could have tech that specifically applies to a unique magical weakness somebody has. Again, you’re only making things a little more even. You’re probably not giving tech people the advantage. For instance, in the movie Underworld, they have UV bullets that they use against the vampires.
Bunny: UV bullets? Isn’t that just, like, a laser?
Oren: No, they glow. They glow real bright.
Chris: They’re probably not realistic, they just look cool. They’re like a bullet that has a liquid that looks like black light.
Oren: My hot take is that vampires should not be vulnerable to UV lamps, outside of maybe some very limited circumstances, because once you establish that weakness, vampires are just child’s play to defeat. Why do you need a gun, when a lamp already exists? We already have a UV gun. It’s this lamp I got, and you just kind of sweep it around. Solved. It’s so boring.
Bunny: Grow plants and destroy vampires. That’s what the Amazon listing says.
Oren: Yeah, that’s a great use for that. I would generally say that you need to think about what kind of tech level you want, because that is going to affect what kind of magic makes the most sense for your setting. If you’re doing your kind of standard medieval-ish technology where you have swords and horses and castles, and pretty much every weapon is dependent on muscle power in some form, you don’t have to think about that too much. That’s where all of our default starting magic is coming from anyway, just because that’s where the genre has been for so long. So you’re probably gonna be okay there. Your biggest problem there is gonna be making sure your magic’s not just OP and causing problems, and that also applies if you go further back. Like technically speaking, there is a huge difference in technology between the Middle Ages and the Bronze Age. When you’re talking about how it affects magic, with fiction – they’re kind of the same. I’m very sorry to all the history professors who heard that, but in this context they are.
Bunny: Oh, Bret Devereaux is gonna come for you.
Oren: Oh, no, not Bret Devereaux! His article on archery ruined my book. [laughter] What do you mean they don’t fire in volleys? He couldn’t have told me that like two years ago? Agh! I hate it. [general laughter]
Bunny: Gotta have a second edition to fix that.
Oren: I’ve also found that once you start getting out of the medieval-ish era, and you get into more of muskets and industrial revolution type era, that’s when I find the connection between magic and technology gets more interesting, because you’re getting technology that is powerful enough to do things that were just unthinkable without these advances, but not so powerful that it’s gonna just out mode most magic systems. I’m not the first person to think of this. There are so many stories of “What if the fantasy setting got to the industrial revolution? What effect would that have on magic? And I think there’s a reason for that. I think that’s a really good balance point, because you can have magic that is still capable enough that you would use it over, say, a musket, or a train, without making the magic so powerful that it’s just mind-breaking.
Bunny: I think it also depends on your magic system, obviously. I was thinking about this, and different magic systems, and I think mixing magic and technology only really works when you have a system where you can cast lingering spells on things. I was having trouble thinking of melding bending and technology. Like, you can kind of replace technology with bending. We see in the one city there’s guys pushing boxes around, and that kind of feels like the train is like a big chariot because it’s still running on effectively muscle power. It’s bending, but you have to have somebody there to do it. Or like Allomancy, although I’m sure if anyone could figure out a way to blend that with tech, it’s Brando Sando, but based on the first Mistborn book, it would be pretty hard to have an Allomancy-infused bike, or something.
Oren: Stuff like Allomancy and bending, they don’t do enchanted objects. You don’t enchant an object with fire bending, but you can, if you’re interested in hard mode, you can stop to think about “How would this magic affect the advancement and production of technology?” For example, if we were just looking at Avatar, the various bendings, particularly earth bending and fire bending, have a lot of implications for industry. An earth bender is like a one-person construction crew. And a metal bender can shape metal in ways that even in real life we would struggle to do with modern twenty-first century technology. And fire benders can produce heat at levels that are not too unreasonable now, but if you don’t have industrial furnaces are very difficult to create. We also saw them charging batteries and stuff in Korra.
So you can think about that. You can ask the question, would the magic make the technology less likely to advance, because we don’t have a need for it? And some technology is invented because it fills needs? Or is it gonna make it more likely to be advanced, because we have more advanced tools to make it with? And, I don’t know. That’s why it’s hard mode. I have no idea what the answer to that one is.
Bunny: Or because a tech entrepreneur wants to outsource the labor to a machine, you gotta invent a machine for that.
Oren: It is notable that most theories of why technology advances do assume that technology does something useful. Which, as we’ve seen, is not always the case. [laughter]
Bunny: Look, instead of looking in a dictionary, I’m going to summon a fairy with a concussion to define this term for me. [Chris laughs]
Chris: Supposedly, things that are not useful get to the end of their hype cycle, and the bubble will pop. Please pop, bubble. Please.
I mean, it’s interesting that there are some magical abilities that are typical in scifi settings to the point where they’re considered scifi, basically all of your psychic abilities. And I do think some of them blend pretty well. Like telekinesis, okay, it’s not more deadly than a gun, but I do think that it’s useful in that it could be used for things a gun can’t be used for. So if you have a fight and somebody is taking cover, or you run out of bullets, or something else happens, telekinesis could pick up the slack and just give you a longer reach, which is really useful in a fight. Not more deadly than a gun, but there’s a variety of situations where it can be used. So to me it makes sense that that is a very popular scifi magic power, shall we say.
Oren: Sometimes scifi gets a little weird. Even Star Trek – in Deep Space Nine, the first time we met the Vorta, they had this weird psychic blast power that they could use, which was clearly kind of cumbersome, and they had to aim it with their chest. So not an especially useful ability, unless no one has weapons, and then it becomes pretty handy, right? [laughter]
What you were talking about with telekinesis is a method that I don’t see that often, which is to think about what technology, at least, what modern technology, is good at, and not try to have magic compete with it on that level. So modern weaponry is very good at delivering destructive force in a line in front of you. It’s just so good at that. It’s so incredibly good at it. Much to our chagrin, in many cases. So you probably don’t need to be trying to make magic compete with that. But modern technology is not very good at making stuff across the room move in a way we want it to move, or at changing the direction that water is flowing. Those are things that modern technology is not good at. So you can have magic do things like that, and have it be a little more interesting, so it doesn’t feel like you’re having to constantly choose.
Chris: Another thing to keep in mind that we see storytellers do sometimes is just assuming that if it’s magical in a setting that’s generally low magic, and it’s kind of creepy, that means it’s somehow powerful. I think we probably talked about this in Dune Prophecy, where it makes a really big deal out of this guy, and he has the ability to look at people and kill them. A powerless ability. It could be powerful, but the thing is, it’s not any more powerful than a gun, because as far as we see in the show, he never does it to anybody who’s not in the same room with him. And it takes time, and sometimes it even hurts him if he does it too much.
Oren: They are really squirrely about what the range on that ability is, and they eventually, I think, establish that it’s based on a virus, so it can affect anyone who’s infected by the virus, which does make it kind of mind-bendingly powerful. But for most of the show, it does not appear to work that way. Everyone’s acting like it’s really impressive, when it isn’t really. The same thing happened in Ten Thousand Doors of January – mild spoilers. A bad guy has the ability to drain the heat out of you with a touch if he can hold onto you for a while, which is a little less dangerous than having a knife. Sure, that guy can kill you if he can get a grip on you and hold you in place. But so can Crocodile Dundee. This bad guy is about as dangerous as Crocodile Dundee. [laughter]
Chris: If you had somebody who instantly killed you with a touch, that would be a little more effective. Not necessarily more effective than a gun.
Oren: They do have revolvers in this setting, so it’s still not super impressive.
Chris: Which is kind of why you need magic to do something different, like shape-shifting somebody – mind controlling them.
Oren: Right. Or opening doors to other dimensions.
Chris: Opening doors to other dimensions.
Oren: Or I suppose in the case of Ten Thousand Doors, making anything you write come true. Technology can’t do that!
Chris: Oh my gosh. Aa! But see, Oren, for some reason we have to cut the words into our skin.
Oren: She did do that at one point. [Chris laughs]
Chris: She did not need to do that. She did not need to do that.
Oren: She was feeling kind of extra that day. It was just a very, real drama-llama kind of day. It’s okay though. She gets tired after she does it. She has to take a little nap.
Chris: Take a little nap for a plot-convenient amount of time. Definitely. The thing that I’ve learned from using magic, writing my own stories, is if it does not constrain you when you are plotting, if it’s never inconvenient, like, oh, I’d like to use magic now. But oh, drat, she just used magic, this is her cooldown time, or recharge time, I guess you can’t use magic yet, then it is not an effective limit.
Oren: Yeah, but I don’t like having limits. I would like to do things that I would like to do.
Chris: It’s true. Constraints can be hard. They require some troubleshooting, some critical thinking, but I think the audience can tell the difference.
Oren: How about I say there are constraints and then ignore them when I need a scene to work properly. [Chris laughs]
Bunny: All you have to do is make everyone surprised that it didn’t work that time, and then every time you do it, everyone acts surprised all over again. So you had limits.
Oren: Yeah, there you go! As long as we acknowledge that we’re ignoring the rules, that’s fine, right? That’s probably okay?
Chris: We have rules, and then every time the protagonists violate them, they just use lots of spunk and determination, and then push past barriers and unlock new abilities.
Oren: They could declare war, if they’re Buffy. [Chris laughs] In fairness, that’s not really activating a new magical ability, that’s just Buffy deciding she’s gonna win the fight this time.
Chris: Teen Wolf even has this whole arc for Scott where he becomes an alpha by, like, pushing past somebody’s magical barrier.
Oren: He’s a true alpha, Chris!
Chris: Oh, that’s right. It’s not even an alpha, he’s a true alpha.
Oren: Because the show establishes that the way that you become an alpha is by killing another alpha, which doesn’t really make a lot of sense, because that implies that eventually there won’t be any, because surely some of them are gonna die in ways other than being killed by another alpha. That’s weird.
Chris: So a true alpha is somebody who becomes an alpha without killing an alpha, and that’s cool, that fills in the gap, except for, of course, to give Scott candy, they have to emphasize how very, very, very, very rare it is. But it can’t be! Or there would be no alphas.
Oren: It can’t be that rare! [Chris laughs] That show is also funny because it’s one of the ones we were talking about where the hunter faction gets to use guns and nobody else does, and there’s never an explanation of why. Why do only the hunters use them? The one hunter who becomes a were-jaguar gets both were powers and guns, so she multi-classed for that.
Well, with the gun-using were-jaguar, I think we can go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.