Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 01 April 2014 23:58:13 Logan Kearsley wrote:

> On 1 April 2014 15:19, Jeffrey Brown <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > On the other hand... a universe that is "too open" can destroy the
> > fantasy. (As a silly example, if the fantasy has a sword and magic
> > universe, and then, hundreds of pages later, a critical battle is won at
> > the last instant by helicopter-mounted machine guns... well, that's sort
> > of disappointing.)
> 
> I'm pretty sure I take your point, but, on the other hand, that sort
> of thing *can* be made to work out quite well.

Yes.  Reconciling magic and technology is not trivial, but it
can be done.  More on an approach I have found for a conworld
below.

>       There's a setting idea
> I've had noodling around in my head for several years (*someday* I'll
> get around to actually writing the story...) in which the
> sword-and-sorcery adventuring is in fact supported behind the scenes
> by high tech trickery of which the characters are entirely unaware.

As in Clarke's Law?  So the magic in that story is not real
magic but emulated by a technology the characters do not
understand?  Did I get that right?

> Sam Hughes has been doing something similar (with a sort of Urban
> Fantasy rather than Sword & Sorcery base) with his ongoing serial
> novel _Ra_ (http://qntm.org/ra). _King Dragon_ by Michael Swanwick
> seamlessly merges fantasy and technological elements, to the point
> that the titular King Dragon is in fact a fighter jet made animate and
> sentient by magical means (which must be crewed by Mortals since its
> metallic frame is toxic to Fey).

Ah, the metal allergy of the Fey!  This is probably the starting
point of the notion, now common in fantasy fiction and games,
that magic and technology are antagonistic forces (as in the old
rule in _Dungeons & Dragons_ that magic users must not wear armour
because the metal interferes with the flow of magical energy).

This antagonism may be "physical" (put in quotes because this has
very little to do with real physics!) or economical.  The idea
behind the "physical" antagonism is that magic and technology
negatively interfere with each other.  Some fantasy worlds work
with the assumption that some technologies simply do not work in
the world because of the presence of magic, though this is not
easy to do consistently.  If you change the properties of the
elements enough to make gunpowder unworkable, you probably change
them enough to make life as we know it unworkable as well.  But
perhaps some technological contraptions just happen to have
magical side effects that make their use impractical.  For
instance, the high pressures and temperatures inside a steam
engine may trigger some adverse elemental magic, as water is
tormented by fire and earth.  So the first engineer who tried
it out and built a steam engine wrought some gruesome magical
havoc, and later engineers did not want to try again.

The reverse, namely technology inhibiting magic, is easier to
achieve as you can define magic to behave the way you want in
your world.  Metals, concrete, plastics and semiconductors may
all emit some sort of anti-magical "radiation", making
spellcasting prohibitively difficult (or dangerous) in an
environment where they are common, such as a modern city.

The other way magic and technology can interfere is what can
be broadly called economical.  Both can be used to achieve
similar things, and people will choose the way that is cheaper.
In most fantasy worlds, magic is fairly rare, limited by the
need of a rare inborn talent, exotic ingredients, or other
factors that cannot easily be reproduced.  But there are some
fantasy worlds where magic is commonplace, and even some where
magic takes the role of technology (such as the _Magitech_
setting of the _Amazing Engine_ RPG, where people commute to
work on flying carpets and watch soap operas on crystal balls
- or so I am told, as I never got it into my hands).  Some
people have proposed that the availability of magical solutions
to all sorts of problems reduces the incentives to develop
technology, and that this is a possible reason why so many
fantasy worlds seem to be stuck on a medieval technology level
for millennia.

But if magic is rare and difficult to reproduce, technology may
eclipse magic.  This is the case in one of my worldbuilding
projects, _Rosæ Crux_, which has the same technology level as
the real world, but also functioning magic.  There is no
"physical" interference between magic and technology, but magic
has some limits.  Magic in _Rosæ Crux_ is *informational*; it
amounts to the manipulation of morphic fields (as in Rupert
Sheldrake's theory; I know, dubious science, but we are speaking
about a *fantasy world* here) through the mind, and this has
some consequences: 

1. Magic is *not* an energy source.  There simply is no way to
power a machine with magic, or levitate things magically.  What
magic can do is to *inform* processes.  A wizard may, for example,
cause a stone to crack in some specific way - but he still needs
to strike it with a hammer in order to provide the energy.

2. Magic cannot do things that are impossible to happen without
it (such as teleporation), only things that are (maybe extremely)
unlikely.

3. Magic is difficult and unreliable.  There aren't many people
who can actually do something useful with it, and even their
spells often go wrong.

4. Magic requires good understanding of the target.  For instance,
if you want to cause a car engine to stall by means of magic, you
must understand how a car engine works.  This sometimes means that
you often can achieve what you are trying to do by mundane means
as well!

5. Magical items cannot be mass-produced.  Magical items are very
difficult to make, and require lots of spells cast on them by a
highly proficient wizard - if only one of these fails, the item
is useless or worse and must be discarded.  This was the reason
why magic did not inhibit the rise of modern technology: people
sought ways to do what they wanted to do in a cheaper way that
does *not* rely on this expensive and fickle art.

Thus, the modern world of _Rosæ Crux_ is much like *here*, and
most magical artifacts are now found in museums; yet, magic
continues to work, is still useful - and taught in universities.

> And then there's the whole _Well
> World_ or _Abhorsen_ series, which are *radically* different from each
> other in nearly every other way but which both feature conflicts
> across the borders of magical and non-magical realms, in which a
> gunship firing across the border may indeed be the turning point of a
> critical battle whose lead-up took place in the sword and magic world
> up to that point.

I have just looked up both in Wikipedia.  They are very different
from each other, but indeed, in the point you mention, they have
something in common.

The notion of different laws of nature holding in different
regions is not really something new - it is part and parcel of
the tradition of Faerie.

> _Well World_, incidentally, is a weird kind of meta-open universe, in
> a couple of ways. For one, maybe your story doesn't fit into *this*
> particular iteration of the universe, but we could fix that just by
> re-booting it.... For another, yeah, your world probably *could've*
> been included in the universe, except that the gods just weren't very
> imaginative, and probably didn't think to do it (that's why there're
> so many anthropomorphic monsters, y'know- satyrs, centaurs, minotaurs,
> etc.- the designers ran out of ideas, and just started cobbling bits
> and pieces of other creatures together).

Seems to be a kind of nexus between very different worlds.
I think the _TORG_ RPG worked similarly, with a near-future Earth
functioning as a nexus between various very different realms. 

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