Magic science: If I ever wrote a book...

I think that if you looked at the timestamps on the vast majority of my posts, pretty much all of them would have been posted well past midnight from wherever I was when I posted. So I've made the effort to post this one at the very least before 10pm.

So uh, yeah. Oh, laptop update: turns out the insurance company doesn't want to pay for the repairs, and the quote came back, saying that the entirety of the repairs would consist of getting a brand new laptop. Or at least that way would be cheaper than fixing it. So now I'm working for Dad to get enough money to buy a new one. I mean, while I have enough money for it as it is, it's only barely enough, and I'm not really that stoked to put a $1648 hole in my drinking money for when I start Uni in two weeks.

Anyway, that's not why I'm writing this. I was bored, so I thought I'd share this idea for an epic book or three that I've had kicking around in my head for like the last... couple of years.

So the idea is that generally, when one decides to write a sci-fi/fantasy novel, the choice is just that: Sci-Fi or Fantasy? I realise that that's more or less a massive generalisation, but the way I see it, is that in order to invoke the temporary suspension of disbelief, you need to start with something to disbelieve. Of course, the easiest ways to do that lie at the core of Sci-Fi and Fantasy: Science and Magic. My question is: why not have both? When I had that idea all those years ago, I thought it kind of strange that nobody had ever clued on to this before.

The story would go something like this then:

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Okay, it just occurred to me that I have only the barest ideas of how this would work. Naturally there would be some kind of vast, sweeping war across the mighty Galactic Empire/Federation, and at the heart of the opposing sides would be the High Council of Magic on one side, and the Advanced Research Laboratory or whatever on the other side. The lines aren't that clear-cut though, as there is misuse of both powerful forces on either side of the conflict. Into this galactic battlefield enters our hero (or possibly heroes, and whose name(s) and occupation(s) I haven't decided yet). He/she/they are involved in the whole affair in some minor way, and are eventually led to discover the inevitable variety of grand conspiracy reaching all over the Federation/Empire, plotting to use the war for their own nefarious gains, as it must because this is a work of fiction, therefore most major plot devices have to be predictable. So it falls to our hero(es) to reveal the faces of the conspiracy and so bring peace to the Empire/Federation. But as his/her/their search uncovers more and more, he/she/they realise that the tendrils of corruption reach higher than they could ever imagine...

Yeah. So, it's a work in progress, but I think it has some real potential. Also, with careful use of detail, I'm pretty sure this can be spread out over at least a trilogy.

But the part that puzzled me most about this was: why have I never seen anybody attempt to do something like this before? Could it be that nobody had ever thought of putting Science and Magic together (not very likely)? Maybe they have, and it just never became popular enough for me to have heard of it (that's actually fairly likely). But then it occurred to me that I HAD seen it before.

For example, the Harry Potter novels are set in modern times, and magic still exists. But even then, magic is given pretty much all the spotlight, and technology takes a backseat. Also, it's more or less stated that magic beats technology any day (hence why no electronics work around Hogwarts). On top of that, there is a dearth of any noticeable amount of detail of the inner workings of magic in the Harry Potter universe. It's more or less, 'anything is possible, except making food appear out of thin air, because that's cheating'.

In the Wars of Light and Shadow series by Janny Wurts (which I'm reading right now), there are a couple of bits that hint at the possibility that magic and technology can exist within the same universe, and it seems to be implied that they existed at the same time as well at some point in the past, and yet in the actual novels, technology is almost non-existent, set back to the roughly the same level as any other bunch of Fantasy novels, whilst magic is allowed free rein. Another example of this is the Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist, where Nakor attempts to explain magic in terms that sound suspiciously like trying to explain high school physics to a bunch of children, but still there is no evidence of advanced technology in any of the books.

In fact, the only novels I can think of in which magic and advanced technology actually exist together would be the Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer, where the fairy people wield both magic and advanced tech. But even here, we see the opposite effect in place: where the technology is practically boundless, the magic is extremely limited, restricted to only hypnosis, invisibility and healing for the most part. Even still, the plot is driven forwards by technology and magic in roughly equal parts.

So what is it about magic and technology that they can't seem to exist in the same universe? Perhaps it's that establishing two sets of rules governing how things work is too confusing, or complicated, or otherwise obstructive to enjoying the story. Or perhaps if we extrapolate the history of some of these novels, we discover that when one is allowed to grow, the necessity of the other lessens? We can see this in the novels I mentioned earlier: in each case, the expansion of one of these powers is only seen in the presence of the absence (or limit) of the other.

Either way, I don't see these as obstacles. Should I ever get around to writing this novel (which honestly isn't all that likely to happen, although I'm still staking my claim on the premise), these shouldn't pose too much of a problem. It seems like all you need to do is avoid going too in depth (after all, this is thousands of years in the future, when both schools have had time to grow and achieve the impossible, albeit in very different ways), and come up with some plausible back story as to how the two came to coexist. Kind of like the Harry Potter universe, except three thousand years in the future, where all the wizarding folk decided to move to a separate planet to escape the muggles or something. I dunno.