The Glade 4.0

What do you mean by magic, and what do you mean by technology? Are you familiar with Clarke's Third Law?

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Go read a Shadowrun book.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Well like the stuff done in Harry Potter or your typical fantasy MMO mixed with modern tech or future-tech (a la StarCraft/Avatar/WarHammer 40k/etc)

Never heard of Clarke's Third Law . . .



Heh, actually I was just thinking about Shadowrun. And, like I said above, I guess WH40K could qualify for magic meets tech.

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If you're not familiar with Arthur C. Clarke you're really not all that familiar with science fiction in general. (This coming from someone who doesn't like the Odyssey series of books FarSky's favorite movie is based on.)

Clarke's Three Laws:

1.When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.

2.The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3.Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Not my favorite film anymore...it's somewhere around #4.

I'm familiar with Arthur C Clarke, just not his laws.

Now that I read them, tho, I recognize them.

My general feeling when faced with magic vs technology is that technology generally wins out, due to it's adaptability, quick turn-around time, and mass-produceability.

Technology and magic tend to fill the same niches, though. This makes it hard for them both to exist while still maintaining their own relevance. I'll admit I'm not too familiar with Warhammer lore (do they even have much lore? :p I know there are a million releases of WH stuff over decades, but it always seemed more a gaming first, lore second thing to me) but from what I have seen the magic and tech there are all but indistinguishable from one another... either they exist simply to blow things up or they lead indirectly to stuff being blown up.

In the last book I read (fantasy, non-modern), magic was of limited use. One thing it was used for, however, was conversation over distances, whether it be across town or across oceans. This is something pretty clearly a technology use in today's world.

Ultimately you can probably find settings where various degrees of technology fits in fine with magic, but it's usually going to be pretty specific to the setting in question. This is probably true mostly in the case of in-setting technological revolutions. Magic usually exists in these settings from the get go, but then you see technology change in the course of the story and that can lead to plenty of interesting results without stomping all over magic's toes.

So.... I think you need to look at it more from a role point of view first. What can technology accomplish that magic cannot if you have both prevalent in a setting. Specific situations can support this well, and you can probably find a lot of stories out there that have some aspect of this (especially if you stretch the word 'technology'... for example, the Wheel of Time series is on the cusp of certain industrial developments which has some impact and is very distinct from the role of its magic). I suspect it's fairly hard to do this, though, without following pretty specific paths that have already been gone down by previous authors.

Just my two cents, though. I'm not one of those people that churns through 50 or 100 books a year by any means so my experience is definitely less than that of more than a few posters here. :p

edit: little bit of clarity improvement.

Fact is that technology is in sum more advanced than magic in Harry Potter... the muggles have a higher standard of living so to speak.

Yeah, but are any of those books good? I read some WH40k paperbacks when I was bored, they were entertaining enough to kill time, but will be completely forgotten.

Sci-fi and fantasy really aren't that different. The best example of them co-mingling are in comic books. The "science" they use is clearly defying quite a few laws of physics most of the time. Stars Wars is a great example. That is straight up space-wizards.

I think it can be done, but from a writing point of view, keeping your made up magic stuff and made up tech stuff straight and not contradicting things and making everything plausible within the universe is going to be more trouble than I would want to deal with. The best thing to do is keep it simple. The more rules you create, the more opportunities for continuity errors you miss. People will forgive the impossible, but not the improbable.

There's an injustice that she has this many movies of her books and Terry Pratchet is unknown to most regular people. The Hogfather was a BBC two part movie that was pretty good. I'd like to see more of his work done so well. Pratchet makes some really endearing characters. Even Death is quite lovable.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

just watched the first part of color of magic. it was... ok....

At this point, it is important to note the distinction between science fiction and space opera. Star Trek is science fiction. Star Wars is space opera.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I would argue that Star Trek is mostly Space Opera too.

My feelings as well.

It pretty much defines the term "Ok" for me as far as a movie goes. It wasn't terrible, it wasn't great.

They completely glossed over the evil Temple scene, for instance, and cut major corners throughout. The actors were all good, tho -- Aston was just about the perfect Twoflowers (for not being Asian, at least).