General Fantasy: On the Absence of Technology in the Presence of Magic

[Lord Raziere]

Whenever I read a Fantasy novel, I try to assume that the local wizards aren't dumb. If Magic A didn't help their situation, asking why they didn't do Magic B is silly because we can assume that someone DID try Magic B at some point and wound up turning themselves into a squirrel. Or summoned something from the Dungeon Dimensions. Similarly, if they could just go into business lighting fires around town or whatever, I'd assume they'd do that. It's just that they either gain more money from researching higher magics or are uninterested in petty concerns like money - they've got their tower and spend a minimal amount of time bringing in the money to sustain it, and spend the rest of the time pursuing what they love - knowledge.

Yup, exactly this. Wizards are not scientists. Just because someone puts a thing to use some way that you wouldn't, doesn't mean they are stupid.

Like say for example, a former dragon slayer using his legendary sword to cut meat for dinner. Is he stupid? No. He just prefers to use it for that since he no longer slays dragons, and the meat he does have is bigger than what can be cut with knives, and leave the dragon slaying to younger more foolish people like he once was, but y'know keep the sword around just to remind you of old times.

similarly, a wizard can be smart, but that doesn't mean he automatically starts making a steam engine work if he had both water and fire magic. Or would be interested in doing so, or have the control necessary, or think up the idea, or think its useful, and so on and so forth. His motivations for using magic are dictated by the context of his life- he might've become a wizard just to fight in a war with magical power and only knows how to use it forcefully. He might've become a wizard without any concern for anyone else and just wants a power trip. He might've learned it just as a pragmatic necessity so he can go adventuring into the wilderness safely to do his real passion: monster watching!
"Well y'know its not every day you see a dragon egg hatch don'cha know. and just think of what can be learned from watching the habits of ogres in their natural environment when no one else is around. crikey, issat a tarrasque? I got to watch this...what a beautiful majestic creature.

Wot? fight em? use me magic for what? I don't care about that, look at all these notes I'm taking, this here is a goldmine of information, mate! A few abjurations and illusions so they don't spot us will be just fine, but fighting them? Nah, they're too beautiful."

[Rodin]

With that last one, I think the actual finishing quote would be more like "What a majestic creatOHGODARGHARGHARGHARGH", and would explain the distinct lack of Tarrasque Biologists in the world setting.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I'm a huge fan of actual freaking history. Small, incremental improvements in technology are certainly normal. Emergence of entirely new technologies are a different matter entirely. These occurrences involved access to knowledge from other cultures, formal education, and the ability to work without worrying about starving to death.

You say that like "entirely new technologies" aren't just an accumulation of "small, incremental improvements".

I meant unscientific as irreproducible by others, as in art. Two wizards may cast fireball spells, but they do it differently, and the spells themselves are visibly different.

Way back in the day, when humans were little more than unusually intelligent apes, any two hominids would have made tools differently, and they were themselves visibly different. Yet we managed to figure out how to use those scientifically.
The process might be artistic in principle, but it's always easy to industrialize in reality. Just look at actual art, whether paintings or literature or film or any other medium. For every true gem which someone poured their heart and soul into, there's a hundred soulless pieces churned out like clockwork. Just look at whatever blockbuster films of 2016 you found particularly distasteful for an example.

Engineers work with others to improve and protect their communities. They need people to carry out their tasks, and to employ them. There is no such guarantee for wizards. Need gold? Transmute a modicum of lead, then get back to becoming immortal. (In most fiction, wizards greatly prefer knowledge to gold.)

I don't think you understand what I mean.
Wizards might be able to ignore some of what they need with magic, but unless they are de facto gods, they can't do everything they want to do on their own. "Profit" here means,

Unless you can name something specific, the best energy sources I can think of are charcoal, or perhaps dried manure. It's sufficient for metalworking, but not for any real transportation capability. See my subsequent idea for why chopping down a forest could be a very bad idea in a fantasy world.

I've never had to put my mind to it, but I'm reasonably confident that something would be figured out if you had an entire civilization working at it. And it's not like transportation or electricity need fossil fuels.

Heading off on a tangent, have you ever noticed how well humans get along with other races in fantasy literature? Our own history seems very, very different. If humans are struggling, they inevitably seem to start preying on other communities, especially if they are noticeably different. You'd think that any fantasy world would be in perpetual war as these groups set upon one another.

No more than they were in real life. If our cultures developed alongside people with pointy ears who could sense secret doors, we'd consider them no weirder than we consider people with dark skin and higher rates of sickle-cell malaria.

Except Universalism, one of the axioms of science, would be false. You and I may be made of atoms, but he could be made just as easily of quintessence, or of a single indivisible substance. How would you find the laws of physics through elimination of possibilities when doing so is impossible? Is energy indestructible? Not when Glorg the Bearded causes a piece of rock to disappeat without putting it anywhere, or losing energy through thermodynamic decay.

How do you find out the rules of entropy when you can actually have a little demon filter things forever without energy input?

You can construct universes in which every rule is broken without spending a second thinking about how to replace them, but that doesn't change a darn thing for the rest of us.

Wizard A wiggles his fingers, twitches his beard, and hurls a small pinch of sulfur and bat guano. Wizard B wiggles her nose and blinks while scattering rose petals.
From a mechanics perspective, both are using spell components to fry a squad of angry orcs. The science, though, may not be there as it would be in an experiment. The learning and practice performed by both wizards is an individual journey into enlightenment.

If they can consistently fry orcs, and if teachers can consistently bring students to enlightenment (or tell them how to reach enlightenment themselves or something along those lines), then how is that meaningfully irregular?

Even if magic is just a technique, it doesn't necessarily follow that it benefits the wizard to teach other people. Yes, from a modern, scientific research perspective we think that way, but I'd look at it more like the history of reading. Up until the invention of the printing press, most people didn't know how to read. It wasn't necessary for their daily life, it took time away from more important things like making a living, and generally speaking only the wealthy could afford to do so. Even basic education is a relatively recent phenomenon brought on by easy availability of the requisite materials.

Right, um, you're making a lot of unspoken assumptions that you never actually explain. Like that first sentence. You never actually explain how the rest of that makes it unbeneficial for the wizard to teach others. There are, loosely speaking, two possibilities:
1. Knowledge of magic is common. Everyone can find someone to teach them whatever little tricks they need. Obviously, this involves teaching magic being common.
2. Knowledge of magic is rare. People with the means and motive will pay through the nose in gold, service, or favors to learn magic. Teaching magic wouldn't be common, but it sure as hell would be beneficial.

Wizardry in a medieval world would be much the same - it takes a hellish amount of training to become proficient, it takes the available money to get trained, and it takes an aptitude for scholarship.

And you don't consider the possibility that such magic would lead to changes in the status quo you asserted last paragraph? If a duke could gain a load of power by having a wizard teach a bunch of soldier-apprentices basic pyromancy, and he had something to give the wizard (gold? land? a noble bride?), he would almost certainly try to do so.

It's also often considered quite a dangerous profession, even if not adventuring. You ask why wizards haven't found a way to turn summoning fire from a stone into a set of battery stones that can be sold to travelers? Well, that's because Old Nicodemus tried it and his entire tower burned down from the resulting conflagration.

That's an assertion which is true in certain settings but not others. And even in settings where it is true...well, plenty of industrial processes are dangerous. Hell, even watermills are dangerous—lots of milled grain means lots of flammable dust, after all.

Whenever I read a Fantasy novel, I try to assume that the local wizards aren't dumb. If Magic A didn't help their situation, asking why they didn't do Magic B is silly because we can assume that someone DID try Magic B at some point and wound up turning themselves into a squirrel. Or summoned something from the Dungeon Dimensions. Similarly, if they could just go into business lighting fires around town or whatever, I'd assume they'd do that. It's just that they either gain more money from researching higher magics or are uninterested in petty concerns like money - they've got their tower and spend a minimal amount of time bringing in the money to sustain it, and spend the rest of the time pursuing what they love - knowledge.

For ninety-odd percent of fantasy novels, I don't trust that the author put any thought into such matters. Most of the others address this sort of issue.

[Thrudd]

In any given representation of a "fantasy world", in what way would you expect the normal pace of small, incremental technological advances to be represented? Unless it is a series of books that follow a world's progress for hundreds or thousands of years, why should we expect to see any sort of advancement at all?

Any given story, or even a game setting, is generally a snapshot in time of that world. The game takes place in year X, and in year X technological advancement is in state Y. Because it is a fantasy world with different environment and history and dynamics form ours, and possibly different natural laws, there is no reason to expect that year X in this fantasy world should match technology level Y of our own world at any point in time. There is no single way a fantasy world's people would or should react to or utilize the presence of magic in their world.

Yes, authors should take care to have a rational and internally consistent world - but that does not mean that all people and cultures in that world always discover or apply the most expedient and efficient way of doing everything at every moment of their existence nor that certain advancements will occur on any particular time table.

There can also be any sort of supernatural explanation for why a fantasy world is the way it is, if it is necessary or convenient to the telling of the story for the world to be technologically stagnant for thousands of years.

I am sure not all authors give much thought to such things, not feeling it relevant to the telling of their story. The detail given to developing a setting certainly aids in telling a good story, but sometimes the desires of the artist to have a certain aesthetic outweigh the scientist's or historian's desire to adhere to a believable and naturalistic sense of world development.

[Kitten Champion]

I am sure not all authors give much thought to such things, not feeling it relevant to the telling of their story. The detail given to developing a setting certainly aids in telling a good story, but sometimes the desires of the artist to have a certain aesthetic outweigh the scientist's or historian's desire to adhere to a believable and naturalistic sense of world development.

It's not just an aesthetic though - well, it is in the more derivative stuff like D&D settings - but the heart of modern fantasy is emulating the epics (and folk tales, though they have there own timeless conventions) from various cultures diving allllll~ the way back to ancient Summaria but for a contemporary audience and with a full acknowledgement that the setting is entirely fiction to begin with. While such poetry often did provide some broad overview of the history hitherto - because edification was part of the function of such stories - they were obviously never penned with a modern scholarly perspective in mind.

Chances are if there's a fictional mythos for your high fantasy world than there are literal deities behind the creation of a setting, that biological evolution will never have even been contemplated or mentioned, and quite often you'll get a Golden Age of spiritual, technological, and physiological perfection of which the current world has declined from. A mythic backstory that takes the reader from the world's beginning to the whatever-era & culture context the current story is set in the style of pre-modern creation myths and cultural histories.

Magic and the divinely miraculous are ubiquitous elements of poetic epics and folk tales the world over, but that doesn't change they're written to ultimately result in the present reality of the audience they were written for. Whatever wonders Thomas Malory's Merlin could provide Arthur, his wisdom wasn't going to lead to the innovation of the steam engine for Camelot. If you're a contemporary fantasy author creating a work which takes Le Morte d'Arthur as its chief inspiration - which has been known to happen - than chances are neither will your Merlin despite the fact that you're fully cognizant of steam technology... though Hank Morgan would, I guess.

That's the assumption of the writer going in, the anachronism is twofold -- both on a meta-level as well as in the text directly. Now, there are of course people who buck this conception and write fantasy from different viewpoints or take much more modern or even later periods - like steampunk, science fantasy, or dying Earth subgenre fiction - but they too tend to take on the different kinds of anachronistic paradigms of different styles and eras of fiction in their base.

[factotum]

Any given story, or even a game setting, is generally a snapshot in time of that world. The game takes place in year X, and in year X technological advancement is in state Y.

I think the issue relates to stories where you hear about thousands of years of history, but no obvious technological advancement in that time--or even going backwards; the people of Gondor at the end of the Third Age appear to not be capable of feats like building the statues of the Argonath, so they've actually backslid technologically in the 1600 years since. In the case of LOTR, as I said earlier, that's kind of justified because everything magical and awesome is diminishing in the world, and Tolkien wanted to show that in the writing. Later fantasy writers just put the ancient awesome things in without really considering why they were there in LOTR.

[Thrudd]

I think the issue relates to stories where you hear about thousands of years of history, but no obvious technological advancement in that time--or even going backwards; the people of Gondor at the end of the Third Age appear to not be capable of feats like building the statues of the Argonath, so they've actually backslid technologically in the 1600 years since. In the case of LOTR, as I said earlier, that's kind of justified because everything magical and awesome is diminishing in the world, and Tolkien wanted to show that in the writing. Later fantasy writers just put the ancient awesome things in without really considering why they were there in LOTR.

But what are actual examples of these authors who "put awesome ancient things" without considering why? How do you know they didn't consider why? What are some stories that are guilty of this?

The whole topic is making a very generalized claim without any specific examples, just a general statement that most fantasy settings are improperly developed. Each fantasy world is unique and would need to be addressed according to the details given by its own author. The idea that the only rational result of a world with any type of magic for any amount of time is some form of industrialization or mechanization can't be supported in this very general sense. It could be argued in specific cases of specific worlds with specific types of magic, but this thread hasn't gotten into that. And even then, that argument would be little more than expressing an opinion about someone else's art (stating that world development should follow patterns of the real world rather than being expression of something more mythic, as Kitten Champion points out).

[Bohandas]

In any given representation of a "fantasy world", in what way would you expect the normal pace of small, incremental technological advances to be represented? Unless it is a series of books that follow a world's progress for hundreds or thousands of years, why should we expect to see any sort of advancement at all?

A lot of D&D campaign settings do have hundreds or thousands of years of in-world history.

[Thrudd]

A lot of D&D campaign settings do have hundreds or thousands of years of in-world history.

D&D is a game that definitely is built around a certain aesthetic and a specific collection of things. So the end result, the present state of the game world, needs to match what the rules of the game represent. In this case, both art and naturalism take second place to making sure the setting remains appropriate for the game. In D&D, the game must include magical treasures hidden in dungeons, implying one or more past civilizations that had technology and magic near to that which exists in the present world - otherwise you wouldn't be finding magic swords and armor and spells that your characters can use. So, the implication would be a world that has either been stagnant or cyclical, gaining and losing and gaining and losing but never going beyond the level that the game mechanics represent.

Or, a DM can explain things in such a way that the treasures found in dungeons are clearly from another civilization with different level of technology - and you can clearly identify adventurers wearing "magic" armor and weapons because they are made of stuff or in a manner completely unfamiliar and maybe impossible to the present material culture.

But that is neither here nor there. If we're really complaining about D&D settings and not fantasy world in general fiction, it's sort of a different issue. The issue is what the game is designed to do, and how the designers explain what is going on in the game and why. Ultimately, that is an issue for each DM to address individually, and we'd need to talk to each one to see how and if they address the technology and magic issue.

Some D&D settings, of course, have more than others - Eberron is a really popular one with magi-tech. Spelljammer is another one. Dark Sun is a very well thought out setting, as well.

[factotum]

But what are actual examples of these authors who "put awesome ancient things" without considering why? How do you know they didn't consider why? What are some stories that are guilty of this?

I'm just reading A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, and it definitely has this. The best swords in the world are made from Valyrian steel, the secret of whose forging was lost when Valyria was destroyed some 400 years before the story opens--yet apparently no smith has been able to replicate this over those four centuries. Moat Cailin, the ancient fortress of the First Men and rumoured to be 10,000 years old, lies in ruins, but the three remaining towers are still somehow solid enough to make effective defensive fortifications against modern armies. Yet there is no general sense that the world is in decline--people are generally horrible to each other, but it's pretty clear that's been the case for hundreds if not thousands of years.

[Thrudd]

I'm just reading A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin, and it definitely has this. The best swords in the world are made from Valyrian steel, the secret of whose forging was lost when Valyria was destroyed some 400 years before the story opens--yet apparently no smith has been able to replicate this over those four centuries. Moat Cailin, the ancient fortress of the First Men and rumoured to be 10,000 years old, lies in ruins, but the three remaining towers are still somehow solid enough to make effective defensive fortifications against modern armies. Yet there is no general sense that the world is in decline--people are generally horrible to each other, but it's pretty clear that's been the case for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Sure, but this is also a world with a mysterious history only revealed as legends and myths. We don't know the truth of it, and it appears likely that there is some sort of cyclical cataclysm or rising and falling of magic forces/deities which has affected civilization. Until a definitive and non-mythological history of that setting is revealed (if it ever is), it's hard to argue one way or the other. We simply don't know enough about the age of heroes to know what was really going on. But yes, that world does seem to have a slower progression in material technology than has our world,. I'm not sure there is enough to detail given about the history to provide a strong argument that this is unbelievable enough to ruin the story.

[factotum]

I'm not sure there is enough to detail given about the history to provide a strong argument that this is unbelievable enough to ruin the story.

I don't think anyone other than you has said that this sort of thing ruins the story? It's just a common trope in fantasy novels that's under discussion.

[Lemmy]

I don't think anyone other than you has said that this sort of thing ruins the story? It's just a common trope in fantasy novels that's under discussion.

In the case of ASoIaF, at least when it comes to magical things, there's an explanation.: Since the Doom of Valyria, magic's neen weakening, to the point where it's little more than parlor tricks and superstition to most people in the world. It does seem to be recovering, though, possibly because of the return of dragons (or maybe the return of dragons was only possible because magic is recovering... who knows?).

All that said... The world does seem technologically stagnant. Other than the bronze-to-steel transition, I can't recall a single description of technological advancement anywhere in the novels, at least not off of the top of my head. However, there are no fully trustworthy narrators in the series. Even the history books (like the encyclopedia) are told from the perspective of a character, so we can't tell what's true and what's myth. It may very well be that the stories told about events hundreds of year in the past use current weapons and armor simply because that's what the narrator believes or how he prefers to tell the tale. Even IRL there are plenty of art depicting past events with anachronistic gear.

[GreatWyrmGold]

In any given representation of a "fantasy world", in what way would you expect the normal pace of small, incremental technological advances to be represented? Unless it is a series of books that follow a world's progress for hundreds or thousands of years, why should we expect to see any sort of advancement at all?

sigh
There are several situations where it would be relevant.
1. The backstory provided indicates that the world has been remarkably static for centuries. (And no, the real world wasn't static for that long; for instance, less than a century passed between the invention of plate armor—a fantasy staple—and the printing press—which enabled some of the defining features of the Renaissance when contrasted to the Middle Ages. Hell, cannons were invented before plate armor! Wikipedia has a quick list of things that came about in the Middle Ages which could matter to fantasy stories. Note the military technologies section in particular.)
2. The technology available does not make sense, in that no conceivable backstory would have had no one pick up on a given innovation by the time others came along.
3. Magic is given as an excuse for technology not developing, which is the effing point of the OP! So good reading comprehension, there.

[Excession]

This video provides an interesting point about ASoIaF, and how dragons might prevent progress:


I think the argument might be a bit simplistic, and probably glosses over a lot of the economics or warfare and advancement. The central point is interesting though: magic and tech are different. Having a big nation-state, economy, and technology is good for making cannons, but it doesn't help make dragons or mages. So if dragons/mages are rare, or limited to a particular family/school, that group will end up in charge without needing to create a renaissance nation-state or economy, and they will be able to stay there as well. If someone does start making tech progress that could threaten the thaumocracy, they end up dead, because an army with first-gen cannons can't fight dragons or archmages.

Few stories that I can remember use this reasoning, but A Practical Guide to Evil does as one example. Anyone trying to break out of their magical/medieval stasis gets (after two warnings) a visit from the bigger fish of the setting. After that visit, they serve only as an example to others to not try the same thing.

[Armok]

I think that it's also important to consider what technological advancement provides a story from a narrative standpoint, and how it can also limit it. Take the gun, for example. In any good fantasy setting a battle between two characters serves a very specific narrative purpose. Two characters come face to face to struggle against one another and resolve a conflict. The battle is interpersonal, and the spectacle of combat serves as the climax of everything built up to that point.

But let's introduce the gun into this. Now there's no need for the spectacle. Why would you fight face to face with your antagonist when you can lean around a corner and put a slug in him? Sure, there's the classic western standoff, but even then it's over in a single shot. Battle becomes impersonal as military technology advances, and ultimately the kind of conflicts you present and the way they're resolved change.

The setting might gain more "historical accuracy" by advancing at a rate closer to reality, but it can also lose its... tone? Identity? Something like that. For the purpose of telling the sorts of stories we love in fantasy, I think it's necessary to suspend our disbelief and say "Yeah, this is just what they have."

[factotum]

But let's introduce the gun into this. Now there's no need for the spectacle. Why would you fight face to face with your antagonist when you can lean around a corner and put a slug in him? Sure, there's the classic western standoff, but even then it's over in a single shot. Battle becomes impersonal as military technology advances, and ultimately the kind of conflicts you present and the way they're resolved change.

Some SF stories try to get round this in various ways. In Frank Herbert's "Dune", for instance, portable and almost impenetrable personal shield generators exist, but these (for some reason) can only block high-velocity things like bullets, so knife fighting has become common again. In the Deathstalker novels by Simon R. Green they use blasters, but blasters have a very slow rate of fire so it's easy to be caught with your gun not ready to fire again...although he never explains why they just don't keep using projectile weapons in that case, since blasters are clearly strictly inferior to them.