Like Star Wars?
Wizards and spaceships? It'll never work.
Spelljammer was a late 80s cocaine-fueled fever dream.
Star Wars doesn't really do 'super advanced technology'. Like they've got space ships and hyperdrive and laser swords and shit, but they don't treat it like high-tech stuff, they treat it like we treat cars and swords.
Any universe where they have super advanced tech they'll treat it like we treat cars, because cars are also super advanced tech, it's just a tech you see daily and are familiar. How do you expect characters in a super technologically advanced world to react? They see that every day, it's not news to them.
People in 2025 don't really do 'super advanced technology'. Like they've got super powerful handheld computers on them at all times and all of human knowledge accessible at all times and planes and shit, but they don't treat it like high-tech stuff, they treat it like we treat carriages and books.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
-Arthur C Clarke
Not the point of his quote
I think the MCU has done a good job with it, but I'd like to see a non-superhero version of it.
Star Wars
In the 'advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' there is John Carter, Dune and a ton of other movies where the tech seems like magic.
There's a Netflix movie called Bright, which is futuristic fantasy.
It did in Final Fantasy VI with its Magitek
Most Final Fantasy games mix sci-fi and magic. Only the specifics of the lore around how it works changes with each FF universe.
I apologize if this sounds flippant, but it's FICTION.
Literally ANYTHING works if its written well enough...
Came here to mention this. Good reference there, chummer.
Super advanced technology is magic. Hell, regular advanced technology is magic. Just run with it.
I think you inevitably face the whole “magic IS advanced technology” thing. If you actually want them to be different things, you have to have some answer to this.
Isn't it always different things? "Magic" being a different set of rules for how the world works. Technology being the things that can be achieved given the rules. And, whether advanced technology is influenced and how, depend on those rules, lore and culture.
If for example magic is only available to some people with the ability or what not. Technology will always be available regardless.
Stargate SG-1 is a great example where no matter what the magic is, it’s eventually revealed to be technology underneath - just really advanced technology. If you take all limits off science, it’s easy for the two to begin blending. They even do the “only available to some people” thing as technology: certain people share a gene with the ancient ancestors who made the high-technology, and so it recognizes and activates for them and not others.
Techomages from Babylon 5 come to mind.
"I do think there are some things we don't understand. If we'd be back in time a thousand years, trying to explain this place to people, they could only accept it in terms of magic."
"Then perhaps it is magic. The magic of the human heart, focused and made manifest by technology. Every day you here create greater miracles than a burning bush."
And then...
"We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ and we know many things."
I love B5 so much.
Shadowrun… yeah it works
Edit: I just noticed somebody else mentioned shadowrun aswell, well: I second that.
The second Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson gets close. It's a setting where magic meets wild west tech, including guns, cars, and electricity.
I've heard that his next trilogy in the setting will have more of an 1980s tech level.
A couple of Sanderson's short stories touch on space ships, computers, and magic.
EDIT: I didn't answer the question. Yes, I think it can work. I'm also a huge fan of Brian McClellan's Powder Mage books. This mixes musket level tech and industrialization with magic.
The Sunlit Man is even more tech combined with magic. Read that one yet?
What other books do you like in that genre? I loved Mistborn/Cosmere realm and Powder Mage series.
The Sunlit Man was so good. I love books that have fast pacing right from the start, and trying to figure out how the world worked was so much fun.
Shadowrun kind of does the same. It's not really super-advanced, since it's cyberpunk, but it's cyberpunk with magic. And it's my favorite setting, it's such a cool idea.
A lot of cyberpunk tech is vastly beyond our current abilities, though. They treat getting a new fully functional cybernetic arm like we treat getting silicone tits.
This was super common in the 1960s and 70s when hippies where the ones writing sci fi and the thought was that technological advancement would also come along with spiritual advancement to the point of supernatural powers. Star Wars, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many others freely blend the supernatural with the technological. Sure it's not D&D magic with fireballs and shit but it's still magic. Further, if you want to look at a modern IP with this vibe look at World of Warcraft, where there are aliens from space with spaceships and shit with one of the most stereotypical fantasy settings you can imagine.
Absolutely, there are lots of examples, but the first that comes to mind is Warhammer 40k, they have super advanced technology and magic coexisting and sometimes intermingling.
It's not magic, it's extra-dimensional energy!
Sure, and by that definition it's also not magic in LoTR
Arcane
Artemis Fowl is a classic example of this. The fantasy world of fairies relies on super advanced technology in their world.
Why wouldn't it work? Stories usually fail because the plot is bad or because they're badly told, and it's not that hard to maintain verisimilitude just because seemingly opposite ideas like magic and advanced technology are combined - just communicate what your magic and technology can and cannot do in broad strokes and stick to it, and avoid asspulls that make no sense and/or undermine the character beats you're showing. But you get exactly the same issues in a story with only magic or only advanced technology.
Yes. Many wireless already exist.
Comic books do this all the time.
And Wandavision is about as nail on head as you are going to get
Magic is Supermans only real weakness aside from kryptonite
Warhamer 40k
Starcraft
League of Legends
Final fantasy
The Palladium Rifts RPG
Dune
Starwars
There's a ton of examples, so yeah.
My home brew ttrpg setting is exactly that
Yes. It's worked very well in the recent Zelda games
A sequel to Arcanum that moves the timeline forward into the information age?
God I wish we had gotten more than one Arcanum game...
With out Tim it would never be the same even if the rights were not in limbo
The black ocean series does a good job if blending the two together. But it sort of sets them in opposition to each other. Interstellar travel is made possible on futuristic spaceships by using magic to plunge the ship partially into another dimension, shortening the relative distance between stars. But unless the it is specially shielded against it, magic ruins and destroys technology.
It's a great series too. I'm overdue a catchup 🙂
Definitely, although I think it's most interesting if the advanced technology is based on the magic.
Like, let's say there is a world where there are magic plants that can heal you, people who can magically scry nearby locations if they meditate deeply, and stones that levitate in the moonlight.
And there's an evil empire that exploits the fuck out of this by industrially farming the plants to create a highly concentrated serum, removing people's brains and hooking them up to computers for magical sensing abilities, and attaching fragments of moon rocks to the levitating stones to create antigravity. Creating invulnerable flying supersoldiers with impossibly good radar powered by brain backpacks.
Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Sure, there are books like that and Shadowrun.
Starship mage also did it well.
Star Wars did for a while.
Yes and it sounds cool as hell
In Attack on Titan, magic (titan powers) had historically an edge over humanity, but the story is in part about how Humanity's technology has advanced to almost surpass those magical powers and shift the power balance.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
it exists, and is phenomenal:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O.
As in entertainment - yes. But when it comes to realistic representation and imagination as sci-fi then no.
it's really difficult as all magic that we understand becomes science. To create this artificial gap the world has to answer - why can't science understand, reverse engineer and bend magic?
Most scientific progression is very rapid. If fireballs exist then there will be a giant 1,000 rpm fireball machine by the end of the week and that's no longer magic as we see it.
So there has to be a strong artificial limitation why magic exists and cannot be understood and harvested which is really hard to write in scifi. You have to introduce religion, spiritual mysticism or some sort of societal control mechanism that prevents reverse engineering magic which is really hard to do in a way that satisfies the readers cognitive dissonance.
Personally I have found stories like that like Warhammer 40k, Star Wars etc. But without a big, establishrd name it's so hard to convince the reader. I recently finished the wheel of time and really couldn't get over this which ruined the entire premise for me.
Like most things by Philip K. Dick, the man who has more movies based on his writing than any other author?
In dungeons and dragons there is a type of hybrid character you can play called an Artificer who treats magic more like technology, and there are a ton of examples in popular media that others have mentioned. I do think you have to determine how and if you'll keep them distinct if that's important to your plot, but if they developed alongside eachother maybe the technology of that world relies on magic to work.
Or maybe your magic relies on elder gods that don't like the mortal hubris of critiquing the gods works so attempts to unravel magic gets you cursed or worse.
I think they can go together and the way you fit them can even become a plot point!
In any other setting, when we take specific, tiny stones and carve patterns into them until they can perform tasks for us, we call it magic.
Definitely not. I give no reason.
DCEU/MCU does this alot. Klarion the chaos lord use chaos magic(different from wanda's magic) to control starro nanotech, they call it techno-sorcery/magic-tech. but this will never occurs in sci-fi though, since magic isnt really a thing(maginery) when technology and science is used to explain the nature of the universe is involved. dark eleves and ASGARDIANS use magic and tech together. magic is basically making things impossible to a possibility(probability manipulation through energy) with limitations depending on the type of cinema/comic/media universe that it is in. or castlevania(the magical castle that use technology powered by magic)
Iron man and other Marvel movies started being very science. Oriented, but quickly combined magic or turned to magic
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/68872/dungeon-planet-the-healer-always-leaves-alive
Found that little gem a few weeks ago and I believe it fits your ask pretty well 1:1
Honestly almost as good as my other favorite the past few years, https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive, but the latter seems to be more active than the former.
That's prevalent in the Might and Magic series. But (probably depending on the game) the high technology is often hidden from the common folk.
You know what, basically any SCP will have varying levels of scifi and fantasy tropes, or sometimes none at all. Bottom line with SCPs is that anything is possible.
It is called Star Wars, and it is one of the many reasons why I do not like it.
What about it specifically do you dislike? This type of setting definitely invites questioning by the audience and can break immersion, but I'm curious about your take on it.
I think this is the greater unpopular opinion I have, but here I go: It's something more personal rater than anything. Since child I've always fund kinda stupid that a civilization that has ships with space travel capabilities still using swords to fight sigh LASER swords. I always felt Star Wars like a mediaval story, it have swords, magic, incest, politics, and the sci-fi stuff is a big flex tape. I'm pretty sure that without it, Star Wars wouldn't never be the success that it is.
Yes. Do a time travel story and new tech will be seen as miraculous magic by those pesky Elizabethans.
The Psalms of Isaak series did this very well at the beginning -- starts off with a magic fantasy land but as you read you realize that there were forebearers with immense science and technology, and weaves a conflict between the two.
Yup.
Absolutely. Read the nightlord series, just skip through the first half of book one, it's the first thing the author ever wrote and could have used better editing for sure. High tech kicks in at book 3
Tad Williams did a decent job in "War of the flowers" There was tech comparable to early 2000's (smartphones, electricity, cars, etc) but was powered by magic, and magic itself was still capable of being used.
All these youngsters forgetting about He-man
the naysayers in this thread seem to mostly be genre fans talking about their personal preferences and sticking points with magic in fiction. you don't have to reconcile or explain shit beyond "it's magic, duh".
the only reason you need for writing a story is that it's a story you want to write. there are no real rules, anything can "work" as long as you can work it.
that said my example/recommend of a tech+magic setting is Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series. Piers Anthony's work generally is also an example of how you can make any bullshit work if the story is well-told.
my advice to you as a writer is to ignore this thread, open up your word processor, or get your pen and paper, or however you prefer to write, and just write. doing it "wrong" is impossible.
