Science fiction writer’s Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law states that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” meaning that to an observer, a technology which is not understood can appear magical. In this sense, magic specifically refers to an outcome whose origin is unknown. When we are children, the whole world is magical because we do not understand it. As we learn how the world works, it becomes less magical as we understand it more. But there are still things that we find magical: technologies or even features of nature itself that are outside our individual realms of knowledge. No one has yet achieved such a perfect understanding of our entire world that nothing is magical to him anymore.
But there is an interesting inversion of Arthur’s Third Law, which I recently heard on Jonathan Pageau’s podcast The Symbolic World in an interview with Mary Harrington (episode 388): “When people say, ‘magic is just misunderstood technology,’ I would flip that and say, ‘technology is just misunderstood magic.’” In context, they were discussing the need for meaning, and he was making the point that it’s magic, not technology, that shows us the purpose of something. I have been mulling this over in terms of worldbuilding as I ponder the mechanics and makeup of a universe for a story that I am (very slowly) working on.
There are two paths one may take when devising a magic system in a fictional setting: one path may be called, simply, magical, and the other, technological.
The magical magic system doesn’t explain anything. In fact, it may not even be internally consistent. Tolkien’s works feature a magical magic system because it is never explained how magic works: it is, intentionally, not understood—perhaps not even by Tolkien himself. Yet the use of magic points to something else, some meaning or purpose that furthers the story and our understanding of the world.
The technological magic system, on the other hand, attempts to explain all the details about how the magic works, what laws guide it, what its limits are, etc. as if magic were just an extension of physics. The magic system in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series seems to be a good example of this.
Applying Jonathan Pageau’s quote, if a technological magic system is sufficiently advanced—that is, explained sufficiently thoroughly and bounded by sufficiently clearly defined laws that it can be well understood—then a technological magic system becomes, itself, indistinguishable from technology itself.
Paradoxically, by explaining how the magic works, a technological magic system removes the magic quality from the magic itself, with the magic becoming more just a tool—a technology—that can acquired, learned, and put to use for one’s needs, imbuing no meaning or purpose in and of itself, and pointing to nothing outside of itself. Put simply, understood magic is not magical.
I have a basis for the magic system in my story’s universe, but I’ve struggled to develop an internally consistent understanding of how it functions; that is, I’ve struggled to develop a technological magic system. However, after pondering Pageau’s inversion of Clarke’s Third Law, I think I’m coming to terms with leaving it as a magical magic system and foregoing any understanding of the magic and simply allowing it to be magical.
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