Arthur C Clarke once said that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
As a science fiction writer, I can confirm that this is true. Most of my story ideas come from intriguing scientific theories which have caught my attention. Whether that’s a hypothesis for how time travel might be feasible using black holes, or a test of sentience on Artificial Intelligences. So much inspiration for science fiction can be found in science fact.
But in that slippery, transmutable way that inspiration often has, my ideas switch up on me. My carefully researched science often transforms into magic during the writing process.
When a story is set in the far-future, technology is so distinct from our current capabilities that it might as well be wizardry. We can’t create cryogenic chambers for space travel any more easily than we could cast an age-freezing enchantment.
In Jurassic Park, dinosaurs are brought back from extinction using samples of blood taken from ancient mosquitos trapped in amber. Of course, this is impossible. It’s nothing more than loosely justified necromancy. But there’s a logic behind it, that we can almost believe in. Enough to suspend our disbelief, sit back and enjoy the story.
In the same way, well-constructed fictional magic systems have logic behind their mystique. Magic requires an input of energy (blood, a firstborn child, a true name). There’s a technical process (a spell, a ritual, a potion) which exerts a force (an enchantment, a transformation, a curse).
A witch stirring newt guts into a cauldron to create a homunculus is indistinguishable from a programmer encoding an algorithm to create a sentient robot. Neither exists in the real world, so on the page it’s absolutely crucial for both processes to be believable.
In The Glamourist Histories by Mary Robinette Kowal, magic users can manipulate light to create glamours of colour in the air. The magic is informed by the real behaviour of light, which limits what the characters can do. However, the author’s commitment to the laws of physics also leads in surprising directions. The light glamours are used in medicine, since ultra-violet light can be used to sterilise wounds.
It can be tempting to justify the rules of your magic with real science, but you can’t explain everything – and you shouldn’t try. Some things are better left mysterious to avoid bogging down the story with unnecessary exposition. As the creator, I have to research the science behind my fictional time machines, robots and spaceships, but only so I know how much I can get away with. As long as I don’t break the thread of logic, the reader will trust that it works. The theorem doesn’t need to be proven. Sorcery can be left to the imagination.
The best fiction exists in that fuzzy boundary between magic and science. Star Wars is a science fiction universe, but the Jedi lightsabers are pure magic. In His Dark Materials, a world of witches and talking polar bears has a plot which hinges on real life dark matter and physics.
This intersection of seemingly conflicting areas of study has always enraptured me. In my novel The Reckless Afterlife of Harriet Stoker, a community of immortal ghosts exist according to strict laws of energy conservation and physics. Ghosts use their own life force to cast spells. Once their energy is used up, they disintegrate.
For every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Power has side effects. Whether we call it nuclear energy or magic, it still takes resources from the environment. It will pollute or destroy natural resources. It will have ethical and moral implications, like genetic modification or pesticides in real life.
Power is always a valuable commodity in society. Just as technology can be easily attainable, or rare and inaccessible, so can magic. Resources can be hoarded by a magician in their tower, or a billionaire on Twitter. It can be every-day and unremarkable, like flicking on a light switch, or world-ending, like setting off a bomb.
Characters can be born with a natural gift for algebra or alchemy, or – more interestingly – they can struggle to learn their skills the hard way. Whether they use a tablet or a wand, the writer can make them work for what they need.
In my novel Green Rising, a mutation in teenagers makes magical plants grow from their skin. I was inspired by the fungal network that links the roots of trees – the ‘wood wide web’ – and allows plants to communicate.
My teen characters use their plant magic to build a network of people fighting to slow climate change. The grassroots activists connect together to reforest the world, committing acts of civil disobedience which unearth the status quo. Their magic has some downsides – it sucks nutrients from their bone marrow – but it gives them the power to create change.
Magic is a political tool, changing society in the same way that technical innovations can create revolution. Like, electricity, cars, and the internet, magic is morally neutral. But it can be wielded for good, evil, or something in-between.
In Green Rising, magic is wielded scientifically to rewild the Earth. In my novel The Quiet at the End of the World, I did the opposite. I used science to cast a magical spell. At the beginning of the story, humans are made sterile by a global pandemic. Desperate to avoid extinction, the last generation works together to create AI offspring which are functionally human in everything but biology. After time, the origin of these computer-coded children is forgotten. They are human, no different from the generations that came before them. The magic spell which created them is lost to time.
A nuclear waste storage site will turn into a mysterious glowing cave, given enough time. Science becomes magic with distance. Only our understanding of the process changes its definition.
Arthur C Clarke told us that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But in the hands of a writer, all magic has the potential to become technology. And politics. And ethics. And economics. And character development. Magic is the perfect vehicle for storytelling. It’s whatever we need it to be.
Wren James 