User: davidlevine Date: 2006-07-29 02:31 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I'm not sure if the external/internal dichotomy applies to SF and fantasy in general. I definitely disagree that implanting a technical macguffin into an SF character's body is comparable to having a fantasy character achieve magical powers via enlightenment, study, or Being Special -- the implanted mcguffin is still "external" because it is not inherent to the person. As to the case of a fantasy story in which the magic is completely external to the characters, I've read plenty of those (stories in which the magic is, in effect, reduced to a form of technology) and they tend to lack that numinous sensawunda that makes fantasy fantastic -- they're not really fantasy, to my mind, they're just historical dramas set in imaginary lands with an imaginary technology.

Despite the above, I agree that the internal/external dichotomy is an important distinction between technology and magic. I poked for a couple of months at a novel idea in which I re-did a major 20th Century historical event in an alternate world in which America runs on magic rather than technology. One of the challenges was how such a world would differ -- in effect, what are the differences between science and magic?

I decided that, for purposes of this novel, magic would be inherent to an individual, non-deterministic (that is, a given set of initial conditions and series of actions can always result in a different outcome no matter how many factors you control), and the success or failure of any magical act is strongly influenced by the individual's emotional and mental state. All of these are in opposition to the core of science, the scientific method, which is posited on the idea that science experiments are repeatable, independent of the person who performs them, and that any variations can always be explained by observable differences in physical conditions (even if such differences are not at first obvious). There are other magical systems, of course, but this one parallels your proposed internal/external dichotomy quite nicely.

User: jaylake Date: 2006-07-29 05:01 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Oops. I didn't mean to be quite so simplistic about the idea of internal technology, rather, I was trying to draw an example.

I like your citation of the 20th century -- bibliothec pointed out that a lot of this thought process comes from a post-Enlightenment viewpoint. More on that later as time permits.

User: rosefox Date: 2006-07-29 03:06 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

Magic, on the other hand, both as generally understood IRL (hermeticism, Kabbalah, Wicca, etc) and as generally understood in fantasy, relies on the practitioner having achieved some element of enlightenment

Student of magic, disagreeing with you. *) Unless you regard learning to walk as "some element of enlightenment", which perhaps it is from the perspective of those who are crawling; but most of us see it quite rightly as simply making use of our legs in the most efficient way possible, as soon as they're strong enough to hold us up. Magic is just the same. The flow of energy through the self is simply a thing that is there, the way that your legs are things that are there, and learning to make basic use of it is about as complicated as learning that when you let water flow through a paddle-wheel, the wheel turns.

Of course, then you get into hooking the wheel up to a mill and using the mill to grind your grain, and that's engineering. *grin*

User: awritersweekend Date: 2006-07-29 03:45 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

well, when I was a child, learning about magic at my grandmother's knee (she was a comrade of Crowley, et al) I was told there are two forms of magic. One is external and relies on scholarship, initiation, or the cleverness of the magician to harness it. The other is internal to the magician and is passed through bloodlines and in some rare cases through the power of magical contamination.

A real person of power, you will surely apprehend, never discloses her ability.

User: kaigou Date: 2006-07-29 04:45 (UTC) Subject: (no subject) Keyword: love's bitch

Can you think of any books in which magic is as feasible for Joe as it is for Tom? That is, in which you don't have to have bazillion years of study and/or just that special something to make it work, and perhaps in which if person A follows the exact recipe as person B, that the same result will come about? I'm racking my brains, but my brains are dead, Jim.

I work with web applications developers and -- of all things -- COBOL developers. To the new/young folks doing VB, COBOL is probably the closest in Real Life they'll ever come to an esoteric system. It's like it just doesn't make "sense" to them, not like VB, and the VB dev-guys will tell you in all seriousness that they can follow the exact steps and get nothing but ruinous errors while the COBOL progs will do the same and get a beautifully compiled string. Or whatever. Although it may be technology, we do joke almost daily about it being magical: just today somone was saying, "if the server crashes again, get the guru to wave a dead chicken over it."

How is someone who comprehends data strings and middleware and syntax any different from the concept of wizards who spend long years learning strange incantations to power functions, err, spells, that blast from their fingers at lightning-speed? I don't have enough fingers and toes to name all my non-tech friends who may be fully aware, intellectually, that the internet is tech and not magic, but that's the limit of their comprehension of how it works -- and to some degree, they're taking the internet's continued well-being on faith, having little to no science/understanding of it on any real terms.

Hrmm.

User:	gillpolack
Date:	2006-07-29 12:38 (UTC)
Subject:	(no subject)

When I teach magic history (being an historian, not a practitioner of magic) there are a couple of things that need establishing before magic can even begin to be compared to technology.

1) What cosmology is at play? (Things that seem technological to us seem magical to someone if they defy the cosmological logic, and vice-versa - lots of Medieval "magic" is nothing of the sort - it's science resting on a Ptolemaic world view).

2) Who is defining something as magic? There is a vast difference in understanding between a high level theorist and a person-on-street (well, mostly).

3) What religious rituals are linked to magic? Do they work with science, against science or have no interaction whatsoever? The assumption that magic is non-existent assumes a religion which is ineffective in a cause-effect kind of way. This is fine with the cosmology of many modern scientists, but didn't work with people like Newton. You can't take deity out of explanations of a universe where deity is the major causative factor. This changes a bunch of views of things - 'magic' and 'science' have to be explained in relation to 'miracle' and 'judgement'.

I'm going to post my thoughts to my own blog and see how my scientist-friends react. Could be fun :).

User: jaylake Date: 2006-07-29 14:00 (UTC) Subject: (no subject)

I'm going to post my thoughts to my own blog and see how my scientist-friends react. Could be fun :)

Definitely looking forward to that. FYI, I was going to expand on this a little to talk about Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, and magical thinking in the modern world. You've come pretty close to the same points here in comments, albeit from a completely different direction than I might have,

User:	creed_of_hubris
Date:	2006-07-29 16:27 (UTC)
Subject:	(no subject)

It's interesting you bring up the singing sword -- I think most magic in Prince Valiant, at least, as long as I've been reading it, is Bible-based (they keep running into things like the Garden of Eden or King Solomon's gold) and there's no enlightenment, so to speak, although it's true that internal characteristics predominate -- you have to be virtuous to survive your encounter with it; the wicked get whacked (Indiana Jones thinking).