Time, Space, Laser Swords, and Lightning Bolts

Examining the role of "magic" and "technology" in storytelling

Jul 11, 2025

A quote that dances in my mind every day comes from Arthur C. Clarke:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

—Arthur C. Clarke in a letter to ‘Science’ Magazine in 1962

It’s a pithy quote that makes you exhale through the nose and smile slightly before scrolling onto something that rots your brain from within. But I can’t stop thinking about it. There’s a beautiful contradiction in it that reveals so much about the inextricable link between Science Fiction and Fantasy.

When a work of fiction contains “magic,” it is always presented as an ancient, primitive, forgotten practice. It may come in a medieval setting, like in The Witcher, or The Lord of the Rings, or Mistborn, or A Song of Ice and Fire. When we see it in a modern setting, it is presented as a secret world within the modern one: and the secret world is always one that presents as older, like in Percy Jackson or Harry Potter (fuck TERFs). The aesthetics of magic are serif fonts, old wood, tattered, yellow tomes, and wizards with long, white beards and decrepit, ancient faces.

“Technology,” on the other hand, is a way to describe the tools of the future. A story that has “technology” as its main focus is either set in the near future, like with Black Mirror or Ex Machina; or in a far-flung future, like in The Expanse, or Dune, or Star Trek, or Foundation. The aesthetics of “technology” is sleek silver guns, holographic images, angular but rounded sans-serif fonts, and spaceships.

In this context, Clarke’s quote cuts through the tropes, and highlights an insight that muddies all these waters. Technology and magic, he says, convene at a point distant enough from our current understanding of the world. Dune is a great example, as is Foundation. (I’ll talk about Dune, because that’s the reference you’re most likely to understand, but if you haven’t yet, please read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.) I am, of course, talking about the Bene Gesserit, a literal sisterhood of witches that advise, and honestly, control the minds of the Kings of the world. It looks like magic to us, but Frank Herbert created a complicated evolutionary history to the Bene Gesserit—a history that really begins after a revolution against all computers, against all “technology”: The Butlerian Jihad. The Bene Gesserit read as spies and nuns, and their actions read as cynical political maneuvering, and not literal divination. Frank Herbert describes their supernatural powers (like The Voice) as mutations to adapt to a human universe without computers. However, if you’re familiar with fantasy storytelling, it’s impossible to see this sisterhood and not think of the Lodge of Sorceresses from The Witcher.

To properly drive home my point that magic can feel like technology and technology can feel like magic, there is no better example than a small indie series of films that you may or may not have heard of.

Star Wars.

Space travel, alien species, faster-than-light travel, all topics that are widely available in scientific discourse. Space travel, of course, being an actual result of human technological advancement. At a fundamental level, these things are understandable to us as humans living in the 21st century. We understand what our kind of life needs to live: water, air, food, shelter, etc. Faster-than-light travel, though impossible, feels to the common fiction enjoyer as something that technology could achieve.

And yet, what is Star Wars about? A farm boy being recruited by an old wizard to join an ancient Order of benevolent and noble Knights to save a princess from the castle of an evil sorcerer.

Luke Skywalker is guided by The Force: a nebulous… well… Force… that permeates all living things, but that some people can manipulate to move objects and influence minds. More evil people can manipulate it to choke people and produce electricity. Literally, Emperor Palpatine casts 3rd Level Lightning Bolt for 8d6 damage!

The first thing you ever know about Star Wars is that it is set “A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” In the past. Not the future.

Technology and magic have vastly opposite aesthetics, tell vastly different stories, and exist in vastly different time frames. And yet, they are two sides of the same coin: serving a similar function in different stories. What happens when these two meet in a muddy confluence? What is the role they play, and why does it have such different effects in different stories? What makes magic and technology tick?

Let’s find out together, in this essay which has taken me the better part of two months to write.

The Kid that Found His Dad’s Gun

We think of “Science Fiction” as a genre that takes a particular trend of technological advancement and extrapolates it into the future. If gene editing exists, then it may get good enough that it can bring back dead and extinct species. Given how such advancements in technology are quickly implemented by companies for their own purposes, one such company may want to make it a theme park. Welcome to Jurassic Park.

The problem with this approach, though, is that it simplifies the role of science fiction too much. It gives science fiction the responsibility of moralizing the public. In the ancient past, kings would go to oracles to read the future in order to define their actions in the present. Predictions of the future necessarily come with that connotation: is this a future we want, or don’t want? What actions are necessary today to make that future come to pass, or to avoid it? These are not responsibilities fiction deals well with. How many times have you disliked a movie because it’s “preachy”? School is never fun. Being told what to do is never fun. You don’t want to be taught something while you’re watching a movie.

You do, however, want to learn.

I firmly believe you don’t learn anything at school from the classes. You learn from the experiences. From interactions with your classmates and teachers, and from making mistakes. You learn by feeling and thinking.

Seeing science fiction as predictions of the future makes the writer a teacher, reading from a textbook. It’s a bland, unimaginative, and colourless way of seeing this genre that’s capable of so much. What’s more is that this definition of science fiction doesn’t even describe most of the stories that fall under it accurately. Science fiction stories are never full predictions of a complete human future. They’re smaller, focused on one or two aspects of human life.

Ursula K. LeGuin has a different idea. One I agree with more. In the preface to The Left Hand of Darkness (a book that does not fall in the predictive model of science fiction, and yet is undeniably science fiction), Le Guin says the following:

This book is not extrapolative. If you like, you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction as a thought experiment. Let’s say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let’s say (says Phillip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the Second World War; let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens… (LeGuin, in the Preface to The Left Hand of Darkness)

It begins with a question. It begins with a “What if?” Then it moves on to a hypothesis, a particular point of view. It’s an exploration, not a lecture.

We deal with these questions every single day in the 21st century. What if we could train a machine to make art and write essays? What if we ignored climate change and the world began to burn? What if we could build ourselves a rocket and land on Mars? Science fiction offers us a way to examine what our world could look like in these scenarios. We create these alternative worlds, where we ask one question and begin to construct a world around it. In science fiction, more often than not, the central question revolves around the advancement of technology that already exists in the real world. The question becomes “What if we continued to advance this specific technology, and incorporated it into the real world?”

That’s the role of technology in the science fiction story. It’s the focal lens. It’s what we view the world of the hypothetical through. A science fiction story creates a world where that technology is the biggest part of it. Minority Report does it with predicting crime. Westworld does it with a theme park using Artificial Intelligence. My favourite example comes in a different theme park based on advanced technology: Jurassic Park.

The newer movies have been misinterpreting what made the original fantastic. It was never the CGI that made that movie great (although the CGI was revolutionary and I still sob like a baby child when we see that first Brachiosaur). Jurassic Park asks a simple question. “What if gene editing became advanced enough to bring dinosaurs back from extinction?” Every Jurassic Park (and World) movie subsequently has asked the question “What if the dinosaurs from the original movie were bigger?” or “What if the Park from the original movie was bigger?” Do you see the key difference between these questions? It’s the technology. The first movie focuses on the technology. The subsequent ones just start from the first movie. They’re no longer a thought experiment, they’re action blockbusters. The original begins with gene editing. Not dinosaurs.

The thought experiment takes an interesting follow-up question and explores it. Michael Crichton, the writer of the book Spielberg’s iconic movie is based on, describes his process in a way that pretty much shows you the thought experiment he goes on. I’m paraphrasing here, but Crichton believed that there wouldn’t necessarily be a scientific reason to create a dinosaur. He thought they would be created for entertainment purposes only. You can see how he took one aspect of a technological advancement and thought about how it would be used in our life.

Technology is the magnifying glass that allows us to take a deeper look at our society. It doesn’t matter how the technology works, only that it does, and that it is used by people. In Jurassic Park, the story revolves around a team of paleontologists and scientists appraising the dinosaur-based amusement park before it can be opened to the public. If you pay attention, though, the park’s billionaire creator, John Hammond, only calls them because a handler at the park dies at the beginning of the movie. It’s the lawyers that want the park appraised. And then, of course, there’s the iconic discussion that the characters have in the restaurant, the one that contains Dr. Ian Malcolm’s fascinating line:

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

—Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in ‘Jurassic Park,’ 1993, written by Michael Crichton and David Koepp.

That conversation is science fiction. Not just Malcolm’s line, but the whole discussion. It’s the exploration of these points of view, and a simulation of that scenario. After this, the characters are thrown into this experiment, and they face all the consequences of it. There’s corporate espionage. There’s technical difficulties. And there’s violent death.

If science fiction is an experiment, and its plot and characters are the mice we put in a maze, then technology is the lens of the microscope through which we examine its blood.

What If It Really Is That Deep, Tolkien?

Alright, so science fiction is a thought experiment. Then, what is fantasy? How is it different from science fiction? And how is it different from any other genre? I mean, it certainly feels different. But what makes a fantasy novel fantasy?

Let us turn, as I so often do to understand fiction—and fiction only—to Sigmund Freud. When talking about the origins of creative thought, he uses a very specific word to describe the process of creative writing: phantasying. This word serves as a perfect starting point with which to arrive at a role for Fantasy as a genre. Here’s a passage from Freud’s Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming:

The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality. (Freud, in Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, 1908)

Think about any fantasy story. You’ll notice that it’s never set in the real world. Any other creative writing may be set in the world of today. Science fiction may be set in the world of tomorrow, or even yesterday. It may be set in the world with a few things changed. But fantasy is always set in a different world, what J. R. R. Tolkien called the Secondary World. It may be a completely original world, like Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings or it may be a secret one hidden within this one, like in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. Importantly, it’s a whole other world, with its own economy (drachmas) its own society (gods and monsters), and its own history (Riordan repeatedly hints that historical figures were the children of the gods, and that World War 2 was a big fight between the children of Zeus and Poseidon on one side, and Hades on the other). Each fantasy story, creates a separate world of fantasy.

Then there is the investiture of emotion—the writer takes the world seriously. This is how I see the worldbuilding and history writing of fantasy—the parts of the fantasy world that the audience doesn’t normally see. The notes that the author’s son has to pore through to posthumously publish a compendium of complicated history for this world that does not exist. That’s a key part of fantasy storytelling: enriching the world by creating a background history for no reason other than to give the secondary world depth and character. It allows the reader to immerse themself in a world that they feel has existed before they started reading the story, and that will exist after they finish. It allows the reader to take it seriously. In certain cases (especially in Role-Playing games), the story may rely on the reader inserting themself into that world, and being invested in its fate and politics. It’s a mandatory part of fantasy stories.

And finally, a sharp separation from reality. That’s where the magic comes in. It’s easy to see fantasy storytelling as swords and armour and castles, but magic is what separates fantasy from, say, historical fiction. The interaction of magic with humanity—whether the magic is hidden from the mundane world like in Percy Jackson or whether it’s a part of being human like in Mistborn—is what Fantasy stories are all about.

The classic formula of fantasy storytelling is seen in Star Wars, as I mentioned earlier. It’s about a hero, generally a young man, or a teenager, who lives a humble, boring, and often downright abusive life in a world full of magic. This world is ruled by an all-encompassing evil empire, and its people are suffering. There is a prophecy out there which states that one person who can wield magic better than anyone else in history will save the world from tyranny. The Chosen One.

The important point is that magic is treated as both a weapon and an all-encompassing force. Something that exists all around us, and something that we can use to kill people. Only a select few people can use it, sense it, manipulate it. It can be wielded at various levels of power, with most people being weak. And our hero can wield it better than anyone else, though they don’t know it yet. The only one who might be at the same level as the hero is the emperor of the evil all-consuming empire. The story revolves around the hero learning how to use that power and using it to destroy the evil overlord.

So many of your favourite stories just jumped to your mind, didn’t they?

The role of magic in the story is to signify the hero’s progress along that journey. The more they know about magic—and by extension the more you do—the closer they are to defeating evil and completing their journey. Thus, magic is this nebulous thing, this mysterious force. You necessarily don’t know much about it when you start. As the story goes on, however, it becomes clearer and clearer how the magic works. When the story is over, you have an emotional understanding of that magic. You’ve been on a journey to learn this with our hero.

If fantasy stories are day dreams, as Freud says, then magic is the part of the dream that doesn’t make sense at first—the part of the dream that separates it from reality. When the dream ends, however, it starts to make some sort of sense as you wake up and your rational brain begins its work on what you have just experienced.

Life… Finds a Magic System

The addition of or focus on technology and magic each make for stories that feel different. Science fiction stories are attempts to answer a question, whereas fantasy stories are epic journeys through a magical world.

However, if you examine the stories, you can see them as mirror opposites of each other.

Science fiction takes today’s society adds a thing or two to it, and sees how society reacts. Fantasy changes society itself, and examines how people react to it. Both are stories of alternate realities. Both are what-if scenarios played out for (sometimes) thousands of pages. Magic and technology are the Change introduced to society, the variable that is shifted to see how everything else reacts. They are the thing that allows for this what-if to play out.

At a certain point, they converge.

In Jurassic Park, at the end, we see that, despite the park’s best efforts, dinosaurs have found a way to procreate, and create life on the island. They don’t explain how that happened, other than to have Dr. Malcolm say, “Life… uh… finds a way.” That lack of explanation isn’t lazy writing, it’s an intentional conclusion of the thought experiment that is Jurassic Park. The story needs you to not understand. The point is that you can’t understand. It’s supposed to be the lesson of the story: Nature is uncontrollable chaos. You cannot control it. Trying to leads to dire consequences. You cannot understand it.

Dr. Malcolm speaks of Nature like he’s describing a God. He says it in that scene in the restaurant: “Gee, the lack of humility before nature that’s being displayed here… staggers me.” He accuses John Hammond of not understanding the power of evolution and natural selection. He talks about the Natural like it’s a nebulous Force that Hammond is currently wielding “like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun.” He talks about the Natural like it’s magic.

On the other side in Fantasyland, let’s talk about Mistborn for a second. Mistborn is a trilogy of fantasy novels written by Brandon Sanderson. The first book, The Final Empire, follows that classic formula. We join Vin in a journey to discover her awesome powers as an “Allomancer,” using metals in her body to gain superpowers. This journey culminates in a plot to rob and possibly overthrow the Lord Ruler, a godlike emperor of the entire known world.

The magic of Mistborn seems amazing and strange at first. We don’t understand how Kelsier, Vin’s mentor and the best allomancer anyone in the book knows, flies through the air and fights the way he does. As he trains Vin, though, we learn about it with her. But as the world of the story develops further, in the second and third books, we learn more about the system. “System” is a word I’m using deliberately. It’s a set of rules, a predictable framework. In a valiant attempt to stay away from the weeds, let me explain the magic system in the Mistborn series. There are three kinds of magic—each dealing with the human body’s interactions with metals. In each of the three kinds of magic, the same metals produce a similar effect, within the framework of the new magic. This may get difficult to understand if you haven’t read Mistborn. What I’m saying is that if Vin burns Pewter in her body, we know from the first book that this makes her stamina and strength reach superhuman levels. We learn later on that Sazed, a learned sage character, wields the second kind of magic. Through it, he has the power to wear Pewter on his body, and can regulate strength and stamina levels in his body, and even store them for later. If we learned about a new form of magic in the same world, and we learnt how the body interacts with metals in that form of magic, we’d be able to predict that Pewter would affect the magician’s strength and stamina.

You know what else we can do that with? Gravity and time.

Despite having never been there, based on calculations far above my pay grade, we know how much gravity is on Mars, and we know that time works differently in different kinds of gravitational circumstances. (thanks, Christopher Nolan!) A system of laws that predictably works in certain ways? That sounds a whole lot like science, doesn’t it?

At a certain point in the sci-fi thought experiment, you no longer understand how the science works, although you subconsciously understand the conclusion being arrived at, the moral argument being made. We don’t know what “way” life found there, but we do know that it found a way—and that’s the point. It doesn’t matter what you can understand about the science, it matters whether or not you can learn what the author is trying to say.

At a certain point in the fantasy day-dream, you understand the magic well enough to use it to destroy evil. You understand it well enough to wield it like a focused weapon and take on the evil overlord one-on-one.

At a certain point, you can understand enough to learn, and at a certain point you can learn enough to understand.

At a certain point, where understanding melts into feeling, technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Fantasy Footwork

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