Question Finding a balance

It is driving me a little nuts trying to find the balance between fantasy and sci fi for my space elf. I seem to go to either extrem, either to much fantacy where I can't see her people reaching to the stars, or to far the other way forgetting their magical roots. -huffs a sight- Probably doesn't help I'm been listening to the Shanarra series while trying to write.

Cryptic wrote: It is driving me a little nuts trying to find the balance between fantasy and sci fi for my space elf. I seem to go to either extrem, either to much fantacy where I can't see her people reaching to the stars, or to far the other way forgetting their magical roots. -huffs a sight- Probably doesn't help I'm been listening to the Shanarra series while trying to write.

The first question you need to answer would be, in my opinion, if you are aiming for coexisting technologies (both technolog and magic exists and can emulate each other), paradigm shift (both are essentially the same, it only matters how you 'see' them) or full on clarktech (magic is technology that is so advanced there is no understanding how it works only that it works).

The answer to this question determines the position technology and magic have in your worldbuilding.

The second question is where on the Sanderson scale you want your story to fall: between hard and soft magic systems. Only the question must be posed for both technology and magic (and yes,for this meta purpose science and technology are not different from magic). The answers need not be the same either. It is fairly common in fantasy worlds that technology is a fairly hard magical system (because the reader knows more about it and is harder to convince to suspend his or her disbelief and go with 'an engineer did it!' as an explanation), while magic is treated as a softer system. This often accidentally strays into deus-ex-machina territory because the temptation is large to use technology everywhere until the problem cannot be solved and then resort to magic to handwave it. Star Wars is guilty of this with the various Jedi mind tricks. But given that we have no idea what a jedi can actually do, it is rare to see a Jedi actually /solve/ the plot problems using his or her magic. (that tends to be somebody using a vague jedi-like intuition to blow sh*t up.)

so, how intermingled or separate do you see magic and technology in your story?
And how lax or restricted do you intend to make your systems?

From there you can identify in your plot the points where one or the other should take presedence, and how much they should be present in the background of any scene.


(In case you are unfamiliar with Sanderson's laws, the difference between hard and soft system is the degree to which the system has strict and well defined rules. This is proportional to how much the system (i.e. magic) can be used to solve the problems posed by the story. If the system has strict rules and limitations, and these are known to the audience, then situations where magic can solve a problem are also clearly defined and the audience will be able to understand and accept the solution. On the other hand if magic (or technology) just is and can do anything the author wants, then the author can not use it to /do/ much. At least not without risking alienating his or her audience by making them feel cheated. The softer the magic system is the more you should use it to /create/ the story problems rather than solve it.)

Crypto, there were two things that you may be over looking:
One, your 'Space Elves' need not have invented the hard tech themselves. They could have traded with visiting technologically advanced but magically bereft races various useful technology that did things that their Magic could do, but at a price they would prefer to avoid, for magical stuff they regard as trivial, but for the Traders? oooohhhh... Maaaagggiiiccc....

Second, your Race could have lost their magical power somehow, either through some offense to their gods, or a 'Dry Spell', or possibly something they had to travel to the Start to restart their magic. By the time they recovered their magic, they'd developed a nice tech base.

Everyone's familiar with the engineering maxium "Good, cheap, fast. Pick any two." and "Magic has a Price", but physically engineered solutions also have a Price, and magic tends to tolerate corner-cutting as well as any engineering process.

When Celeborn goes camping, after a day of hiking and pretending to fish, he's sure to be tired. It's much safer to strike a match to start his campfire. If all the firewood is wet, a desiccation spell sure would be handy. Or maybe he could work out a deal with the local gnomes for some coal to start with until the fire dries the wood he's gathered.

Nole Musk could plan his petroleum refinery around commercial cracking catalysts. Being magically attuned himself, he's acutely aware of the environmental and human costs of the processes he'll be using - jest as aware as he is of what could happen if a salamander got loose. So he might opt for a two-stage process using "natural" materials (certain types of fuller's earth were used in the early 20th century, both natural and artificial zeolites were used afterward) for one stage, and a second stage relying on enchanted alembics which bypass the use of dangerously high temperature/pressure combinations at the cost of lower throughput but gaining high enough specificity that he doesn't need the high through-put.

The magical price (in destroyed lives and souls) of a spell that can turn Dresden into a pile of masonry with all the people inside might be sufficiently grotesque that General Turgidson opts for daylight raids and conventional explosives every time ... right after he has the sick f--- who recommended calling in The Necromancer court-martialed.

For Werner von Palomino, the barrier posed by c on his material plane may simply mean that he needs to safely transpose his spacecraft across "close" material planes so that c is never actually exceeded in his local frame of reference. There could be a sanity-breaking way to do that directly with tech, but for now magic must suffice. Interstellar communication may only be carried out through gates, magically-intangled mirrors, and fast couriers carrying masses of memory crystals (and their digital ghosts),


tl,dr: magic tends to work best with wonders and horrors, at making unobtanium and pure explodium.

I've only glanced through the replies so far, so I'll comment more later.

But I did want to say; Bek the :Got it from someone else idea" was something I haven't considered, but fits with what I've sketched out.

Cryptic wrote: I've only glanced through the replies so far, so I'll comment more later.

But I did want to say; Bek the :Got it from someone else idea" was something I haven't considered, but fits with what I've sketched out.

And consider the social effects of Alfar (or Simaril, or whutev) who 'abandon their sacred obligations' to pursue the hard-edged, materialistic but oh-so advantageous studies of science and technology.

Also, you'll have to decide what Tech there IS out there. May I highly suggest Gravitics? There's tons of sick,twisted and profitable shit you can do with Gravity Manipulation.

Bek D Corbin wrote: And consider the social effects of Alfar (or Simaril, or whutev) who 'abandon their sacred obligations' to pursue the hard-edged, materialistic but oh-so advantageous studies of science and technology.

Humm, yes. And going back at the Reborn Earth Sidhe from a "pure blood" for being not true Sidhe in that way Though that does lead to confusion regarding Nikki. Does TQtC thing trump her origin if it is found out? Then again, I may just have in the past of the colony have events kick some of the Stuck Up out of my batch.
And maybe something in their new environment shortens their lifespans some.

Bek D Corbin wrote: Also, you'll have to decide what Tech there IS out there. May I highly suggest Gravitics? There's tons of sick,twisted and profitable shit you can do with Gravity Manipulation.

-stock evil laugh for "I'm going to have so much [i[fun[/i] with this"-[

There's a wiki page "Stock Evil Laughs"

Try watching this for reference and just move up the timeline a lot!

Cast a Deadly Spell

In a fantastical 40's where magic is used by everyone, a hard-boiled detective investigates the theft of a mystical tome.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0101550/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_58

and there is a part 2 of this out there

Witch hunt

www.imdb.com/title/tt0111730/?ref_=tt_sims_tti

If it helps two of my favorite magic/scify mix anime's are Knight's & Magic and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha.

null0trooper wrote: Everyone's familiar with the engineering maxium "Good, cheap, fast. Pick any two." and "Magic has a Price", but physically engineered solutions also have a Price, and magic tends to tolerate corner-cutting as well as any engineering process.

There's one school of engineering design that uses a variant of this philosophy.

"What's your carrying capacity for books?"

"I don't know"

"Ok, we'll just keep piling them on till you fall over, and then remove the last book we gave you." - from Freefall.Purrsia.com

But this isn't just used in fiction.

If you don't have access to a chip-fab plant, then a cheaper way to make a CPU is to use Field-Programmable-Gate-Array's. FPGA's are programmable chips that can act as simulated CPU's. They're blocked out in an Array format, so it's a blocked of interconnected switches. They're not very power-efficient in use, but they're cheap and generic, so they're inexpensive to play with.

One engineer decided to experiment with an evolutionary programming approach, where he wanted to get a chip that would send a signal if it received one level of input voltage, but didn't do anything if the voltage was too low. He was running this set of experiments with a large number (1000+) of sets of arrays.

Initially, he set each array with random settings, and kept the versions that looked promising. Then altered the settings slightly, and, kept re-iterating till he got some useful results.

After a few thousand re-iterations, he was starting to get something closer to the functionality he was after. Another few thousand iterations, and he was getting closer again.

After 8000+ iterations, he was getting something that worked. Then he loooked at the design that he had ended up with, and there were number of the FPGA's that weren't doing anything, so he started to remove them.

He went from an array containing 100 chips to one that contained around 70, while it still worked. There was one block of chips that were not connected to the main part of the circuit. They were still powered, but not directly connected.

So he removed them, and the circuit stopped working. Put them back, and the functionality was there. When i last checked the research around 5 years ago, he still had no idea how it worked, and why those chips were necessary. It's possible that it's some form of resonance effect, or some form of magnetic field effect that alters the behaviour of the main circuit, but he doesn't know.

Neither do any of his colleagues who are also working on the Quantum Computing research.

As it's not understood using the current models of electronic behaviours, it cannot be simulated in software, only in hardware.

There's lots of idea-spaces that can extrapolate from this where hand-wavium might actually be a good explanation...

The magical price (in destroyed lives and souls) of a spell that can turn Dresden into a pile of masonry with all the people inside might be sufficiently grotesque that General Turgidson opts for daylight raids and conventional explosives every time ... right after he has the sick f--- who recommended calling in The Necromancer court-martialed.

IIRC, The Necromancer was working with the Reich, (Not FOR the Reich.) He was using them for his own ends.

Charles Stross's The Laundry Files, have this as part of the background. Think John Le Carre meets H.P.Lovecraft, with the British Civil Service trying to avert a Grim-Meathook-Future. Worth a look.

For Werner von Palomino, the barrier posed by c on his material plane may simply mean that he needs to safely transpose his spacecraft across "close" material planes so that c is never actually exceeded in his local frame of reference. There could be a sanity-breaking way to do that directly with tech, but for now magic must suffice. Interstellar communication may only be carried out through gates, magically-intangled mirrors, and fast couriers carrying masses of memory crystals (and their digital ghosts),

Asher's The Polity Series, use a modified form of this. with hyperspace nodes being used to act as FTL transmission systems. Similar network structures, with a different hand-wavium basis.

tl,dr: magic tends to work best with wonders and horrors, at making unobtanium and pure explodium.

I think part of my balance issue is getting my head around Sidhe lifespans. It could be they are only 10 generations removed from Aunga, and at least to me the Sidhe aren't wont to change easily.

"As my great-to-the-seventh grandmother said-"

"She never said that! And there she is, let's just ask her."

"Great-great-great-great-great-great-great-gramma, did you ever say..."
"Whatever it is, I probably did say it at one point. I mean, after this many millennia, it's hard to keep track, and I said a lot of things."

Sir Lee wrote: "Great-great-great-great-great-great-great-gramma, did you ever say..."
"Whatever it is, I probably did say it at one point. I mean, after this many millennia, it's hard to keep track, and I said a lot of things."

"Some of them were even true!"

"Which ones?"

"There's the rub, innit? You could ask some of my old exes; maybe they'll finally turn out to be useful!"