magic and technology

 

 Prof Alan Jacobs wants to know whether magic and technology can learn to get along with each other. He laments the dominant tone of fantasy literature that sees natural magic opposed to cultural machinery.

http://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/magic-and-technology-can-the-two-coexist/260412/

 Jacobs hopes for:

“A fictional world where magic rules but is not the only game in town”.

This sounds very much like Tolkien‘s home town of Oxford. When he lived there his charmed life as a university don was under a certain amount of pressure from the city’s belated industrialisation. The Morris Motor works had been built in Cowley, on the edge of town, lending a new, Fordist edge to the politics of town and gown. It’s hard to look at the map of Middle Earth without seeing a psychological map of Oxford just behind it. So writers who want magic and the machine to coexist could do worse than to fictionalise the way they see this working already in a specific place. China Mieville has done this with New Crobuzon – and more explicitly with UnLunDun and Kraken.

The either/or/both/neither terms in which this discussion is framed will be familiar to the readers of Fourcultures.

Now read:

Magic needs rules

The four cultures – no way

One thought on “magic and technology

  1. Writing my thesis on Kenyan witchcraft, I can confirm, magic and technology DO co-exist. I mean, the witchdoctor was answering a phone call during a session, how more co-existing do you want it. That reminds me, in the north of Sweden, Saami witch doctors can even HEAL over the phone! Technology is just a tool, not some kind of magic barrier against magic.

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