I think the MCU has done a good job with it, but I'd like to see a non-superhero version of it.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Star Wars
In the 'advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' there is John Carter, Dune and a ton of other movies where the tech seems like magic.
There's a Netflix movie called Bright, which is futuristic fantasy.
I apologize if this sounds flippant, but it's FICTION.
Literally ANYTHING works if its written well enough...
It did in Final Fantasy VI with its Magitek
Most Final Fantasy games mix sci-fi and magic. Only the specifics of the lore around how it works changes with each FF universe.
Super advanced technology is magic. Hell, regular advanced technology is magic. Just run with it.
I think you inevitably face the whole “magic IS advanced technology” thing. If you actually want them to be different things, you have to have some answer to this.
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Techomages from Babylon 5 come to mind.
"I do think there are some things we don't understand. If we'd be back in time a thousand years, trying to explain this place to people, they could only accept it in terms of magic."
"Then perhaps it is magic. The magic of the human heart, focused and made manifest by technology. Every day you here create greater miracles than a burning bush."
And then...
"We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ and we know many things."
I love B5 so much.
Shadowrun kind of does the same. It's not really super-advanced, since it's cyberpunk, but it's cyberpunk with magic. And it's my favorite setting, it's such a cool idea.
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The second Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson gets close. It's a setting where magic meets wild west tech, including guns, cars, and electricity.
I've heard that his next trilogy in the setting will have more of an 1980s tech level.
A couple of Sanderson's short stories touch on space ships, computers, and magic.
EDIT: I didn't answer the question. Yes, I think it can work. I'm also a huge fan of Brian McClellan's Powder Mage books. This mixes musket level tech and industrialization with magic.
The Sunlit Man is even more tech combined with magic. Read that one yet?
What other books do you like in that genre? I loved Mistborn/Cosmere realm and Powder Mage series.
The Sunlit Man was so good. I love books that have fast pacing right from the start, and trying to figure out how the world worked was so much fun.
Why wouldn't it work? Stories usually fail because the plot is bad or because they're badly told, and it's not that hard to maintain verisimilitude just because seemingly opposite ideas like magic and advanced technology are combined - just communicate what your magic and technology can and cannot do in broad strokes and stick to it, and avoid asspulls that make no sense and/or undermine the character beats you're showing. But you get exactly the same issues in a story with only magic or only advanced technology.
Artemis Fowl is a classic example of this. The fantasy world of fairies relies on super advanced technology in their world.
There's a ton of examples, so yeah.
My home brew ttrpg setting is exactly that
MCU does a good job. Iron Man is supposed to be science based, and Thor is a Norse god.
I think a better example than Thor would be Dr. Strange. Thor is just an alien, and his people have advanced technology, not actually magic.
Dr. Strange literally uses magic magic.
The black ocean series does a good job if blending the two together. But it sort of sets them in opposition to each other. Interstellar travel is made possible on futuristic spaceships by using magic to plunge the ship partially into another dimension, shortening the relative distance between stars. But unless the it is specially shielded against it, magic ruins and destroys technology.
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A sequel to Arcanum that moves the timeline forward into the information age?
God I wish we had gotten more than one Arcanum game...
With out Tim it would never be the same even if the rights were not in limbo
Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Sure, there are books like that and Shadowrun.
Definitely, although I think it's most interesting if the advanced technology is based on the magic.
Like, let's say there is a world where there are magic plants that can heal you, people who can magically scry nearby locations if they meditate deeply, and stones that levitate in the moonlight.
And there's an evil empire that exploits the fuck out of this by industrially farming the plants to create a highly concentrated serum, removing people's brains and hooking them up to computers for magical sensing abilities, and attaching fragments of moon rocks to the levitating stones to create antigravity. Creating invulnerable flying supersoldiers with impossibly good radar powered by brain backpacks.
Yes and it sounds cool as hell
Like most things by Philip K. Dick, the man who has more movies based on his writing than any other author?
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
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Starship mage also did it well.
Iron man and other Marvel movies started being very science. Oriented, but quickly combined magic or turned to magic
In any other setting, when we take specific, tiny stones and carve patterns into them until they can perform tasks for us, we call it magic.
That's prevalent in the Might and Magic series. But (probably depending on the game) the high technology is often hidden from the common folk.
In dungeons and dragons there is a type of hybrid character you can play called an Artificer who treats magic more like technology, and there are a ton of examples in popular media that others have mentioned. I do think you have to determine how and if you'll keep them distinct if that's important to your plot, but if they developed alongside eachother maybe the technology of that world relies on magic to work.
Or maybe your magic relies on elder gods that don't like the mortal hubris of critiquing the gods works so attempts to unravel magic gets you cursed or worse.
I think they can go together and the way you fit them can even become a plot point!