Starship mage also did it well.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Star Wars did for a while.
Sure. Maybe the advanced tech is powered by magic, maybe the "magic" is just lost advanced technology.
Isn't that what SheRa used? Magic was an energy to be harnessed by the technology.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
— Pratchett, maybe..?
In Attack on Titan, magic (titan powers) had historically an edge over humanity, but the story is in part about how Humanity's technology has advanced to almost surpass those magical powers and shift the power balance.
As in entertainment - yes. But when it comes to realistic representation and imagination as sci-fi then no.
it's really difficult as all magic that we understand becomes science. To create this artificial gap the world has to answer - why can't science understand, reverse engineer and bend magic?
Most scientific progression is very rapid. If fireballs exist then there will be a giant 1,000 rpm fireball machine by the end of the week and that's no longer magic as we see it.
So there has to be a strong artificial limitation why magic exists and cannot be understood and harvested which is really hard to write in scifi. You have to introduce religion, spiritual mysticism or some sort of societal control mechanism that prevents reverse engineering magic which is really hard to do in a way that satisfies the readers cognitive dissonance.
Personally I have found stories like that like Warhammer 40k, Star Wars etc. But without a big, establishrd name it's so hard to convince the reader. I recently finished the wheel of time and really couldn't get over this which ruined the entire premise for me.
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.
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.
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!
Yes. Do a time travel story and new tech will be seen as miraculous magic by those pesky Elizabethans.
DCEU/MCU does this alot. Klarion the chaos lord use chaos magic(different from wanda's magic) to control starro nanotech, they call it techno-sorcery/magic-tech. but this will never occurs in sci-fi though, since magic isnt really a thing(maginery) when technology and science is used to explain the nature of the universe is involved. dark eleves and ASGARDIANS use magic and tech together. magic is basically making things impossible to a possibility(probability manipulation through energy) with limitations depending on the type of cinema/comic/media universe that it is in. or castlevania(the magical castle that use technology powered by magic)
We have high technology because we don’t have anything else to leverage.
I suspect a world with strong magic is liable to leverage that to the exclusion of technology.
A now-ended iseki story on Reddit’s HFY subreddit called “Wait, is this just GATE?” Asks the question of what would happen if a universe of only technology and no magic (ours) made contact with a universe of pretty much only magic and almost no technology beyond that found in the Middle Ages. It contains some tropes (used mainly as comedic relief or irony) and plenty of references to current magical-universe plot elements from games and novels, but is a surprisingly fresh and compelling examination of the cross-universe idea.
The Psalms of Isaak series did this very well at the beginning -- starts off with a magic fantasy land but as you read you realize that there were forebearers with immense science and technology, and weaves a conflict between the two.
You know what, basically any SCP will have varying levels of scifi and fantasy tropes, or sometimes none at all. Bottom line with SCPs is that anything is possible.
Absolutely. Read the nightlord series, just skip through the first half of book one, it's the first thing the author ever wrote and could have used better editing for sure. High tech kicks in at book 3
Definitely not. I give no reason.
You are going after two different nerd groups, so if you are able to keep them both happy... sure
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/68872/dungeon-planet-the-healer-always-leaves-alive
Found that little gem a few weeks ago and I believe it fits your ask pretty well 1:1
Honestly almost as good as my other favorite the past few years, https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/63759/super-supportive, but the latter seems to be more active than the former.
Anime does this all the time; Especially the ISEKAI-Genre
Yup.
All these youngsters forgetting about He-man
Tad Williams did a decent job in "War of the flowers" There was tech comparable to early 2000's (smartphones, electricity, cars, etc) but was powered by magic, and magic itself was still capable of being used.