Magic, Science, and Clarktech

[firefossil]

So there was some derail in the Pet peeves thread that I feel the need to continue because reasons:

Untrue. The gold standard is certainly Brandon Sanderson. Burning steel pushes. Burning Iron pulls. The user and the object move according to relative mass. The rules are set and from them and a basic knowledge of physics you can derive all interactions, including with other powers.

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So... science fiction, not magic fiction.

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Mistborn isn't science fiction lol

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Regardless, the description given makes it sound like sci fi just wearing the cloak of fantasy.

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I mean, the powers care about physics and shit but you can get them from eating the body of a god and the magic system also has stuff like "stockpile your connection with other people so you can make friends super fast when you need to," so I think your extrapolation overreaches.

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Maybe not describe it as "how it interacts with physics is completely accounted for and makes total sense" then. If you've got hard, rigid clearly defined rules, that is basically sufficiently advanced technology. Like, the description given made it sound like old-style hard sci-fi wearing the clothes of fantasy.

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So for you it can't be fantasy if how magic works is understood in-universe?

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Given how accepted the maxim is that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic that may not be quite the phrasing you wanna use to argue that something doesn't count as fantasy.

And there are rigid, clearly defined rules for the connection-stockpiling power. If you want to draw on a certain amount of connection, you need to be touching an object made of a particular alloy of copper and aluminum in which you previously deposited that amount of connection, which resulted in people liking you less while you were depositing. These rules are explicit and they are not subject to overrule by your mighty willpower or some shit. This is consistent with HamHamJ's statement that

Likewise, with the pushing-and-pulling powers they mentioned, one of the clear, rigid rules is that you can get them by eating the body of a god. If you define sci-fi-ness to include all power systems with clear, rigid rules then you define sci-fi-ness to include a nonzero number of power systems where you can get powers by eating a god.

And yeah you didn't have most of this information but that's kind of my point. That taking a small piece of information about a story and extrapolating to "it's clearly not actually the genre that you, person who has read the thing, say it is" is silly and likely to lead to shit like this. Unless you wanna keep defining fantasy to exclude stuff where you eat gods for the power it brings you, in which case I guess we gotta agree to disagree.

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If you're basically making your own fictional science with scientific considerations... then yes? Genres can wear the trappings of other genres.

Yes; technology can pretend to be magic if it's good enough. That is my point. A tractor beam can appear supernatural. It is still a tractor beam, just wering the trappings of the supernatural. It's fundamentally using logic, reason and the realm of reality. 'Actual magic', by contrast, is supernatural. Sure it can have rules, but it should not at any point interact with the setting's physics... if the setting even has physics.

Sufficiently advanced technology is science; magic is supernatural. This is why Midichlorians went down so badly in Star Wars; it's an inherent genre shift of what it is, which comes with a whole host of changing implications compared to the old genre.

[Edit because blarp]:

This is not all sci fi. It is a very specific, rather old form of sci fi similar to speculative fiction.

Star Wars is still Sci-fi because it has all sorts of other elements of sci-fi; it's also fantasy because of The Force.

The problem here is that what was described to me was only that facet of it. If you describe something a certain way to me... then I'm going to think it sounds like a certain thing. I've not checked out the series, so I have no idea what other genres it may or may not have part of it. But if you describe the 'magic' system in a way that sounds like a certain kind of sci-fi... then I'm going to assume it is a sci-fi setting because that's literally all the info I've been given.

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Being supernatural doesn't mean that it can't have rules.

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Sure; but if you're treating those rules as a science, then you're being scientific by definition. Lenz's law isn't supernatural, for example; sacrifice sixteen pureblood nobles to summon something is.

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Okay, @The Englanderish, you clearly don't understand what Clarktech means. It specifically refers to extremely advanced technology being indistinguishable from supernatural forces. It does not cover scientific understandings of supernatural forces, because you don't need to be very advanced to break down the typical distinction between magic and technology, because you are starting with magic and working towards technology, while Clarktech is using non-magical technology and taking it so far it looks like magic, but is actually something different.

A grand Magic Academy that teaches students how to use magic in a highly scientific and procedural manner isn't teaching Clarktech, because the most primitive possible expression of the field literally is magic of the traditional incomprehensible wonder variety. The academy is teaching the processes it actually operates by, but this is simply refining the magic, not making technology indistinguishable from magic.

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But that's just it. The situation you describe is technologising magic. It is making it Clarktech.

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No, it's not, because Clarktech specifically refers to the opposite scenario, where technology develops to the point it can't be readily separated from magic. Magic as a technology starts at magic, and is never distinguishable because it is actually magic. Clarktech doesn't cover magitech, because Clarktech is specifically non-magical technology looking like magic.

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But that's just it. Magic is the technology here. The distinction between it and technology is meaningless in such a setting. it's functionally equivalent to clarktech in what it actually means for the setting.

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Are you using technoligising as a synonym for understanding?

Or, well, I guess it depends. I'd agree that "understanding" in a "knowing the reason effects happen" way would be making a science out of magic (I wouldn't say it make something not fantasy but that's another debate) ; but "understanding" in a "if you have your stick three times to the left while saying Fireballum it makes a fireball" way isn't really making it a technology.

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I guess a way to put it would be "how is this thing called 'Magic' not a science?" Like, if it's heavily understanding based and can be engineered as such... yeah that sounds like a science with the serial numbers filed off. Talk like a duck, walk like a duck, squalk like a duck etc.

That's basically the deciding factor, I guess. Compare your fireballs example. That's knowledge, not understanding - you don't know why it works as a rational concept, only that it does, so that's an example of magic having rules but not being a science.

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The difference is meaningful, because magic is a field of technology, while Clarktech is all technology. Clarktech is Reality+, Technological Magic is different without needing to be better in every way within applicable fields. A Clarktech society, as a genuine rule, trivializes many problems IRL because the entire point of Clarktech is that it's what we have, but better, if only within a limited number of fields. Technological magic just means there's some scientific understanding of magic. It need not be complete, it need not have broad application, it need not be associated with decent technology outside of magic, and the magic can be a sidegrade to IRL methods of getting the results, being better in some areas, but worse in others, due to the limitations of magic as a force.

A highly advanced technological magic civilization need only have advanced magic. Their metalworking can be utter garbage, their understanding of biology beyond the surface layer nonexistent and their mathematics utterly lacking in differential calculus. All they need to have is advanced magic, everything else is able to be anywhere you want. With Clarktech, you don't really have that option, because what's accomplished via Clarktech must be based on understanding the principals behind the process, meaning that every single alternate application of those processes must be available. If you can regrow limbs with Clarktech, you must be able to make replacement organs, because the processes are too closely related. With magic, there might be Rules of Magic making it easy to undo organ failure, but impossible to replace missing parts of the body. Perhaps outright conjuration of matter is impossible, but transforming existing matter is trivial, or life force injection can't allow the body to repair what it's incapable of repairing naturally.

Rules of Magic apply even more in a technological magic setting than "pure" fantasy, because it's a systemic set of procedures that have fixed rules as to what outputs come from which inputs. As such, the magic can easily have rules forbidding a number of acts from being done magically that we find trivial to accomplish technologically, such as rendering a person immune to particular diseases. The magic may be able to "cheat" these restrictions by using what it can do to replicate the methods of other forms of technology, but you then require those other technologies before you can accomplish the task with technological magic. For instance, magic might be able to create diseases, so sufficiently advanced magic could create a cowpox to any given disease's smallpox, enacting mundane vaccination through a magical cause. But to do that, they need to understand how vaccination actually works to create that cowpox-analogue, which still isn't a certainty when you have the needed degree of magical knowledge, as the diseases need to be mundane viral and bacterial infections rather than contagious curses.

IRL, we have the neural interfaces, motors and batteries for considerably more advanced cyborgs than we make currently, with the bottleneck being that we lack the medical technology to safely use long-term intradermal implants (ones that leave an opening in the skin through which functional components go through) and the programming to reliably have our current neural interfaces transmit proper motor skills to the mechanical limbs (and, to a lesser extent, the manufacturing infrastructure to make the stuff cheaply enough for retail). The same can very easily hold true for magic, as described above.

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What are people's definitions for where magic, science, and clarktech begin and end?

My perspective is that magic does have rules, and defining it as "mysterious" or "unexplained" or "the gaps" is not in line with fictional portrayals of magic.. In fact it often has more rules and conditions than science would. Its just that magic's rules tend to be holistic, arbitrary, immaterial, and symbolic, vs science being specific, consistent, material, and literal. In simpler terms magic is a top-down understanding of the world based around big ideas and ironing out the details later (or never), while science is a bottom up understanding of the world based on first principles then deducing higher order systems from that. Clarktech is the idea that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or vice versa... because top and bottom have reached each other and joined hands with full understanding reached.

Let's look at the Mistborn example above, which I admittedly only know from wiki-trawling and fanfic so correct me if I'm wrong. Things like "ingest and burn Steel to push, Iron to pull" or "storing connection so I can speak better later" is quite arbitrary and very much on the magical side. While it is true that characters can and do experiment with their powers and even learn ways to combo it, or make supernatural beings using it, they are unable to break it down to first principles. They do not understand why Steel is push and Iron is pull, they have not isolated 'push' and 'pull' quarks, etc etc, it just kind of is. This would make it still fundamentally magic in my eyes.

 

[Teal]

I agree, "magic" is only magic when people can get results in story from a certain process, without understanding the process itself. I'd even qualify a cell phone in ancient Greece to be magic, if no one in-story knew how it worked.

The definition of magic is literally "the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces," thus, people are required to both understand it. The second they figure it out using logic and reason, it becomes "the mystic arts" or ''magecraft."

 

[firefossil]

I agree, "magic" is only magic when people can get results in story from a certain process, without understanding the process itself. I'd even qualify a cell phone in ancient Greece to be magic, if no one in-story knew how it worked.

The definition of magic is literally "the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces," thus, people are required to both understand it. The second they figure it out using logic and reason, it becomes "the mystic arts" or ''magecraft."

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Well again I think its less a question of level of understanding and more the method of understanding. For example compare the following statements:

*The boulder rolls down the hill. (gravity)
*The suspect isn't the perp because its only the 2nd act of the episode. (narrative)

Both of these involve rules that the viewer understands. The difference is that gravity is "first principles" while narrative is "the big idea". From gravity, you can deduce the orbits of the planets. From narrative, you can induce whether a plan will or won't work.

 

[Roadie]

If a story features magic that can't be understood or predicted in some way, it's a shitty story.

 

[firefossil]

If a story features magic that can't be understood or predicted in some way, it's a shitty story.

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I think that's only an issue if magic is a tool that gets used to resolve conflicts. Mysterious magic is fine if its a tool used to initiate conflicts, or isn't a tool and is more setting backdrop aesthetic than anything.

 

[Teal]

If a story features magic that can't be understood or predicted in some way, it's a shitty story.

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It doesn't have to be one or the other, a good setting has magic that it's practitioners sorta understand, at least through a cause->effect understanding, so long as they don't fully understand the reasons and methods of such cause->effect relationship.

 

[IonicTiger]

Personally, my definition of magic is simply a force or series of forces of the universe that can be accessed with varying degrees of directness by someone or something that can thus use that force or series of forces in some way, shape, or form for their own ends.

Clarktech, as the name implies, relies on technology–thus, to my mind, indirectly accessing some force or series of forces to then utilize it.

So, to use a very poorly thought out metaphor, if we were to define a power-outlet as a force of the universe, and the effect we wanted was to power a lightbulb, then holding the bulb with one hand and the sticking the fingers of the other into the outlet to light it would be using magic, and buying a lamp would be using Clarktech.

And in regards to the question of whether explaining how magic works stops it being magic, well... sometimes you have to provide a detailed explanation of how the system works–because if you don't, the world it's set in stops making sense. In Mistborn, pretty much every aspect of the plot and world-building is grounded on the rules of Allowmancy and its ilk, and if those rules did not exist and/or were not explained, then they both collapse.

 

[Aliya]

Graviton has spin of 2 for no apparent reason that not having spin of 2 would make it some other elementary particle. It interacts with other particles in a way that creates gravity because it's the only way it could have.
On the most fundamental level, laws of nature are arbitrary. It's just that arbitrariness is disguised under layers of math. But there are always arbitrary axioms, only justification for which is that if they were different, we couldn't have been asking this question.
I always viewed magic as fundamental arbitrary rules of nature acting on a human scale, unlike in our universe, where arbitrary things are hidden in quantum scale.

 

[thamuzz]

My perspective is that magic does have rules, and defining it as "mysterious" or "unexplained" or "the gaps" is not in line with fictional portrayals of magic.. In fact it often has more rules and conditions than science would. Its just that magic's rules tend to be holistic, arbitrary, immaterial, and symbolic, vs science being specific, consistent, material, and literal. In simpler terms magic is a top-down understanding of the world based around big ideas and ironing out the details later (or never), while science is a bottom up understanding of the world based on first principles then deducing higher order systems from that. Clarktech is the idea that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or vice versa... because top and bottom have reached each other and joined hands with full understanding reached.

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I was thinking of how I was going to word my definitions while reading through the quotes section, then I hit this and I saw that it was almost exactly what I was going to write. As in, my first thought was "magic is more top-down, big picture, less concerned with detail, science is bottom up".

EDIT:
While that definition is good, there are some other possibilities.
One is that the underlying principles that define magic are not static, changing over time in unpredictable ways. In these cases, there is often an intelligence or will associated with magic.
El Goonish Shive is a pretty good example of this sort of magic, and also a good example of the blurring that can still occur in such a setting.
IIRC, the Last Unicorn had a similar magic system. Smendrick basically acted as a conduit to a higher power when wielding magic.

EDIT:
Regarding Clarktech, the dividing line for me is how much effort ultimately went into it. If it is the result of a long chain of discovery and improvement, with successive iterations of deliberately created tools and knowledge leading to its ultimate creation, its clarktech. If it sprung forth fully formed, its magic.

Spoiler: Digression

A few fun facts that don't get brought up in the magic/technology discussion.
Science is a technology (or more accurately, the scientific method is a technology).
Martial arts is a technology.
Walking is debatably technology.

Breathing isn't a technology, but breathing techniques are.

 

[Spartakrod]

The gap between magic and superscience is really all about aesthetics and how it's treated in the story. Magic is fundamentally treated as more of an art where its rules are based on symbolism and mythology, while science is well; a science. It's why the highly mechanistic take on magic shown in a lot of tabletop or video game fantasy settings is sometimes criticised as basically having more in common with superhero powers than the kind of magic seen in mythology.

 

[vicky_molokh]

What are people's definitions for where magic, science, and clarktech begin and end?

My perspective is that magic does have rules, and defining it as "mysterious" or "unexplained" or "the gaps" is not in line with fictional portrayals of magic.. In fact it often has more rules and conditions than science would. Its just that magic's rules tend to be holistic, arbitrary, immaterial, and symbolic, vs science being specific, consistent, material, and literal. In simpler terms magic is a top-down understanding of the world based around big ideas and ironing out the details later (or never), while science is a bottom up understanding of the world based on first principles then deducing higher order systems from that. Clarktech is the idea that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or vice versa... because top and bottom have reached each other and joined hands with full understanding reached.

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I wouldn't say that it's not in line with fictional portrayals, because fictional portrayals aren't necessarily uniform. For instance, in a local folk tale a character just orders a smith to forge her a voice like that of another character, out of the blue, with no statement of rules, no explanation before nor after. The word 'forge' doesn't even mean 'fake' in the language unlike English. Or many ancient tales from Greece, Sumeria and so on, where there's not much in the way of explanation of why the blood of the gods flowing through veins of a hero allows such magical feats as outrunning the sun or gaining superstrength, it just happens. Or many of YHWH's magical feats (like resurrecting a child) which are very "because I said so", with any attempts at demystification of "how to become a god" relegated to apocrypha and herecy at best.

 

[Leila Hann]

Personally, my definition of magic is simply a force or series of forces of the universe that can be accessed with varying degrees of directness by someone or something that can thus use that force or series of forces in some way, shape, or form for their own ends.

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TIL that electricity is magic.

 

[firefossil]

The gap between magic and superscience is really all about aesthetics and how it's treated in the stor. Magic is fundamentally treated as more of an art, while science is well; a science. It's why the highly mechanistic take on magic shown in a lot of tabletop or video game fantasy settings is sometimes criticised as basically having more in common with superhero powers than the kind of magic seen in mythology.

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My inclination is that things like Star Wars are science fantasy in that it begins with "the Big Idea" or "I want a laser sword" and maybe works its way back to kyber crystals if it bothers at all. The attempt to shift to First Principles with the concept of midichlorians was infamously hated.

Also I'd argue that superheroes and mad scientists and other such things are just magic by another name, they're built around "I wiggle my hands, then EYEBEAMS or GIANT ROBOTS happens", very much top-down. Narrative causality and psionics are more of a grey area, there are decent arguments either way, and the top-down vs bottom-up does allow for a degree of gradience rather than binary absolutes. See things like biotics, where there are both serious attempts to break it down to First Principles yet is also basically "I want space magic" and has feats that don't really make sense other than "I want space magic". And there are also settings where magic is First Principles enough for me to consider it more "the science of space dust".

Graviton has spin of 2 for no apparent reason that not having spin of 2 would make it some other elementary particle. It interacts with other particles in a way that creates gravity because it's the only way it could have.
On the most fundamental level, laws of nature are arbitrary. It's just that arbitrariness is disguised under layers of math. But there are always arbitrary axioms, only justification for which is that if they were different, we couldn't have been asking this question.
I always viewed magic as fundamental arbitrary rules of nature acting on a human scale, unlike in our universe, where arbitrary things are hidden in quantum scale.

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Fair point, though:

I was thinking of how I was going to word my definitions while reading through the quotes section, then I hit this and I saw that it was almost exactly what I was going to write. As in, my first thought was "magic is more top-down, big picture, less concerned with detail, science is bottom up".

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I think we're largely on agreement that magic is basically a humanizing approach to physics, creating a world where souls or emotions or whatever matter rather than baryons and quarks.

EDIT:
While that definition is good, there are some other possibilities.
One is that the underlying principles that define magic are not static, changing over time in unpredictable ways. In these cases, there is often an intelligence or will associated with magic.
El Goonish Shive is a pretty good example of this sort of magic, and also a good example of the blurring that can still occur in such a setting.
IIRC, the Last Unicorn had a similar magic system. Smendrick basically acted as a conduit to a higher power when wielding magic.

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Actually there are some scientists who've theorized that negative energy (ie anti-gravity) is growing stronger over time, leading to the Big Rip in everything down to the subatomic levels or space time itself is ripped apart and made infinitely distant. Cheery theory that.

I wouldn't say that it's not in line with fictional portrayals, because fictional portrayals aren't necessarily uniform. For instance, in a local folk tale a character just orders a smith to forge her a voice like that of another character, out of the blue, with no statement of rules, no explanation before nor after. The word 'forge' doesn't even mean 'fake' in the language unlike English. Or many ancient tales from Greece, Sumeria and so on, where there's not much in the way of explanation of why the blood of the gods flowing through veins of a hero allows such magical feats as outrunning the sun or gaining superstrength, it just happens. Or many of YHWH's magical feats (like resurrecting a child) which are very "because I said so", with any attempts at demystification of "how to become a god" relegated to apocrypha and herecy at best.

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Technology isn't necessarily explained either in stories, or understood by characters.

 

[Adloquium]

I'm still working my own way through my thoughts on this, but I do wonder how this applies to the various means of FTL present in all sorts of SF works.

FTL is often a narrative tool used because without it, there is no story, or at least not one the author wishes to tell. And so there is a lot of technobabble used to attempt to explain how that FTL works, and depending on how creative the writers are feeling, there are all sorts of methods to apply that technobabble to further ends.

Where this falls on the Clarketech spectrum might be worth considering.

 

[Shanejayell]

POV is also a issue.

Assuming I'm from the future, with invisible implants that let me shoot fire. To ME that's science. To anyone else, that's mysterious magic.

 

[Avernus]

Some semi-connected thoughts:

One definition of magic that I've heard is that it's based on the idea that the universe can be persuaded. Draw the right symbol, speak the right words, think the right thoughts, contact the right entity and the world will bend to your desires. A fair amount of modern magical imagery however is closer to alternate physics.


The more rationalized versions of magic remind me a lot of classic sci-fi in style, if not content. "Take the real world, now add one thing and rigorously extrapolate the results" used to be a very common form of science fiction.


Some modern versions of magic are very sci-fi in flavor. When you have mages with protective bubble shields trading energy blasts, I can't help but think that if you trade "mage" for "starship" you have a science fiction battle instead.


In general I think the sci-fi/fantasy divide is best envisaged with at least two scales. The obvious one is of course is how much it adheres to real world science.

The other one however is how rationalistic/scientific it is. For some works the technology or magic is just a prop really, with little real thought in making it part of a coherent system or explaining how it works. Whether it's a blaster or a magic wand, it's just there; a black box that does what the plot demands. At the other extreme some works go to great lengths to create explanations and define the nitty-gritty mechanics of how things function.

Fantasy works that do the latter aren't literally sci-fi, but they do adhere to the classic spirit of science fiction. Thus the temptation to label it science fiction; it isn't, but it closely resembles classic sci-fi stylistically. It just bases its rigorous extrapolations on imaginary physics called "magic", instead of imaginary physics called "hyperspace'" or "time travel".

There really ought to be a single word to describe that shared style, but there isn't.

 

[Adloquium]

Some modern versions of magic are very sci-fi in flavor. When you have mages with protective bubble shields trading energy blasts, I can't help but think that if you trade "mage" for "starship" you have a science fiction battle instead.

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One of the starter locations in FFXIV is Gridania, which is a forest-based city-state where inhuman, inscrutable nature elementals dictate how humans (ie the player races) can live within the forest, from which trees can be cut down to which animals can be killed for food/skins to which people can be healed of diseases and injuries. The will of these elementals are passed down through the Hearers, who can be as unpleasant as they please as long as they don't misrepresent the elementals (whose punishments start from "the forest will literally eat you" and escalate from there).

I have always thought that if we replaced "elementals" with "AIs" and "Hearers" with "megacorp CEOs", we will have a close facsimile of a cyberpunk setting.

 

[Arcus]

I'm just going to quote Ted Chiang from an interview here, because I think his definition of magic as opposed to science is a pretty good one.

You have very specific views on the difference between magic and science. Can you talk about that?
Sure. Science fiction and fantasy are very closely related genres, and a lot of people say that the genres are so close that there's actually no meaningful distinction to be made between the two. But I think that there does exist an useful distinction to be made between magic and science. One way to look at it is in terms of whether a given phenomenon can be mass-produced. If you posit some impossibility in a story, like turning lead into gold, I think it makes sense to ask how many people in the world of the story are able to do this. Is it just a few people or is it something available to everybody? If it's just a handful of special people who can turn lead into gold, that implies different things than a story in which there are giant factories churning out gold from lead, in which gold is so cheap it can be used for fishing weights or radiation shielding.

In either case there's the same basic phenomenon, but these two depictions point to different views of the universe. In a story where only a handful of characters are able to turn lead into gold, there's the implication that there's something special about those individuals. The laws of the universe take into account some special property that only certain individuals have. By contrast, if you have a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process, something that can be done on a mass scale and can be done cheaply, then you're implying that the laws of the universe apply equally to everybody; they work the same even for machines in unmanned factories. In one case I'd say the phenomenon is magic, while in the other I'd say it's science.

Another way to think about these two depictions is to ask whether the universe of the story recognizes the existence of persons. I think magic is an indication that the universe recognizes certain people as individuals, as having special properties as an individual, whereas a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process is describing a completely impersonal universe. That type of impersonal universe is how science views the universe; it's how we currently understand our universe to work. The difference between magic and science is at some level a difference between the universe responding to you in a personal way, and the universe being entirely impersonal.

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[sapphirenebula]

The gap between magic and superscience is really all about aesthetics and how it's treated in the story. Magic is fundamentally treated as more of an art where its rules are based on symbolism and mythology, while science is well; a science. It's why the highly mechanistic take on magic shown in a lot of tabletop or video game fantasy settings is sometimes criticised as basically having more in common with superhero powers than the kind of magic seen in mythology.

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I agree. I mostly see it as aesthetics and terminology.

In stories technobabble and magic have the same effect.

Though they have different connotation implications and ideas depending on the person, in stories what they actually function as can be similar or the same.

 

[Leila Hann]

"The universe recognizes personhood" is a new definition of fantasy for me, but I think it works.

 

[willyvereb]

I don't think any of these distinctions are really useful, rather than us trying to define this I feel you should let the author do it.
For example, while the turning lead into gold example from Ted Chiang is valid in certain context what if you look at generic offensive spells and how often militaries that use magic have those en masse? Does it mean magic is no longer magic but some sorts of technology? No. You could have a point for defining it as a resource as whoever can amass better quality/quantity of mages would likely win the war but that's a different topic. Or what about settings where everyone can use magic? Does it mean they are just using technology? You could have a point for arguing about those being superpowers but again, matter of perspective.
To bring up another angle, let's talk about the other comparison brought up in this topic. If magic is properly understood it's suddenly science? Especially when you aim this at magic systems with hard rules. Yeah, no dice. You might refine this as a claim that magic is something where we lack understanding of certain elements or don't have complete control... but that's pretty much true for technology as well. Yet, magic is still magic.

So what makes something into magic? Well, three elements can help you in that. First off, following certain classics and tropes. If your ability turns people into frogs, curse them with aliments or throw fireballs then it would lead viewers to believe it's magic. So long you don't make a statement to the contrary since you use tropes associated with magic, they have no reason to doubt when you claim these are done through magic. Second is to maintain an aura of mystery. Magic is often associated by cosmic powers or something beyond the scope of humans. It could be just a mysterious flow of energy but can be connected to deities or to be just a toolkit to "hack the universe". Similarly magic might be understood in its workings yet still mysterious in general. Third, the author can also make a clear distinction between magic and science. In the end magic in one setting can be something entirely else in another. There's no universal definition for magic, neither it should be required. So authors are free to make up whatever distinction they want. Lastly, please note that you aren't even required to use all three of these steps, just one is sufficient.

Take the Nasuverse as an example. The author uses comparisons to engines and other mechanical implements when referring to casting spells. We have hard rules to magic (even if these are sometimes far more malleable than you'd think) and spells that are wide spread and relatively common among mages. So what makes it different from technology? Well, technology uses the existing physical rules created through the interaction of various mysterious phenomena. Magic directly uses these very mysteries to its purposes while still considering physical laws to a degree. Science is about testing and discovering truths about the universe and using these to your purposes. Magic research is about searching for this very origin, the ultimate truth. In addition science is progressive as it advances with time while magic is mostly about discovering findings of the past (not to mention the stock of magic power regresses with time due to cosmic reasons). So yes, you can clearly say magic is different from technology. In the Nasuverse. Maybe in some other sci-fi setting their technology works eerily similar to how Nasuverse magic is described and that's fine. The two are different settings made by different people. As I said there's no universal measure to what magic should be. Can it result in some people denying X's description of magic as actual magic? Absolutely. There are plenty of examples supplied for that in just this thread alone. But well, you can never satisfy everyone. You better convince the majority but there would be always people who don't like your magic system.

 

[Reveen]

I find that the only distinction between technology, superpowers, and magic that is even remotely useful is one that works on the thematic level.

Technology and science and Branderson Sanderson style superpowers represent materialism, a reason-centric worldview, clear and objective rules that people can understand, linear advancement, and the world and the things in it being perceived as tools for human use, who are ultimately the top dogs of the ideological universe due to their ability to use those tools.

Magic represents the exact opposite. It represents the ideas of mythology, religion, occultism, the supernatural, things that people believe materialism can't account for. It represents a worldview based on faith and awe, and fear of the unknown, the belief in a transcendent reality with rules that aren't easily perceptible to reason. And the idea that human beings can't truly understand the larger universe nor can they freely exploit it without danger or consequences. This is the world of gods and monsters, and you're just living in it.

People will probably object that the latter basically on the assumption that because the former worldview is invalid, but that's just a subjective value judgement based on the worldview of secular geeks who like science and video games. Complaining about the magic in a setting where the latter view is the operative one is really stupid. It's like complaining that in a horror movie about a haunted house that they don't figure out how to build a proton pack to catch the ghosts with.

And while I appreciate the former worldview for it's help in advancing the world when applied to a fictional context I find that worldview super, super, super boring.

And I don't really consider Branderson style superpower magic to be magic not because of some kin d of fandom gatekeeping thing. That kind of thing is perfectly fine even if I find it about as exciting as staring at the wall. But because it just kinda misses the thematic point of why the genre calls something magic and not superpowers.

 

[willyvereb]

Mistborn is indeed not magic but more in common with superpowers, in particular you can see parallels with Avatar but explained in a more complex and better defined way. You can classify it as magical in the sense it has a supernatural source and somewhat related to the esoteric truthseeking but otherwise it's much more of a supernatural power/technique than spellcraft. And as far as I know it isn't even designated as magic outright, it's called Allomancy/Feruchemy/Hemalurgy and never really referred as a magic power.

 

[firefossil]

Well I think there's several separate digressions here.

1: Science vs Magic in terms of delineation (aesthetic, mechanics, understanding, perspective, top-down vs bottom-up)

2: Science Fiction vs Fantasy, which isn't quite the same. Or is it! 'dramatic prairie dog'

3: Asimov's separation of science fiction into categories based on relationship between gimmick and story (Man invents car, then [holds lecture on how it works][gets into a car chase with a villain][gets stuck in traffic in the suburbs]) and using it to make delineations with respect to 1 and 2 such as "Star Wars is science fantasy because lightsabers exist to be cool, but Star Trek is science fiction because implications of weird tech is explored".

Overall my preference remains for a First Principles vs Big Idea approach, as well as an acceptance that things are non-binary. You can have a story about mysterious and poorly understood technology. You can have a story in which heroic willpower can defy physics... and also be quantified. Stories are never 100% materialistic and literal, nor 100% immaterial and symbolic.