Why so little pragmatic use of magic?

[biostem]

So I've been watching this decent anime called "In another world with my smartphone", and one thing that strikes me as clever is how the main character combines magic with seemingly mundane science, in order to achieve fairly impressive results - for instance, he had a teammate use ice magic to conjure a giant block of ice, used another spell to reshape the ice into a lens, then cast a light spell, which was then focused into a powerful beam, via that lens. Another example would be to use the aforementioned reshape spell, (which can only create solid objects), to reshape pieces of dragon fang into the components to build a revolver, then using a stored reshape spell and another trigger spell, to have the pistol reshaped into a sword, when given the proper trigger word.

Is it that magic would act as a crutch, thus quashing the necessary drive to innovate and uncover things like modern physics or chemistry, which would be necessary to uncover these "practical uses" for magic? Is it just that they don't want the story to devolve into the protagonists coming up with more and more convoluted combinations of magic and science, in order to solve the issue at hand?

[Q99]

It hiiighly depends on how magic works. Not all that many ice magics will make lenses good for that kind of thing, most magics don't have such a versatile thing as the reshape spell you need (especially turning something from a bunch of fiddly gun components into something like a sword where you want one solid one).

Sure, if magic is an omnitool it may be that, but magic is often not an omnitool. A lot of magic is more fixed and changing it is harder.

Also, other magic may just produce similar effects... sans the steps. Sure, use magic to make item and etc., or just, like, pull a ranged wand out of magic storage, then swap it out for a magic sword. Or fire a 'bolt' spell from your hands which is not necessarily any less an advanced process than firing a gun, it's just done in spell form. So, which one is really the more pragmatic, using magic to replicate the steps of technology, or just getting the result?


I do know a number of worlds where magic gets practically used for a ton of uses, though. Crossgen's mystic is sorta modernday level but everything is done by magic. Fred Perry's Gold Digger has a magic based civilization that does spend effort into researching more magic just as we do technology (and at one point in the past, the 'Age of Wonders,' the magic got advanced enough that a war wiped out everything in a giant apocalypse- the following 'Age of Magic' lost most of that knowledge base and studying the old stuff is valuable), plus it's shown that the pinnacle is often combining magic and technology- but each one takes enough research that a magic society who starts practicing will catch up overnight or vice versa, there's a heck of a different thing between taking one advanced method and applying a new well-developed knowledge base to it, and trying to build that knowledge base from square one.

[Broomstick]

Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series has some very practical and mundane use of magic. Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos and Operation Luna likewise happen in a world with practical magic. The Bas-Lag trilogy has both practical magic and steampunk technology. Just a few suggestions if you're interested.

[mr friendly guy]

Brandon Sanderson is another one who uses rules of magic. He actually gives talks on different ways you can write magic in your fantasy stories, eg magic as science or magic as a plot device etc.

Take his take on the wheel of time when Robert Jordan died. The heroes can make gateways to travel from A to B. Darkspawn can't travel through gateways. He has the main character make a gateway which moves and cuts enemies in half. Another scene have characters make a giant gateway connected to the inside of a volcano and let lava flow down on an enemy army. They also have cannons where someone creates a gateway, fire the cannons and then close it to prevent retaliation.

[The Romulan Republic]

So I've been watching this decent anime called "In another world with my smartphone", and one thing that strikes me as clever is how the main character combines magic with seemingly mundane science, in order to achieve fairly impressive results - for instance, he had a teammate use ice magic to conjure a giant block of ice, used another spell to reshape the ice into a lens, then cast a light spell, which was then focused into a powerful beam, via that lens. Another example would be to use the aforementioned reshape spell, (which can only create solid objects), to reshape pieces of dragon fang into the components to build a revolver, then using a stored reshape spell and another trigger spell, to have the pistol reshaped into a sword, when given the proper trigger word.

Is it that magic would act as a crutch, thus quashing the necessary drive to innovate and uncover things like modern physics or chemistry, which would be necessary to uncover these "practical uses" for magic? Is it just that they don't want the story to devolve into the protagonists coming up with more and more convoluted combinations of magic and science, in order to solve the issue at hand?

As Q99 already noted, it partly depends on the magic system in question (I'm reminded of Dresden Files', and to a much lesser extent Harry Potter's, anti-tech. effect from magic).

Though Dresden Files does actually integrate science and magic a bit. The protagonist has noted on occasion that shit like thermodynamics is relevant to using magic. Magic can bend physical laws but not simply break them.

Buffy did a mediocre episode in season one involving a demon in the internet. Its not a very popular episode, to put it mildly, but I find the underlying concept interesting. Also, Xanatos from Gargoyles integrates magic and tech. on occasion.

Although yes, I could see reliance on magic suppressing technological innovation. This is almost certainly the case for Potterverse Wizards, who have integrated magic and tech., but apparently not much past the 19th. Century tech. level. Out of universe, its also probably largely just a stylistic thing- people associate magic with ye olden days.

[Q99]

Brandon Sanderson is another one who uses rules of magic. He actually gives talks on different ways you can write magic in your fantasy stories, eg magic as science or magic as a plot device etc.


Take his take on the wheel of time when Robert Jordan died. The heroes can make gateways to travel from A to B. Darkspawn can't travel through gateways. He has the main character make a gateway which moves and cuts enemies in half. Another scene have characters make a giant gateway connected to the inside of a volcano and let lava flow down on an enemy army. They also have cannons where someone creates a gateway, fire the cannons and then close it to prevent retaliation.

Yea, he's good at it. And note how while he has people use the systems cleverly and such, there's definite limits on what can and can't do, you couldn't recreate tech with most of his magic, but you can come up with clever effects.

Although yes, I could see reliance on magic suppressing technological innovation. This is almost certainly the case for Potterverse Wizards, who have integrated magic and tech., but apparently not much past the 19th. Century tech. level. Out of universe, its also probably largely just a stylistic thing- people associate magic with ye olden days.

And the majority of magic settings are ones where things are still pseudo-medieval, you wouldn't expect high advancement from them anyway... though, granted, some of them have been at pseudo-medieval longer than the separation between us and the foundation of Egypt.


Then there's urban darkness ones like World of Darkness, where magic either comes from your species or, if you're a mage, it's relationship with tech is a lot more complex like that! (Tech is what it is because the Technocracy convinced enough people that that's 'normal' thus restricting most magic)

And Buffy magic tends to be too freewheeling and off the cuff for much tech integration IMO.

[Jub]

Take his take on the wheel of time when Robert Jordan died. The heroes can make gateways to travel from A to B. Darkspawn can't travel through gateways. He has the main character make a gateway which moves and cuts enemies in half. Another scene have characters make a giant gateway connected to the inside of a volcano and let lava flow down on an enemy army. They also have cannons where someone creates a gateway, fire the cannons and then close it to prevent retaliation.

Deathgates were a thing before Sanderson took over and had little to do with if you could or couldn't travel via gateway. The slicing versions just closed with Trollocs part way into them and were actually pretty inefficient. They were used much more effectively later and there they were just gates that had no exit and dropped you into an infinite void.

[Q99]

I do note I really like stories that integrate the magic with the setting well and show the effects the magic has on how the society works and how people think. In Vlad Taltos/Dragaeran books, you don't knock doors, you clap on them. Why? They're a culture that has magic alarms and even traps, so even if it's just an alarm, knocking sets them off... and this is mostly an upperclass home thing, the peasants don't have this magic, but it filtered through the culture.

"Wait, they have this spell, why don't they do X...?" shouldn't be a question one asks in stories (though with the note sometimes people like to assume that a spell is simple and easy when it's not- I'm referring more to when a magic is shown to be reasonably easy to do/done for minor occasions).

[Imperial Overlord]

Plenty of settings have magic being used pragmatically. The first example involves casting three spells to generate a laser like effect (involving a highly dubious ice lens) and not simply conjuring a laser beam (which would be one spell, not three, conjuring the same amount of light as the light spell) so the real question so I have to ask what you really want to ask? Are you asking about practical magic use? That's in plenty of series. Are you asking about combining magic with science and technology? That's a much more limited genre but it exists.

[Zixinus]

Is it that magic would act as a crutch, thus quashing the necessary drive to innovate and uncover things like modern physics or chemistry, which would be necessary to uncover these "practical uses" for magic?.

By that you mean "creatively useful" or "making effective use of physics". As for how it quashes it, it is simple: if given a choice between learning how to do powerful, exciting, prestigous magic and choosing how to do the things that require learning science, which would you pick? Most people would pick magic as that empowers them more than learning chemistry or physics, as well as their associated crafts (a lot of innovations in chemistry and physics come related to crafts that heavily relied on them, such as lens-crafting). Why learn boring chemistry when I could learn how to throw fireballs around? How much more useful is magic, especially if the security and/or prosperity of the realm relies on them? Learning magic is always useful in videogames alone, why not in real life?

The best and brightest in the society would study magic if they can. So would the majority of those that can choose their profession. In such an atmosphere, chemistry, physics, biology and even math would be subjugated only to how well they can perform magic. Magic doesn't act as a crutch, it acts like an intellectual hole that drains away intellectual effort away from science (again, if the magic system works that way). Consider in the past how much intellectual effort was spent on, say, religious issues (the phrase "how many angels can fit on a pinhead" comes to mind). That their magic is physically inefficient is secondary to making the magic exist in the first place.

Also consider that some of your examples are less simple than it sounds. Take the lens thing with the ice. There are tremendous amounts of variables involved in order to make that work, such as practicing making near-perfect lens-shaped ice, from making sure the ice is transparent and not opaque, to learning how to aim the lens, etc. There is lots of potential of complications that you cannot work out on the fly, you need either careful planning of working all this out or lots of trial-and-error to make this work. The more you make your spellwork rely on physics, the more physics you need to know and what happens if your spell doesn't work because of your ignorance of physics? Better to make the spell work in of itself with reliance as little as possible on outside factors.

[Q99]

A thing is in some worlds, study of magic may be the best way to learn physics, but then the way to take advantage of that is to simply make better spells.

Like if you move from 4th level spells to 5th level spells, you aren't simply 'gaining XP or power,' often enough that is directly 'I know more about how magic, i.e. part of how the universe/world functions, works and how to apply it.'

[Q99]

Btw, if you do want to see 'modern knowledge used to make magic more awesome,' stuff, Japanese Isekai light novels (i.e. the main character dies and are resurrected in a fantasy world, often with some advantage) is full of it.

'Make My Abilities Average,' for example has a character grasping the root programming of magic better and using physical principles to (1) optimize spell chants, and (2) come up with spell applications no-one on that world knew (like using the principles of compression to make better air magic).

Some really get over the top with such stuff, but the normal formula is 'character applies their RW knowledge to be uber.'

[loomer]

Magic is rarely free. If you can summon a fireball directly for the same amount of Energy/Will/Mana/Cosmic Juice/Sacred Ruby Dust/Depleted Local Aetheric Magic Juju as speeding the decomposition of local organic matter, then just going 'fuck it, kaboom' will be a more attractive option than 'okay, let me just rot this swamp real real fast and then trigger a spark'. So you need what we'll call Mana for simplicity, and then you need one other thing - one of the most consistent things in fictional magic and real-world occultism. You need mana, and you need Will - mental strength and focus, which can rapidly deplete. It's why sorcerers and wizards in games and movies get tired after popping a few spells off even if the raw energy is freely floating about in the cosmos - the effort required to basically break (or at least bend) reality with your noggin is pretty significant.

Magic is rarely so limited it cannot replicate the effects of your 'pragmatic' uses, either at a slightly higher level of spell or with slightly more energy, but less energy overall than casting two or more spells. Where this is the case, there will be no incentive to waste time, energy, and mental strength casting two or three spells where one can do the job, unless that one is unavailable for some reason or an external factor - a need for subtlety, say - is imposed.

Magic is usually uncommon. Often, it's outright rare, and quite often, nearly unique. There are rarely wizards literally everywhere, and even where they are, they tend to share space with a whole lot of non-wizards.

It boils down, ultimately, to efficiencies. If a spell can do what you need it to do on its own, then the wizard has no incentive to be 'pragmatic'. If it can't, then either it can't be done, or if it can, would be more energy/labour/will intensive than circumventing the problem in other ways for someone not trained in 'pragmatic magic'. More likely for pragmatic magic is actually using mundane objects - a glass lens, say, to focus that spell. So long as the energy cost to the wizard for using more spells is higher than the cost for buying that lens and it's available, then the pragmatic thing to do is to use less magic, not more.

Would magic stop the development of physics and other sciences? Almost certainly not. The classical wizard archetype basically is who did the science for large swathes of human history. While there are a lot of more recent depictions that treat wizards as basically just going 'lol fireball this is easy get on my level scruuuub' without the kind of in-depth research (of, uh, 'variable' quality to be... well, pretty damn generous to us occultists and our ancestors, really, but research nonetheless) involved in preparing rituals and spells. If magic were real, it would be studied both by wizardy types and non-magically inclined science-types, just like the practices of sorcery and alchemy were nearly inextricable from the practice of science in its early years.

What it might do is cause some interesting twists, asynchronous developments, and oddities. Let's consider your ice lens - is its presence going to mean that no one learns to build glass lenses? Almost certainly not, because ice melts and glass doesn't. Conjuring and shaping ice is a two (or more) step process that creates a device of limited lifespan for presumably high investment of Mana and Will. Creating a glass lens - perhaps by another wizard, or just a mortal artisan who studied under the Witch of Lenscrafting - on the other hand, while a high investment of time and mundane resources, is a lasting option to perform the same task. More importantly, it is one where many of the resources are a distributed cost across a production chain, and while focus and effort is required, that focus and effort is distinct from Will. Unless the witch is doing it, you can get the same thing without an investment of Mana and Will, just not on short notice.

Where it gets interesting is that many things that were not possible until we developed the combustion engine, electricity, or an understanding of thermodynamics may become possible sooner. More likely than magic shutting down research into physics, it'll probably speed it up in a few ways, and the knock-on effect will be that a, magic becomes an integral part of any good science lab (maybe NotEinstein can't do it personally, but if he can literally ring the Ghost of Wizard Newton up to ask him to do a little ritual for him to prove <x> is true, you think he won't?) for its abilities to provide necessary inputs that may be difficult or impossible to attain.

The only time where magic will fully replace - rather than hybridize with - study of physics etc is where magic is cheap, abundant, and open to use by many people. Think of magic like an energy source. When it's sweet delicious oil, it drowns out alternatives by being so damn cheap for the return that it'd be insane to invest time and energy into those alternatives. When it's coal, it leaves bigger openings. If it's wood, it leaves much bigger openings. If it's a slight breeze that gets a tiny little toy windmill going like it is in our world, then by god the opening is bigger than my mouth is.

[Q99]

Interestingly, the Vlad Taltos series has multiple types of magic, with multiple natures.

Sorcery draws on the imperial orb (an artifact that in turn filters raw chaos), which provides as much power as necessarily. Complexity makes spells difficult, not raw power (raw power matters some since you're still channeling it through you, but it's a minor concern), and thus a lens solution would be far harder than a sorcery bolt.

Witchcraft works through the mind and a person's own power, but complexity is handled a lot more intuitively by the mind rather than conscious formula (even more-so if you have a familiar who can offload some of that and help smooth things over). So making a lens is something you could do and it wouldn't even necessarily be super-hard if you knew what you were doing, but throwing a bolt of raw magic is much harder to do and I don't think I've ever seen a witch do it- indirect using something to cause an effect is actively easier.

[loomer]

Forgot the second part of the knock-on effect, which is that initially marginal (but later very useful) uses of purely 'mundane' physics and chemistry may be displaced with the ensuing effects depending on what they are. It's where we get into that fuel analogue again, but it will only remain the case where using wizards remains cheaper on a societal level than the alternative. Communication technology is my go-to. Early on, it may make more sense to use wizards and crystal balls thus displacing early options like semaphore lines and telegraphs, but if a demand develops for quick communication at long distances that outstrips either the abilities or number of wizards able to perform the role, then so long as there is an awareness of those principles then they might still be developed, and possibly skip a few steps by letting certain ideas 'out of the bag' as a reality 'out of sequence', with the hunt to find a non-magic reliant analogue already having a specific target and areas of inquiry, especially if the wizards are also involved in the process. If, however, magic remains so cheap and abundant that you can just train more wizards, then maybe you never get the telegraph at all. This is not so much magic displacing pragmatic and mundane options however, as in a world where magic is that cheap and abundant it's clearly a fundamental part of the cosmos, and being a more efficient and instant option, is itself the pragmatic and mundane option.

[loomer]

Following on - my bad on doubleposting - with that line of thought. The core question of whether magic is better used than a mundane alternative can be boiled down to a ratio. Energy invested:Energy Returned - i:r. Magic is usually in the odd space of the return on the physical energy expended being very good, even far exceeding what should be possible thermodynamically without weird shit like pulling energy from another dimension.

This is not the only metric, though. The second one is somewhat more relevant, which is the amount of social energy expended. If the reward for the social energy expended on selecting, educating, and training your wizards is sufficiently high because magic is either easily taught, innate to most or all people, or a procedure anyone can do with or without training or aptitude, then it'll begin to interfere in other fields development. However, if magic requires extensive training or is limited in its scope, the i:r drops, and other fields have openings where the use of magic would be inefficient or impossible.

In your standard high fantasy setting, the i:r is pretty good - magic is freely available, the energy required to do it physically is outweighed by the rewards, and the social energy is pretty well returned on as well when the druid makes a good harvest out of bad or the wizard lets you talk across continents instantly or the cleric can literally zap the disease straight out of an entire town. In those cases, we should expect to see (but often don't, for artistic purposes and the rule of cool) magic strongly interfering in the development of other technologies like medicine, communications, even metallurgy (if your dwarf rune-smiths can magic steel up cheaply and efficiently, the incentive to develop better furnaces is lower. It might still pop up, probably will, but the social and physical energy investment will have steep rivals.)

In lower fantasy settings with rare magic, or ones with limited-scope but prolific magic, the i:r is... Acceptable, either physically or socially. If it takes more in terms of food, time and labour to support a mage than he can produce in exchange, then he's going to be a less attractive option than in one where he can magic up a good harvest. That doesn't mean there won't be witches and wizards roaming about, but it does mean that the amount of social energy being thrown behind the physical energy requirement will diminish for the reason that magic is simply less useful than in the alternative. It starts to be reserved and 'regular' technologies have a much bigger opening, but there'll still be cases of interference like communication where the social capital is established. Training five wizards for every million people coming of age each year is low, but probably still enough that their unique skills are valuable enough for their presence to be sponsored and have social energy investment despite the poor i:r, but only in fields where what they do is a better use of energy than what a farmer can manage with some sheep or a smith with a better furnace. Those five people join the last five and the five before that, and they can be the backbone of telecommunications, of advanced chemistry - but at the end of the day, either their scarcity or the limitations on their power means that they won't be supplanting 'core' technologies any time soon, and will probably instead give rise to the non-magical development of things they can do that'd be really useful on a larger scale. So that's going to be quite an interesting interplay between magical technologies and non-magical technologies.

On the very low end, we more or less get our reality only Aleister Crowley was actually on to something and not just on something. The i:r is either abysmal, or good with the caveat that very few people are able to use the technology at all. At that point, either you need to invest so much energy (whether physical or social) into the training of wizardy types that it vastly outweighs their benefits, or they'll be so rare that they simply won't have the numbers to meaningfully impact on technological development outside of contributing their abilities and skills - their own magical technology, essentially - to it. Barring extremely fringe technologies, the impact of magic on development in a low i:r or low availability world should be minimal.

[Q99]

One thing that makes social costs complex is born magic- a lot of stuff has it so that not everyone can use magic, or at least not easily.

So you could have a situation where there's enough people to fill the needed social roles, but also people who want it but can't get it. And the latter may have reason to try and learn alternate approaches (such as demon pacts), and the former reasons to stall means not under their control.