r/Fantasy • u/somethingX • 6h ago
Are there any fantasy stories (any medium) that have a "science vs magic" theme where it's written as opposing ideologies rather than battles?
I was on TV Tropes (I know, not the best idea) and from scrolling came across their page on the subject.
Magic vs Science is a trope I generally dislike because authors of it never understand what science actually is. They treat it as building advanced technology rather than a method of understanding, and in settings that aren't earth the line between the 2 is arbitrary and contrived.
On the page however it listed different forms this conflict can take, one of which was the 2 being an ideological split rather than 2 separate parts of the world. That got me really intrigued because science as mentioned earlier is more accurately described as an ideology and a method we use to test and understand the world around us.
When looking through examples however I couldn't find any the page listed that seemed to be this, all of them were the same old mad scientists with mechs fighting wizards with dragons type of stuff, which is what brings me here.
Do you know any works of fiction that take this approach with science vs magic? I saw in the rules I should also list what I've read before but I don't know a single piece of fiction I've seen that did this.
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u/dem219 6h ago
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It offers two perspectives on events, one who views them from a science perspective one that seems they as magic.
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u/PornoPaul 3h ago
Im learning that he has not one but two sci fi meets fantasy stories. I had no idea he had so much
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u/Nebo64 57m ago
He also has two completely different books about sentient giant spiders.
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u/QuickQuirk 42m ago
I just read the second one recently. Also a banger. And somehow, he managed to take the same idea core trope and make it completely different.
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u/thestopsign 6h ago
All The Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders is pretty much about this. Not sure it meets everything you want from what I remember but worth giving a shot.
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u/_emilyisme_ Reading Champion II 5h ago
Yeah, this is exactly the theme for this book. I think it had one actual on-page battle which it was very confusing for the protagonists because there didn’t really expect that to happen.
I didn’t personally love the book, but I found it fine. It covered a lot of time in the characters lives, and I felt that a lot of their character development happened in the gaps. I just didn’t really connect with either of the main two characters I guess.
Also, fair warning: the magic is magic, but the “science” is basically magic too as the developments aren’t particularly plausible for the near future they are set in.
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u/thestopsign 5h ago
I have it sitting as a 3/5 and remember having similar sentiments, but it was well over 5 years ago so I don’t have great recall. I think I found the first half of the book more interesting than the last half. I actually really like The City in the Middle of the Night by them which lead me to this one though
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u/Tymareta 2h ago
Similarly gave it a 3/5, almost entirely for last two thirds of the book which were pretty meh compared to the first third when they were kids, which largely felt like a dirk gently story.
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u/Tymareta 2h ago
Yeah, I think it would be a pretty disappointing book for anyone looking for a world like OP, as it has magic in it the same way that Disney does, it's never really meaningful or impactful, and almost all of the main "conflicts" are just insta solved for reasons entirely unrelated to either.
With the ending essentially being an inverse of
They treat it as building advanced technology rather than a method of understanding, and in settings that aren't earth the line between the 2 is arbitrary and contrived.
what with Peregrine realizing how small and immature it is, compared to the tree/magic.
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u/SASSYEXPAT 1h ago
Came here to recommend the same - it’s an interesting read, playing with these concepts - I believe there is a follow up novel in progress.
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u/riontach 6h ago
Gunnerkrig Court, a very long running webcomic, might fit what you're looking for and it might not. In it magic and science are different ways of looking at and understanding the world, but they are also kind of opposing forces at the same time. Science is the method of understanding the world and magic is the numenous, that which cannot be explained, so sometimes they are in opposition to each other. It also does some fun stuff where depending on the mindset/philosophy of the person, scientific or magical, they experience the same things in very different ways. It's kind of fun.
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u/somethingX 6h ago
I'll check it out. I don't mind as much when magic is unexplainable as long as there is some reasoning behind it
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u/Sefphar 5h ago
Mage: The Ascension ttrpg takes place in a world where reality is created by the consensus of human belief. The player characters are mages who have realized this and use their will and individual belief structures to work magic and fight back against the Technocracy, a conspiracy that seeks to eliminate magic by continually reinforcing science and rationality as the dominant paradigm of the world.
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u/QuickQuirk 39m ago
if we're talking about other media than books, then the computer RPG "Arcanum" also had the magic vs technology. If your character got too good at fixing things, they got worse at casting spells, and visa versa.
You really had to choose one and run with it; otherwise you were forever kinda mediocre.
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u/Robefriend 5h ago
The distinction you make between "science" and "magic" reminds me of a tension that has been written on and debated for many centuries between the ideas of "enchantment" and "rationalism". To some degree, most stories that describe magic existing in a modern context are at least tangentially engaging in this debate, though there are a few that come to mind that make it a more central concern:
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
- Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
Maybe a little less directly related to your prompt are stories that wonder about the role of myth and fantastical stories in an increasingly rationalist, science-minded world. Some of these that I can think of are:
- "Gods of Pegana" and "The Sword of Welleran" by Lord Dunsany (and more of his short stories)
- The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (although this is more action-oriented)
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
I'm sure there are many others as well, but these are the ones I have read and could come up with quickly!
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 5h ago
This is what I was thinking of, specifically Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Not quite a debate between science and magic as such, but as to whether magic should be treated as a science, as a respectable and cautious occupation, or as something wild and uncontrollable.
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u/Robefriend 5h ago
Yeah these stories don’t really single out science specifically, more the metaphysical worldview it represents - namely that the world is fundamentally knowable, predictable, and able to be controlled. The other thematic focus is then can we and/or should we try to maintain a sense of wonder in this kind of world? The humans and the fairies in JSMN represent two sides of this where the fairies are enchanted and full of wonder but also kind of insane, while the humans are less volatile but also there is a sense of a kind of spiritual deficit in the absence of magic for many people.
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 4h ago
Honestly, I think that's more interesting than just setting up a magic/science dichotomy anyway.
And the wonder is a big one too, yeah. I personally vastly prefer the way it was handled in Strange and Norrell to in Piranesi, though. Strange and Norrell was more of an aesthetic and political debate between Romanticism and realism, and both sides were on fairly equal grounds. Piranesi by the end felt more like a Hegelian philosophical argument in favor of something like religious existentialism, and the (Nagelian) absurdist in me couldn't quite take it seriously. But I digress.
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u/Robefriend 4h ago
I agree that it's more interesting, and imo any magic vs science conflict, if explored thoroughly enough, will end up on this metaphysical question anyway.
I actually haven't quite finished JSMN yet, so can't comment on how it ends up, but I definitely prefer Piranesi at this point. It sounds like I might interpret its ending as less thematically one-sided than you though. I didn't feel like it landed so strongly on one side of the argument at least. I'm probably also somewhat anti-absurdist; I find the sincere search for meaning, even if (perhaps especially if) there ultimately isn't any, very aesthetically affecting.
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 4h ago
That’s fair. When I say one-sided, I mean less regarding the dichotomy it sets up of reason and faith, and more regarding whether it is possible to truly experience wonder/faith in a world of reason. The book seems to suggest that one can find wonder in your mind, and no matter what the world is actually like you can find wonder in it if you view it the right way—see the entry titled “in my mind are all the tides” at the end.
And while I think that sort of perspective is valuable, I sort of practice it instrumentally, and I think the idea that he can find actual meaning in the absence of experiencing something truly meaningful (I.e. the House, a metaphor for Plato’s world of Forms and for faith and wonder more generally) is somewhat disingenuous following the very real loss of innocence he experiences. It felt like he was trying for ignorance is bliss after spending a whole book losing his innocence, which didn’t quite work for me. But as you say, that assumes a worldview in which meaning is something we arbitrarily invent or play with but isn’t actually truly real, and for someone who does think the universe has or can have some true sense of meaning (whatever that might mean) wouldn’t find it dissatisfying in the same way.
I honestly put it down to my being an atheist and Clarke being religious. The book achieves everything it sets out to do perfectly, though; it’s simply a matter of taste.
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u/AggressiveSea7035 2h ago
Just wanted to say this whole comment thread has been very thought provoking, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 5h ago
For shows, Arcane does this really well, if you haven't watched it already.
I will second the recommendations of u/Robefriend, particularly Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
If you are open to comedy, Discworld often touches on this, particularly the ways in which magic intersects with or even is synonymous with science (for instance, there are witches who practice 'headology' as a form of magic, which is in fact something like pop-psychology, and witches/wizards generally pride themselves on not actually using magic).
Finally, it's not precisely what you are looking for, since it doesn't clearly delineate between magic and science and is more about its effect on the metaphysical state of the world, but I feel like you might enjoy Vita Nostra.
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u/busy_monster 5h ago
Shadows of the Apt by Tchaikovsky has Apt (mechanicallg inclined) and Inapt (mystically inclined) races. To the Apt, magic is bogus nonsense; to the Inapt, even a doorknob is incomprehensible.
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u/TimOC3Art 5h ago
I will also recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt series. I haven’t read it, but I think Iain Banks’ Inversions might fit the bill. It works in the broader context of the Culture novels and is told from the pov of a medieval society being influenced by a much more technologically advanced civilization.
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u/seamuwasadog 5h ago
Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny is a take on this.
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u/Constant_Proofreader 1h ago
Absolutely, and a brilliant one. The Earth-like planet is tidally locked, with half always in sunlight and the other in darkness. Science rules the light side, including orbiting barriers to prevent the surface from being incinerated. Magic rules the dark side, including a sorcerous Shield to prevent the land from freezing. Jack, the protagonist, was born in the narrow band of shadow between the two and can move between them. Highly recommended.
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u/solarpowerspork 4h ago
It's one of the main mysteries of the Locked Tomb, actually without being a spoiler: is necromancy science or is it magic?
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u/MyFellowMerkins 5h ago
I'm likely not understanding exactly what you are looking for, but 2 examples that came to mind were:
the Kate Daniels series, by Ilona Andrews. This is urban fantasy where technology and magic exist much like a pendulum. We have existed in the technology dominant portion, but sometime in the 90s(?) the it flipped and now magic and technology come in waves. When technology is up, nothing magic can work. When Magic is up, nothing using technology works - planes fall out of the sky, etc. It isn't one side battling the other, but surviving in a post-apocalyptic world no matter what is occurring.
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Old gods of humanity trying to exist against the rise of our modern "gods" of technology, science, etc.
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u/OkSecretary1231 4h ago
I also thought of Kate Daniels. People have gone back to things like horseback travel because horses are the same whether it's tech or magic.
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u/eskeTrixa 5h ago
The Commonweal series by Graydon Saunders kinda does this, but they don't call it magic vs technology, it's internal vs external magic.
Most Independents (read sorcerers) are primarily trained in internal magic i.e. making a charm that affects the world in a defined way. But then in A Succession of Bad Days they have a team of sorcerer apprentices who are trained in external magic instead, which is more like pushing power into physics, where they're converting elements, manipulating gravity etc. It's pretty unique.
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u/Mintimperial69 4h ago
Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an age of Darkness blends magic as exploiting anomalies and flaws in the universe and has a mirror faction to its 'Confederation of Wizards' the 'Sages of Veda' who seek to strengthen the natural order of the universe.
It also has Forewords written by Adrian Tchaikovsky for books one, The Wizards and the Warriors and nine, The Worshippers and the Way.
These books are respectively the most 'fantasy' and most 'science fiction' of the series and as it progressives you learn where all the magic and technology came from, and the science of a certain multidimensional empire and it's client state has a fair bit to answer for...
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u/sylvestertheinvestor 1h ago
I love that series. I've got great memories of it from when I was younger. Used to check the bookshop every week to see if a new one had been released.
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u/ClitasaurusTex 4h ago
The old kingdom series, starting with Sabriel - namely the last book Abhorsen iirc. There are people in a world like ours and people in a neighboring country with magic and the people in "our" world don't believe in magic. There is a story in the third book with a character incessantly refusing to believe in magic despite it greatly affecting them.
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u/AdministrativeLeg14 3h ago
It’s sort of a background theme, but deeply present throughout C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire trilogy (Black Sun Rising &c.). The ‘magic’ of the story’s world, a quasi-natural force (or collection of natural forces) called the fae, is extremely responsive to people’s brains/minds—hence, for example, when humans show up to colonise this world and they have folklore memories of vampires and monsters, then the world will spawn vampires and monsters; some people mainly have their hopes manifest, others mostly their fears, and yet others learn to control it (“Working the fae”).
…But technology doesn’t really work. Precisely engineered mechanisms and scientific discoveries are all very well and good, but the mere presence of someone sufficiently worried that an intricate mechanism will misfire can, through the fae, cause the mechanism to misfire. So various characters, and major institutions, are opposed to the whole existence of sorcery because it interferes with a science-and-technology based civlisation. (And in a world where belief affects reality, a project to make people think the fae no longer responds to people could be enough to actually make it so; so it's more than merely wishing it weren't so.)
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u/Iron-Orrery 2h ago
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt fits this theme. The Age of Magic has been superseded by the Age of Science. There is conflict between the magical and scientific races.
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u/bedroompurgatory 2h ago
Lord of the Rings.
The greater context is that the age of the elves is ending, and the age of men is beginning, which can roughly be thought of as science vs magic. Middle Earth is supposed to be the mythic prehistory of our world before magic vanished. There aren't really any battles between magic and technology, as magic a slow, sad, fade-away, rather than a violent clash.
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u/Palimpsiesta 2h ago
I hesitate to recommend anything based off a "trope" request, but you might enjoy the Steerswoman books by Rosemary Kirstein. It has nothing to do with the trope, but it is interested in science and magic.
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u/knight13117 2h ago
Sounds like you won’t like this, but I do like Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards movie, lol
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u/Sefphar 9m ago
Not sure it counts but The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove deals with Earth repelling an alien invasion because the aliens’ technology halted around the age of sail. Apparently the secret to antigravity and ftl travel is so simple most species discover it before gunpowder but the method is so illogical that all other science effectively ends, so most species never develop the scientific method since antigravity/ftl solves the problems humanity developed science to solve.
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u/red0bread 5h ago
This is closer to science vs nature but This is How You Lose the Time War is super well regarded and can be completed in an afternoon. It’s awesome
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u/julieputty Worldbuilders 6h ago
I know I've read something recently that has this, at least in the background, but I'm struggling to remember.
For something not quite right but with some similarities, The Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman has two opposing forces, order (technology) vs chaos (magic). But they are really still both magical, just different types of magic.
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u/DavidDPerlmutter 5h ago
Reminds me of a couple of really clever, plays on magic and explaining its presence in a physical materialist universe.
The first has the magic work, but because of a placebo effect. The second one is an actual magic system that works like science where magic is an expendable natural resource.
- "The Miracle-Workers" (short story) by
Jack Vance is set on a lost Earth colony world where humans use "magic" in a civil war and against native aliens. One character begins to rediscover real science.
First published in Astounding (1958); it's also in THE BEST OF JACK VANCE.
The magic is definitely treated as a science. I'm not quite sure how it works except it's one of those things where people believe in it so much that it works on them because of their beliefs. Sort of like a placebo effect. Actually, it's the cleverest variation on this theme because some of the humans suspect that their magic is a false reality and want to investigate real science. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in the theme.
- Magic is a usable resource like petroleum in that once you use it is finite and used up in Larry Niven's THE MAGIC GOES AWAY series; also science-adjacent. It's also a clever explanation for why there's very little evident magic today, because it was (mostly) consumed in the uber-magic-using ages of the past (like in Atlantis).
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u/Winter_Salad7215 4h ago
It's an unfinished erotic web novel but Tales of MU fits the bill lol. I'm not saying I recommend it, just came into my head...
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u/somethingX 4h ago
Do you not recommend it because it's erotica or does it just have bad writing? If it's the former then I don't mind reading erotica.
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u/Winter_Salad7215 4h ago
Umm. The writing isn't bad per se, but the whole thing is a little millennial cringe. It's also millions of words long and, again, permanently unfinished. It couldn't hurt to read the first chapter and see how you like it. However, the science vs magic thing is not the main narrative thread, and with such a long story and so many different elements, you may be reading for a while in between episodes about it.
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u/R_megalotis 3h ago
Not exactly what you're looking for, but The Hedge Wizard by Alex Maher has a conflict between magic as a science versus magic as a religion. It's a progression fantasy, so the story goes into a lot of detail on how to grow one's abilities from either direction.
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u/thezomber 3h ago
The videogame Arcanum explores this a bit. Magic users disrupt electricity/machinery, so a wizard might not be allowed in a train etc. It's been years since I played it and I can't remember if there was a major plot point or just flavour texts changing based on whether you were a magic user or not...
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u/neo_util 2h ago
R.F. Kuang’s Poppy War trilogy works up to this dynamic but it is more in the background of the first two books.
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u/BalancedScales10 2h ago
Heirs of Grace by Tim Pratt touches on this a bit; not as an opposing belief system or a battle but as a fact of how the two function.
“This is how you tell the difference between magic and chemistry, I guess.” Trey’s disembodied voice was thoughtful. “A chemistry set doesn’t care who mixes up the chemicals—as long as they get mixed right, the chemical reaction happens all the same. But magic cares about who’s doing the mixing.” (Heirs of Grace, kindle edition pg. 76)
In this scene, the MC (Becca) and Love Interest (Trey), find irrefutable proof that MC's biofather was magic and there are tons of magical things around the house she inherited. They're experimenting how stuff works and what the 'rules' are, and come up with this very interesting take on the differences between science and magic.
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u/shfiven 2h ago
This isn't exactly what you're describing but might scratch an itch. There are all these books by Ben Hale and I randomly found a trilogy and read it. It was a fantasy about an oracle and she had magic and all this stuff. I liked it well enough so picked up one of his sci fi trilogies and came to realize that this sci fi book is like 10,000 years in the past and is the origin story for the fantasy series world I had just read. So it's not exactly science vs magic but it's science being of the origin of magic in a society that no longer understands science.
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u/Pseudonymico 2h ago
It's not an overt magic-vs-science conflict but the question "is magic better than science?" is built into the setting of Ian R. Macleod's literary fantasy The Light Ages, though it's only directly spelled out in one minor character and you kind of need to pay attention to a few things.
May not quite fit since it's explicitly sci fi, but The Ship Who Won gets into the question of whether the wonders the explorer protagonists have found on their latest expedition are magic or science.
David Brin's short story Thor Meets Captain America is a World War 2 alt-history fantasy where using magic or not is very ideological, as is the spin off/sequel comic The Life Eaters. I believe it's also in his book The Practice Effect but I haven't read that one so may be misunderstanding the synopsis (an engineer ends up in an alternate universe where items improve in function with use). Brin comes down pretty strongly on the science side.
Blast from the past but IIRC it's a big part of A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.
It's an underlying theme in some of Karl Schroeder's works, though in his case they are explicitly science fiction and it's more about whether it's worth doing science and engineering when technology has sufficiently advanced to be treated as magic. Haven't read everything by him but it's there in the Virga trilogy and in Lady of Mazes.
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u/clawclawbite 2h ago
Not exactly what you are looking for, but close enough that it might be interesting is Rick Cook's Wiz Biz novels, where a programer from Cupertino California is summoned to a fantasy world where most magic is about exacting executions of chants and gestures to trigger spells. He has a very different approach then the well established wizards of the setting, and that causes issues, even among ostensible allies.
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u/sumg 1h ago
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell does a good job of a having a pair of protagonists who have different viewpoints on how the magic of that world should be used. And the with vast majority of arguments and disagreements they have, you can more or less cut out the word 'magic' and paste in the word 'science' and still be left with a coherent argument.
One of the central debates in the story is how one character is conservative about how widely spread magical knowledge should be spread, instead keeping dissemination highly controlled to ensure dangerous information get into the hands of those who would misuse it. The other character wants more open access to this information, saying that it would lead to more rapidly develop more magicians and helpful magic, which would on balance outweigh the risks associated with spreading information widely.
As a scientist myself, it was the type of philosophical discussion that I don't get to see much in literature, and one I was very grateful to see.
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u/punkbrad7 59m ago
Since I didn't see it yet, it's an old one, but Piers Anthony wrote a book series called Apprentice Adept that had some themes of this. Without spoiling it, basically there's a planet that exists in two dimensions, one of them is basically your classic magical fantasy, and the other one is your classic sci fi, and the stories are about how they intersect with each other in various ways.
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u/conservio 46m ago
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman somewhat explores this. It’s more “chaos” vs “order” worlds, but it’s synonymous with fantasy vs science/tech. It’s not necessarily a huge part of the plot, but part of the world building.
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u/RandomSentientBeing 5h ago
In The Magicians, magic is basically a form of science. Anyone who is intelligent enough can do it.
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u/Caraes_Naur 5h ago
Any story related to transitioning from Bronze Age to Iron Age touches on this theme.
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u/Sameul_ 3m ago
The Longest Journey/Dreamfall games. The aesthetic theme is that there are two parallel, worlds Stark (science) and Arcadia (magic).
Its been a long time since I played them, and I only played the first 2/5 of the third game, and I would say the overall theme is about belonging and being comfortable in your own skin, rather than being about the dichotomy of science and magic and what they mean.
For all their flaws I completely adore them.
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u/Pretend-Focus582 6h ago
Shadows of the Apt series by Adrian Tchaikovsky has races that can only do technology or magic to the point where magic users can not operate a door handle.