[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum at at MuseHack]
We’ve all heard the saying that goes “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” made by the incomparable Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
I would ad a corollary, especially in the worlds of world building (and perhaps in an age of mind hacking and psychological techniques, our own). “Any sufficiently organized magic is indistinguishable from technology.”
Because when you world build, you’re getting things organized in your head to explain how they work. In the case of Magic and Technology, they’re really the same thing most of the time. Not entirely, but mostly.
Now you may wish to argue with this, but for the sake of building a setting, magic and technology are no different. I would state that magic and technology are the ways characters manipulate themselves and the elements of their settings to achieve results fitting a specific goal – and thus really no different.
Vaccum tubes and potions, ethereal forces and electrical energy, it’s all about Making Stuff Happen. So for the rest of this essay, I’ll just call it MaT since I can’t figure any other word to encompass the two of them, and I won’t call it MT as it invites innumerable jokes.
As a world builder, you just have to figure out what it all means. That’s when it gets complicated.