Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about technology in fantasy:

What role do you think technology should play in fantasy? Some authors try to avoid it (ex. worlds set in an imagined past before modernization or worlds where wizards simply do not use telephones or television even though they have been invented). Yet other authors try to imagine what a world with both technology and magic would look like (ex. The Legend of Korra, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series). Can magic and technology work well together? What questions does an author have to address to make it work?

In the end, it very much depends on the world and whether things feel like they fit. There are definitely worlds where the two can sit side by side, or where magic and technology are in conflict or synergy in an interesting way — saying that makes me think of Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels books, for instance, which features the world flipping between magic and technology regularly. It can be a very fertile way to add depth to the world, introduce obstacles to the plot, and give neat ways to mix the two up together.

Sometimes the two can just co-exist because it’s a fantasy world of the author’s own creation rather than historical fantasy or something. The problem is that it can be tricky to get that to “feel right” to the reader: it’s a regular complaint in Final Fantasy XIV, to talk about a gaming example for a moment. Even though Allagan and magitek technology has always sat alongside magic in that world, sometimes the whiplash is really strong to players, even though I don’t think it’s actually badly done. The expectation that a fantasy world won’t have certain types of technology is strong, and aside from pure plausibility about how elements fit together, authors have to think about whether reader expectations will trip them up.

As with other stuff people feel strongly about like anachronisms, I’m pretty loosey-goosey myself. Put together something that feels coherent, and I’m fine with it!