Magical Technology

Any sufficient advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Any sufficient advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. This is a very useful axiom if you wish your high fantasy to evade the downsides of history¹.

In the simplest sense, this is obviously true, because magic is technology. (At least the part of magic called magia in Latin; goetia and theurgia are another matter.) Magia is things that work by unknown means. Technology is magia dredged up out of the concealing waters and sorted into things that really work, and those that don't. Drinking willow-bark tea is magic, swallowing aspirin is technology, and the difference is knowledge. Wearing garnets to strengthen your blood is magic -- or superstition -- and again the difference is knowledge.

So -- what does this matter when world-building for high fantasy?

Especially when you want to keep out history's nastier aspects by putting in magic to avert the poverty, famine, disease, and death?

Obviously, if it's not to be science fiction or historical or simply mundane contemporary, what has to happen is that the advance has to dredge up different things, different rules, different ways of things working.

There's always the delightful alternate history where magic did exactly what technology did, with some cosmetic trim. Robert Heinlein did it masterfully in Magic, Inc., and Poul Anderson, in Operation Chaos. However, it does limit the story, and the world, and it also generally carries at least a whiff of the comic with it.

For more options, there is the wide-open aspect of developing your magic so that the world has a technology different than ours. As long as the world is consistent, or the rhetoric is convincing, it allows all sorts of drama. It allows some things to far ahead of our world while others lag far behind. It allows a lot of things without troubling your head about path dependency. (One reason that the Industrial Revolution started in England was that they had heavily converted from firewood to coal-burning. Another was that the desire to make cannons uniform, to allow cannonballs to be reliably fired, led to precise boring, allowing the pistons to be precise enough.)

Magical development probably has path dependence, but just as people are seldom aware of it in technology, so too would they be unaware of it here. Just be wary of blatant discrepancies. If merchants in your city have walking automata to deliver purchases, a wealthy person with crippled legs will not use a wheelchair rather than a walking chair.

Your choices on what to have (and not have) revolve about two issues: background and plot devices. What issues from before the Industrial Revolution do you want to elide? Disease, famine, crippling injuries? Agricultural magic is a big one, though medical magic would probably be more front and center, and also the magic to ensure pure water. Fortunately, if you want considerable magic, putting some obvious effects in will lead readers to assume others.

Indeed, your biggest efforts may have to go into preventing it from looking exactly like modern times. Your readers will tend to assume that regardless of what you do. It does help, some, for there to be historical analogues. If your world has no messages delivered faster than your fastest travel -- barring such simple messages that can be borne by beacons and church bells, and even for them you need relays for distance -- that was life up to the telegraph. (With a brief and limited interlude of the optical telegraph, which had serious flaws.) You may have to emphasize that the man on the spot has a lot of authority because an appeal to the king would take months, possibly years. You may also have to emphasize that messages are indeed that slow, for the readers who don't know that. More obscure details, like the difficulties of pursuing criminals who can move as quickly as the news can, may need to be spelled out one way or another.

On the other hand, if you want the king's spymaster to be able to gain information about what the heroes are doing in a village a hundred leagues away in a matter of minutes, and to send back orders about the heroes in the same time span, you have to give hints. Very likely that there are stories about it. Indeed, historically, there are legends of crafty spymasters having such means, using magnetized needles in synchronization, so your characters may be blindsided despite the stories, since they logically dismiss them.

This is especially important if it is a plot device. If your characters seize the needles and send a false message, this works only if the needles have been introduced. If you merely want to finesse famine, weather reports and perhaps a troupe of wizards sent out to do the annual field spells will suggest all the infrastructure for food; you do not have to discuss weather-control magic. If you want to deal with the Evil Overlord's army by hailstoning them all to death, you need to introduce the weather-control magic. Perhaps someone tells a wizard he should have gone to a different school, because the city it is in has never had a thunderstorm in a century, where other schools can only brag of no cyclones, and such clues.

Healing magic is particularly important in any tale with any degree of adventure, and could range all over. Healing potions do all the healing, of anything at all, and can be bought over the counter. Great wizards made magical healing devices that can cure, say, blindness, and then dedicated them in a church so that a pilgrimage is needed to get to that one device that can heal you. Perhaps they would indeed need large buildings filled with magical amulets and talismans to diagnose and treat the illnesses and injuries, and perhaps you would even call these buildings -- hospitals.

Terminology is tricky. "Hospital" reflects a very old tradition. Though the term took some time to disassociate itself from "hotel" and "hospitality" the medieval times had hospitals. Still, always choose your terms with care. Referring to the magical institution by the technological institution's name carries baggage with it, and terms for concepts, such as electricity, are worse. On the other hand, it takes real artistry to rename them plausibly and without annoying the reader. Hunting about for synonyms, even relatively obscure ones, helps. Sometimes archaic terms will carry the effect. Other times, you may have to dig back into the origin of the term. Path dependency, if you develop it, can help. If your world knew that lightning was electricity from the beginning, perhaps they still call it lightning, or a term derived from it.

Delicate use of strange terminology can help make the magic itself strange to the reader. One must notice that while magical devices are not so fatal to the sense of wonder as the character's casting spells, they are dangerous. Once the characters use them mechanically, they will feel no sense of wonder. It takes a real trick to use them to induce a sense of wonder in the reader under that case. If you want them to do double duty, in the wonder and the world, it is best to keep their on-stage appearances rare, often in the hands of others, and the results marvelous. Then you will not only evade issues with world-building, you will add interests to the story in the process.

1. See here: