Like Star Wars?
Dune as well.
Warhammer 40k
Yeah, there are a lot of examples out there.
Star ocean, some final Fantasy, psychics in starship troopers
Sort of dr who? At least the time lords regenerating
Tbf, in Dune all the “magic-y” bits get “scientific” explanations. I suppose you could argue the same with Star Wars and midichlorians.
Most magic books have a magic system that seems to be backed up by sciencey like explanations for their universe.
I can only think of a few that don’t, like Harry Potter.
DS9?
Wizards and spaceships? It’ll never work.
Spelljammer was a late 80s cocaine-fueled fever dream.
Star Wars doesn’t really do ‘super advanced technology’. Like they’ve got space ships and hyperdrive and laser swords and shit, but they don’t treat it like high-tech stuff, they treat it like we treat cars and swords.
Any universe where they have super advanced tech they’ll treat it like we treat cars, because cars are also super advanced tech, it’s just a tech you see daily and are familiar. How do you expect characters in a super technologically advanced world to react? They see that every day, it’s not news to them.
We don’t treat iphones and AI like we treat cars. Star Wars has literal instantaneous communication anywhere in the galaxy and literal thinking, feeling machines, and they’re like ‘lawl my 9 year old built a stupid robot that speaks 4,000 languages with some plans he downloaded from them thar interwebs!’ Technology, like everything else, is a spectrum - except in Star Wars. There’s no sense that anyone in the SW universe is going ‘Meh we’ve had starships for 10,000 years, but these new laser swords, man those are some hot shit!’ or whatever. There aren’t tech enthusiasts in Star Wars; you get a little bit of the gear-head enthusiasm for ships, but no one is raving about the new must-have gadget or that cool new meta-material they read about. They treat technology in Star Wars like we treat trees: just a brute fact of life with the occasional redeeming quality. Technology is change, and even if it wouldn’t change significantly over the course of the various shows and movies, there’s no evidence that it has ever changed.
I think the point is that the tech doesn’t materially change most starwars characters interactions from present day. It’s not really scifi because the science / tech doesn’t shape how the characters interact dramatically.
If you give the characters some real scifi-tech like put them inside computers, or have backup throwaway clone bodies, or jack them in to a hive mind, or give them time travel or alternate universes then the whole dramatic context of the character interactions has to change and the story has to be shaped by the technology to some degree. It’d likely be a bit more alien as our innate sense of constraints and jeopardy doesn’t apply.
Only really the deathstar is anything different tech wise - it is only used once, and becomes more like a part of the maguffin.
The other fantastic dramatic features that starwars does use that are alien to us - precognition, mind control, reincarnation(sortof) - are magic rather than tech.
I never said Star Wars was sci-fi, it’s not. But it does have super advanced tech which is the issue being discussed.
How do you treat cars and swords.
People in 2025 don’t really do ‘super advanced technology’. Like they’ve got super powerful handheld computers on them at all times and all of human knowledge accessible at all times and planes and shit, but they don’t treat it like high-tech stuff, they treat it like we treat carriages and books.
The whole design aesthetic of the Star Wars universe is a state of technological stagnation. They all have advanced technology, but it could be more advanced, however, for whatever reason, they haven’t bothered to make any but minor advancements in a very long time.
The whole “used future” aesthetic is a big part of what gives Star Wars its vibe.
Super advanced technology is magic. Hell, regular advanced technology is magic. Just run with it.
Starship mage also did it well.
Yes and it sounds cool as hell
Anime does this all the time; Especially the ISEKAI-Genre
Yes.
Shadowrun kind of does the same. It’s not really super-advanced, since it’s cyberpunk, but it’s cyberpunk with magic. And it’s my favorite setting, it’s such a cool idea.
Yes. Many wireless already exist.
Comic books do this all the time.
And Wandavision is about as nail on head as you are going to get
Magic is Supermans only real weakness aside from kryptonite
Warhamer 40k
Starcraft
League of Legends
Final fantasy
The Palladium Rifts RPG
Dune
Starwars
In dungeons and dragons there is a type of hybrid character you can play called an Artificer who treats magic more like technology, and there are a ton of examples in popular media that others have mentioned. I do think you have to determine how and if you’ll keep them distinct if that’s important to your plot, but if they developed alongside eachother maybe the technology of that world relies on magic to work.
Or maybe your magic relies on elder gods that don’t like the mortal hubris of critiquing the gods works so attempts to unravel magic gets you cursed or worse.
I think they can go together and the way you fit them can even become a plot point!
As in entertainment - yes. But when it comes to realistic representation and imagination as sci-fi then no.
it’s really difficult as all magic that we understand becomes science. To create this artificial gap the world has to answer - why can’t science understand, reverse engineer and bend magic?
Most scientific progression is very rapid. If fireballs exist then there will be a giant 1,000 rpm fireball machine by the end of the week and that’s no longer magic as we see it.
So there has to be a strong artificial limitation why magic exists and cannot be understood and harvested which is really hard to write in scifi. You have to introduce religion, spiritual mysticism or some sort of societal control mechanism that prevents reverse engineering magic which is really hard to do in a way that satisfies the readers cognitive dissonance.
Personally I have found stories like that like Warhammer 40k, Star Wars etc. But without a big, establishrd name it’s so hard to convince the reader. I recently finished the wheel of time and really couldn’t get over this which ruined the entire premise for me.
Star Wars did for a while.
DCEU/MCU does this alot. Klarion the chaos lord use chaos magic(different from wanda’s magic) to control starro nanotech, they call it techno-sorcery/magic-tech. but this will never occurs in sci-fi though, since magic isnt really a thing(maginery) when technology and science is used to explain the nature of the universe is involved. dark eleves and ASGARDIANS use magic and tech together. magic is basically making things impossible to a possibility(probability manipulation through energy) with limitations depending on the type of cinema/comic/media universe that it is in. or castlevania(the magical castle that use technology powered by magic)
Shadowrun… yeah it works
Edit: I just noticed somebody else mentioned shadowrun aswell, well: I second that.
Arcane
