Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
I think that works quite well. If a modern human saw another modern human muttering a few words and waving a stick and something appeared out of nowhere as a result, we'd probably be inclined to check the stick for evidence of a power-source etc ... but if we found the stick to be simply wood then we'd be scratching our heads. Now certainly scientists would continue to look for explanations, they're like that, but I suspect most of the rest of the population would be content to call it magic - at least until it was reduced to something as common place as the mobile phone. (Is magic only magic if it is limited to just a few people? Is anything ubiquitous, however amazing, always given some less fanciful name, like eyesight, smell and hearing. Could it be that Harry Potter's magic is only called magic because there are muggles and squibs?)
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That's a very interesting idea - I like it! An example that came to mind is the group of people called the Technomages in Babylon 5. They were up-front "non-magic" but behaved like mages. I rather wish they had delved deeper into the Technomage mythos in that show
.
On topic though, I would agree with that definition of magic. Exclusivity to a select group of people is a necessary (but insufficient) condition. Heck, why look to SF/Fantasy for that? Most stage magicians today are the same. We call it stage magic (as opposed to ... ah ...
real magic *snicker*)
only because we assume that
someone knows how the trick is really done. I've always thought it a bit strange that that assumption comes so easily to ... well ... to most people
.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Now wind forward some thousands of years and go the planet Solaria (see Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun) and we see humans with "transducer lobes" in their head that collects energy from their surroundings - so giving them the power they need to do what otherwise might appear to be magic. They don't call it magic, they have an explanation for their ability.
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*Sigh* thank you for that blast from the past
. Been a while since I read those books. Minor correction though - we did see the planet Solaria for the first time in
The Naked Sun, but they didn't develop transducer lobes until much much later (probably sometime long after the establishment of the First Empire). We get reintroduced to the (transducer-lobed) Solarians only at the very end of Asimov's career - in
Foundation and Earth . (I nitpick, therefore I'm an SF geek
).