Magical Technology in Contemporary Fantasy

Authors

  • Saradindu Bhattacharya Central University of Tamil Nadu

Keywords:

magic, technology, interface

Abstract

In this essay I propose to illustrate how contemporary popular writers of fantasy employ magic as technology in their works to interrogate what it is to be “human”. I proceed from the assumption that magic is technology in its etymological sense of techne, meaning craft, and can involve technology as we commonly know it, but also something more. I use three very popular fantasy series, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus trilogy and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series to demonstrate how magic works in these books as an interface between the “powerful” and the “marginalized”, the “natural” and the “cultural”, the “normal” and the “radical” – binaries that fracture these “fantastic” worlds as much as they do the “real” in terms of what we consider as constituting a “humane” social order. In each of these series, magic is not only a subject of knowledge that characters actively seek in their quest for power but also a frontier across which older notions of the “human” engage with newer ideas and manifestations of the same. In these texts, it is magic that differentiates characters from one another in terms of how integral it is to their being and of how they come to terms with the anxieties and tensions such differences generate. Thus, I argue that magic as craft or technology works as an interface through which notions of difference and change are negotiated in contemporary popular fantasy.

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Published

2016-07-07

Issue

Section

Essays