Magical Technology in Contemporary Fantasy
Keywords:
magic, technology, interfaceAbstract
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.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2016 Fafnir

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Content in Fafnir is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0).
Beginning in November 2019, authors retain full copyright without restrictions. By publishing with Fafnir, authors grant a non-exclusive license to Fafnir to distribute the publisher’s version of the work, and give Fafnir permission to grant reprint and/or translation requests in accordance with our open-access policy and our Creative Commons license.
Prior to November 2019, copyright for all published material is held by Fafnir, but authors have full permission to use their work as they wish (i.e., self-archiving, reprint requests, using for other projects, etc.).
In both cases, re-use or re-posting of material published in Fafnir must acknowledge original publication and include a link to the publisher version.