Absolutely yes. One of my favorite anime is GATE. It has a portal open from a alternate world at Roman level technology with legions and classical architecture, but it has dragons, elves, and magic and they send an army through to invade modern day Japan. The counter-attack is insane. Do a google search for “massacre of alnus hill”
I think the MCU has done a good job with it, but I’d like to see a non-superhero version of it.
There’s a Netflix movie called Bright, which is futuristic fantasy.
Star Wars
In the ‘advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ there is John Carter, Dune and a ton of other movies where the tech seems like magic.
It did in Final Fantasy VI with its Magitek
Most Final Fantasy games mix sci-fi and magic. Only the specifics of the lore around how it works changes with each FF universe.
Why wouldn’t it work? Stories usually fail because the plot is bad or because they’re badly told, and it’s not that hard to maintain verisimilitude just because seemingly opposite ideas like magic and advanced technology are combined - just communicate what your magic and technology can and cannot do in broad strokes and stick to it, and avoid asspulls that make no sense and/or undermine the character beats you’re showing. But you get exactly the same issues in a story with only magic or only advanced technology.
Yes.
Super advanced technology is magic. Hell, regular advanced technology is magic. Just run with it.
Starship mage also did it well.
Like most things by Philip K. Dick, the man who has more movies based on his writing than any other author?
A sequel to Arcanum that moves the timeline forward into the information age?
God I wish we had gotten more than one Arcanum game…
With out Tim it would never be the same even if the rights were not in limbo
The second Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson gets close. It’s a setting where magic meets wild west tech, including guns, cars, and electricity.
I’ve heard that his next trilogy in the setting will have more of an 1980s tech level.
A couple of Sanderson’s short stories touch on space ships, computers, and magic.
EDIT: I didn’t answer the question. Yes, I think it can work. I’m also a huge fan of Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage books. This mixes musket level tech and industrialization with magic.
The Sunlit Man is even more tech combined with magic. Read that one yet?
What other books do you like in that genre? I loved Mistborn/Cosmere realm and Powder Mage series.
The Sunlit Man was so good. I love books that have fast pacing right from the start, and trying to figure out how the world worked was so much fun.
Definitely, although I think it’s most interesting if the advanced technology is based on the magic.
Like, let’s say there is a world where there are magic plants that can heal you, people who can magically scry nearby locations if they meditate deeply, and stones that levitate in the moonlight.
And there’s an evil empire that exploits the fuck out of this by industrially farming the plants to create a highly concentrated serum, removing people’s brains and hooking them up to computers for magical sensing abilities, and attaching fragments of moon rocks to the levitating stones to create antigravity. Creating invulnerable flying supersoldiers with impossibly good radar powered by brain backpacks.
The black ocean series does a good job if blending the two together. But it sort of sets them in opposition to each other. Interstellar travel is made possible on futuristic spaceships by using magic to plunge the ship partially into another dimension, shortening the relative distance between stars. But unless the it is specially shielded against it, magic ruins and destroys technology.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
-Arthur C Clarke
Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
