It takes place in a modern day world where "magic" was discovered decades ago and is now a formal science with graduate programs right up there with engineering and physics. It has rules, and in fact one character just created a magical quine (which was apparently thought to be impossible).
If every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I wonder what the turning point was when people stopped thinking of electricity as magic and instead thought of it as science.
When you get into talk about electrons, how they flow, how they transfer between atoms, and how we end up harnessing them, it is very easy for the D&D nerd in me to mentally replace "electrons" with "mana".
Absolutely fascinating world we live in.