Hacker News Reader

Comment by kombookcha | Hacker News Reader

A very fun example of this theme is in the franco-belgian fantasy comic series Thorgal, which is set in a Conan-esque fantasy world with all the expected trappings, but in which the gods are highly advanced alien entities and magic is often framed as manipulating extremely complex and powerful heirloom technologies that the living have no frame of reference for as anything other than magic.

The titular outsider hero falls from the stars in a little space pod as a baby and is raised by the local Viking-proxy culture ala Superman or Goku. Quite an engaging read if you're into this blend of sword and sorcery with background sci-fi elements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorgal

View on HN

That is similar to the concept of Numenara - which is set in the future 4 billion years from now. At that point in time, the earth no longer geographically resembles anything current and has been repopulated a couple of times by disparate races of non-human sentiences. The current population (as of the the beginning of Numenara) are yet another group of humans transplanted or created in-situ and living in a world where the technologies of the past resemble magic. It seemed pretty clear that, from the background, there clearly is not a thing that is magic, but its stand-in is unknown and sometimes, unknowable, creations from a lost past.

I read "The Archers" as a kid, and really liked it, but it was the only one I had access to. I recall it was a pretty straightforward adventure, set somewhere around northern Europe in the 10th century, without any sci-fi elements... Now I'll need to revisit it and find the others. I've got a young son who would also be interested, so perhaps that's something we can do together. Thanks, man.

I can't immediately recall any sci-fi elements from The Archers myself, so that checks out. Anything to do with the lost precursor civilization tends more towards the archaic future-tech. Like in City Of The Lost God there's a magical weapon that's basically an operational laser gun. Or The Island of the Frozen Seas, which has a palace that looks like a downed spaceship complete with sarcophagi/crypods with people in them.

And you're welcome! I hope you and your son have fun! :)

Honestly, "magic is ambient nanotech that's poorly understood and difficult to invoke" is a rather tired trope, because it's an instantly obvious approach one can take. Doesn't stop people from re-using it over and over, take e.g. "The Lord of the Ice Garden" by Grzędowicz: this twist is so obvious that all the build-up feels kinda insulting to the reader's intelligence.

Right, but I don't think that it necessarily needs to be a twist.

The first two Pillars of Eternity games leaned hard into this trope, but it was never really "revealed" as a plot point -- it was just background that you uncovered as you progressed stepwise through the game. The Gods as literal hiveminds, chained to or unbound from their original core functions to varying degrees; a fallen hyper-technological society; stuff like that...

I've never liked it as a narrative element because it's such a handwave. If you're going to have "magic is nanotech", or whatever other backing, at least actually use that backing to put narrative rules on it that the reader can understand.

I sorta wish the Horizon video games’ presentation indulged the present perspective more rather than eyewink at every turn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com