thepoisoneater_144dpiShanna Germain claims the titles of writer, editor, leximaven, girl geek, she-devil, vorpal blonde and Schrodinger’s brat. Her short stories, essays, poems, novellas and more have appeared in hundreds of books and publications, including Women Destroy Fantasy, Best American Erotica, Best Bondage Erotica, Best Erotic Romance, Best Gay Romance, Triangulation, Salon, and Storyglossia. Her new novel The Poison Eater is out now from Angry Robot and is set in a world where technology is viewed rather differently…

There’s an oft-quoted line from Arthur C. Clarke that goes, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The first time I heard that line, it kind of blew my mind. I was suddenly walking around with a new understanding (brought about by my utter lack of understanding) of cards, phones, computers, and even my coffee maker. How did those things actually work? I knew that it wasn’t “magic” but it might as well have been. You pushed button or turned a key and a thing happened. You didn’t even have to say “abracadabra” or “caffeine, please.”

That’s one of the biggest differences between science and magic (most magic, at least): you have to believe in magic in order for it to work. You have to do something, say something, think something. You have to be invested in it.

Science, on the other hand, doesn’t give one molecule of care whether you think about it at all. As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

The idea of science as magic is a big one in my latest novel, The Poison Eater. The book is set in the world of Numenera, a tabletop roleplaying game that takes place a billion years in the future. There, the technology is so ancient, so weird, so alien that the people who live among it, study it, and use it all believe it’s magic. Castles that grow additional rooms, a mental blast that harms (or heals) foes, a mechanical creature made sentient (and even sapient) – these all certainly seem, from our vantage point, to be magical. It makes sense that we might believe we need to perform a ritual, gather special objects, or say certain words to make them work. And in some ways you might have to do some of those things. Because all of those effects come from super-advanced technologies. So your ritual would probably include touching the item and in the process, pushing the button or flipping the level that makes it work. Or maybe your magic invocation is just what the voice activation needs in order to bring the mechanical creature to “life.”

shannagermain_websiteSometimes, in our modern world, where we have such a solid understanding of technology and science, it can be hard to wrap our brains around the idea that something we know as absolutely non-magical, like a cell phone, could be considered so by others. And yet, who hasn’t invoked the gods of technology to save their deleted files or whispered the magical spell of “Please don’t crash” at their computer? I’m not ashamed to admit that I have tried more than to bargain with the internet gods when my wi-fi has borked. And after someone (ahem… me) spilled mocha on my laptop, I was not above a little prayer, as I kneeled before my computer with a blowdryer and a bucket of rice.

Do my actions change anything? Probably not. Do I know that those objects are not magical? Yes. But it momentarily makes me feel like I have some kind of power over the thing that I don’t really understand.

When building other worlds, it’s really easy to assume that weird is only what’s weird for us. But in fact, it’s often the opposite.

Ask someone alive today: “What’s weirder, a box that lets you talk to people on the other side of the world or a machine that lets you instantly travel to the other side of the world?” Most people would say the latter. But that’s not because one is more magical than the other. It’s because we already have boxes that let us talk to people on the other side of the world—cell phones and computers carry our words and faces to almost anyone, anywhere, at anytime. In fact, if you add in radio and TV, we’ve had those things for so long that they seem utterly mundane. Not magical at all.

Now imagine a parallel universe where technology had gone a different way. Where someone had invented a teleportation device instead of the Internet. In a world like that, cell phones would seem redundant. Why talk to someone on a box when you can just jump over and visit in person? Of course, that would mean a whole new channel of technology—devices for keeping overzealous teleporters from showing up at your house unannounced, teleportation security, a datasphere to keep track of who’s coming and going when to keep down crashes.

In The Poison Eater, there are sciences and technologies that allow you to track another creature across the world, see enemies coming from the future, teleport between time and space, and record of the past. And so many more. Of those, the recording device probably seems the most commonplace to us, but it’s one of the hardest for Talia to wrap her mind around.

Talia couldn’t stand to watch anymore. She pushed herself from the device. Her eyes felt scratchy and swollen. “Where are they, Ganeth? They’re going to die. We have to help them.”

“They’re fine,” Ganeth said. He had turned his attention to a large metal container and was poking at something inside it with a buzzing synthsteel rod. “I already watched to the end.”

She wanted to take the rod out of his hand and force him to give her his full attention, to answer all of her questions. Right. Now.

Instead, Talia said, “Explain.” Then, remembering some of his past explanations, she added, “Explain it for me.”

“It’s not real,” he said. “Or, rather, it is real. But it already happened”

“How? When?”

“It’s a recording, from the past.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. Everything was blurred. Here was one place she thought she’d get answers and now she had too many answers and not enough questions. “How?”

“Well, there are these tiny particles in the air, everywhere around us, that we can’t really see, called nano–”

“No,” she said. His words weren’t helping. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

Using science as magic helps create an interesting world, but it does more than that. It serves as a reminder to the reader that they’re not in their known world anymore. “Oh, people think it’s weird to have a device that records the past. That’s really different from my experience.” It reminds them to step outside of their worldview in this new place, to be open about what they might find there.

It also reminds us that every day we touch things, buy things, and use things that we don’t understand. Someone tells us it’s science, not magic. But unless we understand the science ourselves, how are we to know? And that unknowing, in itself, can be magical.

Numenera: The Poison Eater is out now from Angry Robot