Fantasy with Friends: Fantasy and Tech

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about technology in fantasy: What role do you think technology should play in fantasy? Some authors try to avoid it (ex. worlds set in an imagined past before modernization or worlds where wizards simply do not use telephones or television even though they have been invented). Yet other authors try to imagine what a world with both technology and magic would look like (ex. The Legend of Korra, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series). Can magic and technology work well together? What questions does an author have to address to make it work? In the end, it very much depends on the world and whether things feel like they fit. There are definitely worlds where the two can sit side by side, or where magic and technology are in conflict or synergy in an interesting way — saying that makes me think of Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels books, for instance, which features…