This is such a huge topic that I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around it without delving into specifics .... It's kind of like saying "how would technology impact society". Clearly it DOES, but you have to choose what technology you're talking about just to have a basis for the conversation, and that's how it feels to me here -- I mean, the options for magic are SO vast. It's an utterly different thing to have small numbers of very powerful sorcerers controlled via a guild-type system, vs. magic being a subtle thing that's all around you in the world (as in, say, CJ Cherryh's "Rusalka" books), vs. a population of hereditary magic-users that live side-by-side with non-magic users (as in A:tLA), vs. a world like Piers Anthony's Xanth in which everyone has magic and there's a sort of sliding social hierarchy based on how powerful you are.
I'm having trouble thinking of examples of fantasy books in which magic had no impact at all on society, because if you're writing a book with magic in it, you've got to think about the way that it is controlled and maintained and passed along and used by people in power, if only to a shallow degree. But on the other hand, I'm having equal trouble coming up with examples where the interaction of society vs. magic is the main point of the book; mostly it's somewhere in the middle, where it's addressed somewhat, but not to a particularly large degree. Which makes me wish that an author would really take it on; it's awfully hard to come up with new varieties of magic that haven't been written before, but much easier to come up with new angles to approach them from -- such as this!
In a classic fantasy-style setting, where magic is controlled and passed down by a relatively small hierarchy of wizards (and generally not available to ordinary people or controlled by the ruling class), I think your comparison with the medieval Church is about as perfect an analogy as you can get. The dynamic between the feudal lords and the wizards is very similar to that of feudal lords vs. the Church, I think, especially since authors often use various handwaves for why wizards don't deus ex machina the characters out of their problems (because the wizards have their own problems, because they have a code that forbids interference except in certain cases, etc) that end up stripping wizards of most of their literal magical power within the context of the story while still having the potential power available. Which sounds almost exactly like the Church (i.e. you don't need miraculous demonstrations of the local clergy's power every day to believe that the clergy has that power and behave accordingly).
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branchandroot
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Date: 2012-08-23 06:36 pm (UTC)I'm having trouble thinking of examples of fantasy books in which magic had no impact at all on society, because if you're writing a book with magic in it, you've got to think about the way that it is controlled and maintained and passed along and used by people in power, if only to a shallow degree. But on the other hand, I'm having equal trouble coming up with examples where the interaction of society vs. magic is the main point of the book; mostly it's somewhere in the middle, where it's addressed somewhat, but not to a particularly large degree. Which makes me wish that an author would really take it on; it's awfully hard to come up with new varieties of magic that haven't been written before, but much easier to come up with new angles to approach them from -- such as this!
In a classic fantasy-style setting, where magic is controlled and passed down by a relatively small hierarchy of wizards (and generally not available to ordinary people or controlled by the ruling class), I think your comparison with the medieval Church is about as perfect an analogy as you can get. The dynamic between the feudal lords and the wizards is very similar to that of feudal lords vs. the Church, I think, especially since authors often use various handwaves for why wizards don't deus ex machina the characters out of their problems (because the wizards have their own problems, because they have a code that forbids interference except in certain cases, etc) that end up stripping wizards of most of their literal magical power within the context of the story while still having the potential power available. Which sounds almost exactly like the Church (i.e. you don't need miraculous demonstrations of the local clergy's power every day to believe that the clergy has that power and behave accordingly).