Am a civil engineer working in tech now. I never felt like engineering was magical, we studied materials and stresses and tested stuff and built things.

While I know software engineers basically do the same things in a digital concept (hardware included) they are basically speaking arcane words that make the machine do things like conjure up images, transport information across the world at the speed of light.

Maybe fantasy writers should write more infrastructure into their stories for their wizards, like undersea cables or satellites built by the generations before

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

This is essentially the backstory of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Warhammer 40k has proceeded so far into the future and so much knowledge has been lost that mechanical gadgets like dams require priests anointing them with oil and burning incense to use them.

Dying Earth is loosely similar. There’s both tech and magic.

The Saga of Recluce builds the tech and integrates it with magic.

The Book of the New Sun takes the same tack as W40k (albeit written earlier) with far future shit relying on old tech without knowledge.

The Broken Earth trilogy has a mix of far future and magic. It’s my one of my favorites.