"All those substitutes for magic Muggles use — electricity, and computers and radar, and all those things — they all go haywire around Hogwarts, there's too much magic in the air."
— Hermione, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Science and magic don't get along, according to a lot of fiction. A High Fantasy setting where magical forces are the norm rarely has modern conveniences. Conversely, a modern or futuristic setting saturated with technology is unlikely to feature overt mystical powers and spells, even though certain high-end gadgets tend to have have borderline fantastic abilities and functions.
This trope is when the presence of magic floating in the air actively interferes with or harms technological devices. These magical energy/forces act as a setting-wide version of a Walking Techbane — thus ensuring that magic and technology could never coexist in the same vicinity, resulting in a Medieval Stasis.
Of course, this trope almost invariably assumes No Tech but High Tech, and the only devices affected by magic are of the modern—usually the electrical and/or digital—kind. Things like wooden wheels and smithing tools (which technically count as technology) are safe.
Compare The Magic Versus Technology War, where a mage and technology-user use their respective abilities to fight one another, but the magic/technology fields aren't destroying the other on their own. Direct opposite of Science Destroys Magic, although the two aren't mutually exclusive.
Related to Electromagnetic Ghosts, where ghosts can interfere with electronics. Contrast Magitek where magic and technology can be combined.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Interspecies Reviewers: Part of the reason why the world is stuck in Medieval Stasis even though there are people who have come from other worlds is that the existence of mana would interfere with their technology, making it impossible to recreate any of them beyond possibly steam engines.
- Downplayed in Sonic X. While it's possible to create machines that harness the magical powers of the Chaos Emeralds, ordinary Earth machines go absolutely haywire if they get near one. The first one to be discovered is dug up at a construction site, and the excavator that uncovered it immediately goes on an uncontrollable rampage.
Comic Books
- Hasbro Comic Universe: In this continuity, magic is inimical to all forms of technology, especially Mechanical Lifeforms such as Cybertronians. At the end of First Strike, Garrison Kreiger reveals himself to be Merklynn and not only subdues the incoming Cybertronians with his magic, but proceeds to use the Talisman to terraform Cybertron, in the process corrupting the remaining energon reserves and rendering them unconsumable by the Cybertronians as if it were poisoned. In the ensuing Transformers vs. Visionaries, the Cybertronians find themselves outmatched by the Prysmosians due to their magical capabilities, and over the course of the novel the heroic Spectral Knights wound up developing the first forms of magic that are not only not harmful to technology, but can heal Cybertronians.
Fan Works
- Child of the Storm: While the setting at large adheres to this, Tony Stark (who is not a wizard himself but works with many magic users) has managed to "magic proof" certain pieces of technology (like his smart phone). As a result, he has to put up with being called "Midgard's most skilled blacksmith" and the like by his Asgardian allies because they don't have words for "engineer" or "scientist". He doesn't mind, in fact he rather enjoys the title of "Lord Stark" that this brings with it.
- Harry Is a Dragon, and That's OK manages to get to the bottom of why various electronics don't work at Hogwarts: Hogwarts has spells to protect it from lightning, which have the side effect of preventing valves, spark plugs and cathode ray tubes from working. Once that's sorted out, certain types of technology are able to be introduced.
Literature
- The Dark is Rising: Implied — one sign of Will coming into his Old One magic is how the radio turns to static in his presence.
- In The Dresden Files, active human magic destroys all post-WWII technology, and a wizard can fry modern electronics just by being close to it for a while even if they don't use magic in its presence. Butters speculates that wizards project a sort of entropy field that in the current era manifests as glitches in electronics. Every hundred years or so, magic changes what its side effects are: previously this field was responsible for curdling milk or giving wizards skin blemishes like warts and moles. Non-human magic uses, like the Fair Folk, do not have this limitation: one of the major advantages the Red Court vampires had in their war against the White Council was that they could freely use modern technology like smart phones to communicate with each other.
- Harry Potter:
- According to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, magic interferes with electricity, which explains why Wizards don't have things like phones, television, and computers. However, Word of God also adds that most Wizards, especially Purebloods, pride themselves on not needing Muggle-made conveniences, since magic can fulfill most of the basic functions of technology, thus widening the technological gap between muggles and wizards.
- Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them includes a section on Chizpurfles, tiny magical parasites that are attracted to sources of magic and feed on them. If they can't find any magic, they will instead attack electronic Muggle devices, which explains why sometimes such brand-new devices randomly stop working.
- Night Watch (Series), unusually, averts this completely. One magic user even goes into low Earth orbit in a space shuttle to cast a spell on all the Earth - and then runs into severe problems when his magic stops working because he is so far from other living beings (whom magic draws its power from)...
- Old Kingdom: Upon crossing the border from Ancelstierre into the Old Kingdom, magic starts working, but anything produced by machines and technology will begin to deteriorate until it completely falls apart. Nicholas Sayre, who insists that magic isn't real, has been told repeatedly to use parchment when sending letters to the Old Kingdom, but he persists in using paper, which always ends up in shreds.
- Rivers of London: Using magic will automatically destroy complex and new (generally anything post-'80s) forms of technology. It's acknowledged by DCI Nightingale that this is a relatively new phenomenon, as he's lived most of his life (as in from the early 1900s to the present) without it being a problem. Peter Grant, being naturally scientifically minded, dedicates a large amount of time experimenting to try to explain this arbitrariness and eventually discovers that magic destroys microchips and compressors (to the point of literally reducing them to sand). He also discovers this only applies whilst the circuit is functioning, to the point that simply removing the battery before using magic is an effective safeguard. Whilst the exact reason for this is still unknown, it's generally agreed to be part of the same process how Magic absorbs its energy from the surroundings (including people if not used properly).
Live-Action TV
- Motherland: Fort Salem: The Camarilla infiltrates Fort Salem. They have technology that can block Work (spells used by witches). Tally is able to use her Sight to detect at what frequency the devices operate and passes it to the others, who use it to disable the tech.
- WandaVision: Downplayed. Wanda's magical hex on Westview allows technology, but only to the level appropriate for the sitcom-style "show" being depicted. Any outside technology that doesn't fit into Wanda's world, whether because it's too modern or it's being utilized to harm her, gets transformed by her magic to fit in (i.e. a SWORD drone becomes a toy helicopter, a military tank becomes a truck). Monica tried to get around this in Episode 5 using a drone contemporary to The '80s, the era for the episode, which worked... until Wanda saw it and threw it out herself.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- In the Forgotten Realms, smokepowder, the literally God-approved equivalent of gunpowder, is in itself semi-magical and thus vulnerable to Dispel Magic. Certain areas have wizards who hunt down illegal stockpiles of smokepowder to render it inert.
- Bringing any gunpowder to Oerth, a Medieval European Fantasy planet brimming with magic, immediately renders it useless. The same can't be said for laser guns carried by crashed alien ships, however.
- The main feature of the Post-Apocalyptic, Science Fantasy setting of Amethyst. Magic violates the laws of reality that technology needs to function. The more advanced the tech, the more likely it is to malfunction and breakdown. Outside a handful of advanced city-states called Bastions, humans are forced to live at a mostly medieval level along with the various fantasy races that now inhabit Earth.
Video Games
- Arcanum: Because the Science Versus Magic rules that govern the world, magick twists the laws of physics that technology relies on to function, increasing the odds that technological items will break in unpredictable ways. At the same time, Science Destroys Magic is also in effect — skilled technologists and powerful technological items subtly reinforce the laws of physics in the areas immediately around them, acting as magick dampeners that can stop spells from functioning in their presence.
- Downplayed in Control: Any technology developed more recently than the 1980s or so will blow up or turn into a anomaly when taken into the Oldest House. This restricts the FBC to a Cassette Futurism style aesthetic, using film projectors, heavy vacuum-tube-laden computer consoles, and antique firearms.
- Touhou Project: Zigzagged; while electronic devices can work in Gensokyo as long as you have a means of powering them, the Great Hakurei Barrier prevents wireless communications from cell phones and the like from connecting to the Outside World and vice versa.
Visual Novels
- Sweet Enchantments: Electronics apparently don't work in the magical realm — the heroine's phone always goes dead when she stumbles upon Sweet Enchantments.
Webcomics
- Code Name: Hunter: The pixie Merrybell is working with British Intelligence to determine why magical phenomena are occurring in London, especially in the vicinity of Westminster Abbey. In chapter 2 page 22, an old vacuum tube radio is playing in the background, and Merrybell sits on it (she's small). Soon, the radio begins malfunctioning, and bursts into flames. It's discovered that magical creatures can, to some degree, monkey-wrench technology. Earlier, on page 18, a stone dragon is able to cause a revolver to jam.
Western Animation
- Young Justice: Like the comics, Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes uses a piece of alien technology called a Scarab that allows him to don a powerful suit of armor which grants him a number of different abilities and weaponry. The Scarab was created by an alien race known as the Reach to act as the vanguard of their invasions by infiltrating worlds and taking control of one of the natives. However, Jaime's Scarab initially did not take control of him because the Reach database was cleansed from its memory core when it first landed on Earth by ancient human magic. It was cleansed in another magic ritual near the end of Season Two, in order to free Jaime when the Reach managed to regain control of it. The same ritual also cleansed another beetle warrior, Green Beetle B'arzz O'oomm, a Martian Archeologist who found a Reach Scarab on Mars that subsequently took control of him.
Real Life
- While not necessarily magic places, believers in paranormal phenomena will assert that certain areas (Haunted Houses, The Bermuda Triangle, the Oregon Vortex, etc.) will make equipment malfunction, cell phones and watches no longer work, compasses no longer point towards magnetic north, etc. Of course, the EMF detectors always seem to work perfectly...
