Wizards from Outer Space

He's driving a flying sorcerer.

GUIDE THE SPACEMAN THROUGH THE CASTLE AND DEFEAT THE WIZARD.

— Star Guard

Sometimes Science Fiction isn't really science fiction. Sometimes, it's actually Fantasy. Even so, some things are usually seen as a part of one genre and not the other. If you see a magic sword, for example, you can assume it's fantasy and not sci-fi. Space travel, on the other hand, is firmly in the realm of science fiction, and not fantasy.

Except when the High Fantasy takes place in outer space without the use of sufficiently advanced technology or being "super-evolved" or some such, that is.

Sometimes this is a science fiction setting with some distinctly fantasy elements, such as Magic by Any Other Name. Other times, the only science fiction element is the fact that it's taking place on an alien planet. Magitek can sometimes be commonplace in such settings, but not always.

A Sub-Trope of Science Fantasy. Compare and contrast to Fantasy Aliens, which plays a traditional sci-fi trope in a primarily fantasy setting.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dragon Ball:
  • Dragon Ball Z has Babidi and his father Bibidi, two alien sorcerers responsible for the creation and resurrection of Majin Buu. Buu himself is a magical being, though more a nigh-unstoppable force of nature. The Dragon Balls were created on planet Namek, and Kami was working from racial memory when he made the ones on Earth.
  • Dragon Ball Super introduces Dercori, a fighter from Universe 4 who uses magical talismans in the Tournament of Power.
  • The manga adaptation introduces Moro, the Big Bad of the Galactic Prison arc. He is an alien wizard who uses magic to drain the life from planets and their inhabitants.
• The eponymous Ponko from Hoshi No Ponko To Toufuya Reiko is a cutesy-looking alien saleswoman from space, but might also be described as a soul-eating succubus con artist with all the magical jargon replaced by sci-fi elements.
• Lyrical Nanoha features Magitek Cool Starships operated by Space Police mages that oversee various worlds. Technically it's not Outer Space, it's the Void Between the Worlds, but it's treated the same way.
• The climax of Naruto Shippuden clarifies that the origin of ninjutsu in the world was an Ancient Astronaut with highly powerful chakra abilities cultivating a World Tree that would bear chakra granting fruit.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi skirts into this territory, the Magical World is in an artificial pocket dimension on Mars, with Magitek flying ships shaped like marine animals. It's connected to Earth via magical gates, so there is no actual space travel. There are also sentient robots, and a major arc revolves around Time Travel.
• Outlaw Star has "Tao magic" used by Chinese space pirates, as well as the Caster Guns that fire magical shells.
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Kyubey's species hangs somewhere between this and Sufficiently Advanced Aliens; their actions are generally described as magic, and the fact that they're from space is treated as a twist, but it's not entirely clear how the specifics work.

Asian Animation

• Season 8 of Happy Heroes mixes fantasy elements in with the show's usual sci-fi theme. The Supermen, a group of Ridiculously Human Robots from Planet Xing, go into the book A History of Magic where such fantasy mainstays as wizards, dragons, and gnomes can be found.

Comic Books

• Stardust the Super Wizard from The Golden Age of Comic Books. He used what amounts to high-powered Magitek with no explanation whatsoever to fight Dirty Commies, despite not having any obvious ties to Earth. Examples include him turning into a living star, turning communist spies into giant rats, "levitation rays", and his unseen "delicate detecting unit", which allows him to see and hear anything everywhere. Again, he uses these near-omnipotent powers to fight communists rather than crime, leaving him seeming like a combination of Dr. Manhattan and Joseph McCarthy.
• Gemworld, from the DC Comics universe, definitely applies. When it first appeared in the Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld miniseries, the Gemworld seemed to be just another generic fantasy setting, with monsters and wizards and so forth. And then the Big Bad of the miniseries turned out to be Mordru, the incredibly powerful foe of the 30th Century Legion of Super-Heroes. It turns out that the 30th Century planet Zerox, home of not just Mordru but also Legionnaires White Witch and Dragonmage, is Gemworld, and the original miniseries was taking place on a different planet the entire time.
• Swamp Thing, the latest in an ancient line of mystic plant elementals, once traveled to several different planets, all of which had vegetation on them, by growing a new body on the new world.
• Wonder Woman (1942): In the Golden Age, Wonder Woman's arch enemy, the Roman god of war Mars (aka Ares) actually kept his home base on the planet named after him, as did Pluto.
• Marvel Comics / DC Comics:
  • As a result of taking Fantasy Kitchen Sink to the extreme, both universes have magical and technological (and otherwise) superhumans fighting alongside and against each other, and often going into space.
  • Also averted since most alien races (though there are exceptions like the Dire Wraiths) don't have access to magic.
  • The Breakworlders from the X-Men have access to magic, but due to their extremely martial culture they don't particularly differentiate between it and technology. Humans say "science" or "magic", they just say "weapons".
  • In the DC Universe, it's because the Guardians of the Universe sealed away most of the magic in the universe into an artifact called "The Star-Heart" about 100,000 years ago when they decided that Science should reign supreme. Naturally, they put it on Earth.
  • The 2018 volume of Doctor Strange starts off with an arc where he seeks out alien sources of magic to help restart Earths recently destroyed sources. He encounters a handful of alien wizards, one of which who combines science with magic he takes on as a companion, and the two of them run afoul of a number of alien mages.
• Something like this seems to be present in Hellboy - in the first volume, some random aliens comment on how they can detect Rasputin's attempt to free the Ogdru Jahad, and the Ogdru Jahad (or possibly their spawn) are described in very sci-fi terms at one point, in what is probably a Shout-Out to HP Lovecraft's influence on Hellboy.
• In Saga, the horned people of Wreath wield magic, and it's their primary weapon in their galactic war against the technological people of Landfall.
• Featured from time to time in the Disney Mouse and Duck Comics:
  • One, particularly interesting in this way, comic had Madam Mim fly into outer space on her broom. Because only Batman Can Breathe in Space, she had to conjure a space suit helmet to survive. She then escaped being chased by a passing-by UFO by running it into an Asteroid Thicket, which led the aliens to declare they'd have to postpone the invasion of Earth if they have that sort of technology.
  • In another story Magica is accidentally kidnapped by aliens planning to invade Earth. As this is an Italian story and there's no garlic on the aliens' homeworld, Magica bulldozes through anything the aliens use to try and keep her contained and plans to force them into attacking the Money Bin for her before settling for forcing them to give her their equivalent of Scrooge's #1 Dime so she'll be able to complete the Midas' Touch amulet without having to steal the real deal, not knowing it's highly explosive.
  • In the "Space Recovery Team" series, set in the future, Magica is now living on an asteroid in outer space, from which she wastes no time jumping on her broom and chase the Beagle Boys' spaceship once she discovers they've brought the #1 Dime away from the defenses that had foiled her for (literally) centuries.
  • In Paperinik New Adventures, one of the minicomics on the various issues shows that at some point in the past the Evronians wiped out the Space Wizards-though the Evronian commander was turned in a toad.
• Rom Spaceknight dedicated his life to fighting the sorcerous Dire Wraiths from the planet Wraithworld in the Black Nebula.
• Nemesis the Warlock: Nemesis is a member of the Warlocks, an almost godlike race of aliens with spell-casting powers.
• Played With in 1970's Shazam! comics: the magically-powered supervillain Black Adam originally came from Earth, but the Wizard Shazam banished him "to the farthest star in the sky." He spent the next five thousand years flying through space to return.
• Warlord of Mars: The Boora Witch is your average swamp sorceress that lives on planet Mars, and unlike the rest of the cast (which is grounded on sci-fi pulp action), explicitly uses foul magic.
• Cardboard: According to Old Man Gideon, the magic cardboard aparently came from the parts of an alien ship that merged into the walls of the cardboard shipping boxes. Said alien ship was piloted by a alien wizard who was a particle physicist experimenting on subatomic space travel. It's ambiguous if this is actually true or if Gideon was just making it up.

Fan Works

• Child of the Storm spends the first book and a half hinting that there's something a bit strange about Asgardians as compared to the other Earth-based pantheons, before finally revealing that they started out as this trope. About a million years ago, they were a phenomenally advanced Magitek based space-faring empire. Ditto Jotunheim, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Svartalfheim, and Nidavaellir. They all ended up squaring off against Muspelheim, an even more absurdly advanced Magitek empire, ruled by Surtur, a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wanted to destroy what he felt was an irredeemably flawed universe and replace it with a better designed one. And since he was the Dark Phoenix, having used dark magic to sever a fragment of Phoenix fire, he was more than capable of it. One long and hideously violent war later, Surtur was defeated, and Yggdrasil was created to hold him, and empower the Alliance that had fought against him. This resulted in every world involved save Earth/Midgard being transported to another dimension, as well as the Jotuns becoming Frost Giants, Dvergar becoming Dwarves, Alfar and Svartalfar becoming immortal Elves, and the Aesir and Vanir becoming Gods.
• Present in With Strings Attached in the chapter where the four find themselves shrunken and placed inside an alien kid's basement science project. One of the people they meet there is Stoffer Briggs, the Farming Wizard, kidnapped from his home planet a while ago. He does some magic for them (like hogtying John by pointing at him and calling, "Hogtie that chicken!"). Later, when they have some time to chat, Stoffer talks about how most youngsters are moving away from magic in favor of technology.

Films — Live-Action

• The Jedi and the Sith from Star Wars. It is, after all, the story of a young farmboy who meets a wizard, who teaches him magic. The boy then inherits a magic sword, rescues a princess, and fights monsters, a black knight, and an evil wizard, all while flying spaceships and meeting aliens and robots. The Expanded Universe, both pre- and post-Disney, keeps up the trend, tossing in fantasy-style undead, Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, Black Magic, and occasional stabs at harder science fiction.
• Masters of the Universe dealt with this trope.
  • For that matter, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) itself fits; half the characters use magic and the other half use technology.
• The Asgardians in the Marvel Cinematic Universe flip-flops between Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and actual mystical deities. Thor: Ragnarok reinforces the latter notion while taking place mostly in firmly sci-fi setting. Though not seen in the movie, a number of fantasy concepts such as ghosts and vampires are also mentioned by Korg, a rock space alien.
  • The juxtaposition of sci-fi and fantasy elements gets a laugh-line in Avengers: Infinity War:
  Spider-Man: What is this guy's problem, Mr. Stark?
  Tony Stark: Uh, he's from space, he came here to steal a necklace from a wizard.
• For the most part Space Mutiny is firmly in the realm of science fiction, with little to no fantastical elements. The sole exception is the Bellerians who are stated to be practitioners of magic. In practice, this means dancing half-naked around a plasma ball and having no effect on the plot.

Literature

• Almost Night takes place on a colony planet within a space empire. There's a Space Elevator seen in the distance. But there are magic spells, potions, vampires, werewolves, and other magical races. And the plot centers around a spellbook made by a dark wizard.
• A Diana Wynne Jones novel called Archer's Goon is set in an apparently ordinary English town and in an ordinary sort of family, but the plot revolves around a set of super-powerful magical siblings, several of whom want to rule the world and plausibly could do so. The titular Archer does everything by means of intricate shiny machines, and Venturus is mad for spaceships.
  • It's...unclear where they're originally from. Most probably not space, or the spaceship question would be treated rather differently, but definitely not Earth. Wherever it is, their parents kicked them out of it.
• Lin Carter wrote many stories of this kind in his early novels, inspired by Clark Ashton Smith's example, though Lin Carter's stories were more adventure stories than horror. Tower of the Medusa is a tale set in a Space Opera setting, which features witch queen Azeera as one of the villains and Doctor Temujin, a doctor of the Minor Thaumaturgies, as the hero's ally. Oh, and the heroic thief turns out to have a god hidden within him.
• Jo Clayton's works:
  • The Soul Drinker trilogy had wizards, gods, and space ships.
  • In Skeen's Leap and its sequels, hard-boiled interstellar treasure-hunter Skeen, stranded on a backwater planet, discovers an Portal Door to a world that fairly approximates the Standard Fantasy Setting. It doesn't seem to make much difference in her life; she goes from being chased by saayungka to being chased by werewolves without much intermission.
• One Conan the Barbarian story had a Sufficiently Advanced Alien who came to Earth and taught magic to his apprentice.
• The Cosmere features this. Each planet has a unique magic system, all in the same universe, with "Worldhoppers" who can travel between planets.
  • The Cognitive Realm is used to travel between planets without the need for advanced technology, as places without thinking beings (like outer space) are considerably smaller there, but getting into the Realm in the first place can be difficult. Worldhoppers on other planets almost always have magical abilities that are totally unknown on the other planet, and there is even a town in the Cognitive Realm, as well as scholars who travel between worlds to understand their unique magic systems. Nearly all the people in the cosmere are more or less human, meaning they can blend in somewhat with the natives, but they often look different enough that they don't blend in perfectly.
    • Hoid is perhaps the most important worldhopper. He has appears at some point in nearly every book, and seems to be traveling around collecting magical abilities from each series. His exact origin is unknown but he seems to be one of, if not the most, knowledgeable people about the nature of the Cosmere.
  • In the third book of The Stormlight Archive, it's revealed that humans aren't native to the planet Roshar, they fled there after somehow nearly destroying their original planet with magic.
  • The short story Sixth of the Dusk features spacefaring humans with some form of magic or another, although the specifics aren't covered. A common theory is that they are from Scadrial, as Word of God stated the final Mistborn trilogy will be a "space opera"
• Alien sorcerers appear once in a while in the Cthulhu Mythos. This being the Cthulhu Mythos, the line between magic, science, divine intervention and so on might be a little blurry. To some degree, this is an Unbuilt Trope: H. P. Lovecraft and his colleagues wrote the bulk of what would become the Mythos in the 1920s and '30s, when Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror were not quite the distinct genres we know them as today; the Trope Codifiers for those genres were still decades away from being written after all.
• According to the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, the universe was once dominated by magic and mystical forces, until the Time Lords changed the laws of physics to remove all of that. Certain supernatural powers like psionics, block-transfer computation, and other methods of altering reality remained because they had some 'scientific' grounding. Even earlier than that — before the Big Bang — a universe existed whose equivalent of the Time Lords used "quantum mnemonics," essentially magic words that altered reality around them. The few that survived the Big Bang into our universe became the Great Old Ones.
• The Elric Saga: One story has Elric teaming up with other incarnations of the Eternal Champion to take down alien wizards that had come to his world from beyond his reality. It's even more awesome than that summary makes it sound.
• In Haruhi Suzumiya, when the emponymous character makes a student film, Yuki Nagato is cast in the role of an alien witch.
• Discussed in The Hearts We Sold, as the heartless troop often debates what, exactly, the demons are. Some are willing to accept it simply as magic, while others, like Cal, believe they're an alien species that humans had not yet discovered, and that all their abilities are perfectly explainable scientific phenomena. This view turns out to be correct.
• Jacek Dukaj's short story "The Iron General"^note yes, it's the one that's been translated to English! is set in a Dungeon Punk-style world and, among other things, involves an interstellar travel by what's pretty much a magically-propelled, magically airtight hull.
• In the Spider Robinson short story "Local Champ", a wizard dominates all magic on Earth. When someone tries to take him out with a laser weapon, he laughs at it; while physical energies can travel further than magic (which is limited to a planet's ecosphere), magic can easily overcome scientific forces — at least until the aliens the signal laser communicated with show up to pluck him out of Earth's atmosphere with a tractor beam.
• In Second Apocalypse, Aurang and Aurax are the last survivors of the Inchoroi, a bizarre and malevolent race that come from beyond the world of Earwa. Most characters treat the Inchoroi as something like demons or Eldritch Abominations, but the most learned (and the reader) recognize that they are actually space aliens; their fortress of Golgotterath is actually what's left of their ship. Played with in that while the Inchoroi brothers are powerful sorcerers now, it wasn't until they arrived in Earwa that they realized magic was actually possible and had to genetically modify themselves before they could wield it.
• Clark Ashton Smith wrote a cycle of short Weird Fantasy stories concerning the evil wizard Maal Dweb and set on the planet Xiccarph.
• In The Space Trilogy, Mars is run by the War God who Mars and Tyr are based on, Venus has an Underworld crawling with monsters, and the astronaut who visited both becomes the successor to King Arthur before hunting down the last practitioner of Atlantean magic. If it's unclear, Lewis' love for Classical Mythology and English folklore is not at all segregated from his love for H. G. Wells.
• The Wheel of Time series doesn't feature any space travel in the present, but the past was full of Sufficiently Analyzed Magic. Moghedien mentions in an offhanded way to someone she's trying to distract that "we could travel to other worlds—even worlds in the sky."
• In Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, Wizards travel to the Moon, Mars and to other solar systems on many occasions in the novels via teleportation.
• In the Lord Dunsany story The Fortress Unvanquishable Save For Sacnoth, Raznak is the "greatest sorcerer from the space between the stars" and he comes down to Earth on a comet every 230 years. Once there, he uses the dreams of men to create an invincible fortress and from inside, he sends men mind-warping dreams that causes them to praise Satan once they're awake and so their souls are condemned to Hell.
• In the far future of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, Rhialto the Marvellous is a mighty wizard and in one of his tales, he and his fellow wizards are running low on IOUN stones (these artifacts can only found near black holes). So they travel to the edges of the universe to collect more.
• Influenced by writers like Michael Moorcock and Tanith Lee, Freda Warrington's Blackbird series is set in an alternate universe with 3 dimensions. The creator beings that made the universe, set the dimensions in a triangle pattern with various planets located within. Using sorcerous means, it's possible to travel to these other dimensions and worlds and sorcery is a new emerging ability among the people of the 3 worlds.
• In Liz Williams The Poison Master, humans have been kidnapped throughout the ages by what appears to be aliens "Lords of the Night" and left on the planet Latent Emanation. It turns out that these "aliens" are rogue angels and space travel can be done by alchemically-powered devices.
• The first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic features an alien visitor (Tethis the sea-troll, who comes from another discworld called Bathys) and ends with the launching of a primitive spacecraft. The illustrated story The Last Hero features a more elaborate one, which makes it to the Moon. Both take advantage of the fact that leaving the Disc is as simple as dropping over the edge.
• Fallen Dragon has an in-universe example, with a teacher in the 24th century who makes up a wizards-in-space story for her students, because she thinks the best fantasy has a grounding in the reality of the audience.

Live-Action TV

• The witches in Bewitched vacationed on other planets regularly.
  • So did the witches in Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
• Wizards of Waverly Place had one kid magically transport himself to Mars by accident.
• Some seasons of the Power Rangers were all about this trope, especially early on. Later seasons are split more clearly into aliens / magic / science / supernatural martial arts / etc. However, crossovers can still feel like this, as magic-themed enemies cross over into scifi-like series.
  • In Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Zordon himself literally was a wizard from outer space, as was his rival, the evil space witch Rita.
  • The robotic Machine Empire in Power Rangers Zeo enlisted the help of an ancient evil spirit in one episode. Strangely enough, this spirit was compatible with their Make My Monster Grow technology.
  • Power Rangers Turbo falls more into scifi, as the Rangers, using car-based superpowers, fight a clan of Space Pirates who don't rely on magic as much as earlier villains did. However, in one episode, the Rangers aided a Nature Spirit named Erutan.
• Super Sentai:
  • Choujin Sentai Jetman is a sci fi series in which empowered humans fight the evil interdimensional alien Vyram empire. One of the arcs features a pair of demons as Monster of the Week. This pair was not aligned with the Vyram.
  • Mahou Sentai Magiranger vs. Dekaranger combines this trope with Fantasy Aliens. From the perspective of the Dekarangers, who are Space Police fighting against alien criminals, it feels like this trope, as the Big Bad of the film is a demon. For the Magirangers, who are Magic Knights fighting a race of demons from the underworld, its the other way around, as aforementioned demon is allied with an alien.
  • Engine Sentai Goonger features sentient animal-vehicle hybrids and their human partners fighting a race of polluting sentient robots. The villains of The Movie are an evil sorceress and a pair of Youkai lackeys.
  • Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger's heroes were space pirates in a flying pirate ship that looks just like a traditional sailing vessel.
  • Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters is a sfi fi themed series. The enemies are robots that originate from ordinary objects being injected by fragments of a sentient computervirus. The heroes are humans injected with an antivirus program that allows them to destroy said computervirus. The enemy in one of the movies, however, is a demon. Said demon feels so out of place, the Go-busters don't know how to deal with him.
• Although the show plays much faster n' looser with the restriction now than it once did, Doctor Who still usually maintains that magic, (at least when we're actually calling it "magic" instead of phlebotinum), does not exist. The Seventh Doctor story Battlefield is about an incursion into our world from an Alternate Universe where magic does work.
  • The canonical explanation for this in the Expanded Universe is that the Time Lords didn't like magic, so they changed the laws of the universe to remove it.
• Sliders once visited a world where magic worked and dragons existed.
• Babylon 5 featured, among other things, the Techno-mages, who were stated upfront to be wizards who used technology so advanced that it was indistinguishable from magic. They also had Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who masqueraded as holy figures, and at one point, a space station commander and a Catholic Priest working together could not quite determine if the entity that was possessing a person was an alien or a demon.
• Lexx: Vlad is a Vampire from Outer Space, being a Divine Executioner in service to His Divine Shadow that ended up on Transylvania and became the source of all vampire myths on Earth.
• Ultraman Leo once battled an alien sorcerer named Pressure, who shrank Leo to the size of an action figure, forcing Ultraman King to appear and help Leo defeat the space wizard.
• The third season of Supergirl deals with a coven of dark witches from Krypton that managed to survive their planet destruction and drew from their power (as well as science) to create the Worldkillers - Kryptonian warriors altered by dark magic.
• In Wizards vs. Aliens, apparently there used to be magic all throughout the universe...until the Nekross ate it all. Now Earth is all that's left, and it's the last item on their menu.

Music

• Gloryhammer's second album, Space 1992: Rise Of The Chaos Wizards, is set 1000 years after the first album and involves the evil wizard Zargothrax being freed from his icy prison by the titular Chaos Wizards. This ends in the destruction of Earth in order to prevent an Eldritch Abomination from being released into reality.
• Even more wizard shenanigans in Christopher Bowes' newer project Wizardthrone, featuring a whole band of space wizards.

Game Books

• 1980s four book set, Legends of Skyfall from David Tant, has a human colony ship crash on the fantasy planet of Skyfall. Over generations humans had their science and technology largely regress to medieval levels, but in turn they learnt arcane, clerical and druidic magic. So wizards aren't a rarity in this world, though some of the adventures are low fantasy and your character won't encounter anything more fantastic than giants and lizardmen.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons had the Spelljammer setting. Wooden-hulled sailing ships, cannons, pirates, magic, and monsters. IN SPACE!.
• In the old-school Mage: The Ascension, both the Sons of Ether and the Void Engineers travelled through space using magical spacecraft.
• Pathfinder:
  • An expansion to its default campaign setting reveals that most other planets in the solar system are inhabited by a range of robots, cybernetically-enhanced humanoids, gas-giant-dwellers, and energy beings, most of whom mix magic and science to varying degrees.
  • This was later fully developed and taken into the future with Starfinder. Technological, magical, and hybrids of both are very common, and even formerly purely magical foes show up with science-based tricks. For instance, The Legions of Hell have developed disturbing Organic Technology starships and can use Power Armor...
• Warhammer 40,000.
  • There is magic that is universal (all use the same rule set where it is called Psychic Powers) and necessary for space travel, but the Eldar and the Imperium treat it like magic or religion, introducing terms like warlock and inquisitor. Men in particular treat their Lost Technology spiritually or as actual parts of a god. Meanwhile, the creatures of Chaos are very clearly daemons lifted with no alteration straight out of Warhammer Fantasy (literally, the models can be used for both games).
  • Almost as blatant as the Daemons are the Thousand Sons, who unlike every other faction directly refer to their psychic powers as sorcery and themselves as sorcerers, all while dressed in full ceremonial robes (Which they wear over their power armor) and wielding literal magic staffs and swords no bullshit excuses included.
• The Elder Worm from the Champions Universe is a race of Starfish Alien space-wizards who dominated the entire galaxy a hundred thousand years ago.
  • One of the Elder Worm's slave races, the Thane, fits this trope even more, what with their body-obscuring cloaks, their demon worship, and their chanting.
• Rifts:
  • The Three Galaxies setting, a Space Opera setting with ray guns, Eldritch Abominations, space ships powered by magic, and psychic/superpowered galactic guardians who are essentially Lensman. One of the major intergalactic powers is the United Worlds of Warlock, a variation of The Federation where Sufficiently Analyzed Magic and Magitek are the norm and the head of state is a literal Space Elf.
  • Rifts Earth itself also fits, with widespread Magitek, the above Eldritch Abominations, elves with lasers, cyborg knights wielding swords of psionic energy, anti-vampire railguns that shoot magically-created wooden stakes, and the marketing departments of extraplanetary megacorporations coming up with mecha styled after medieval knights. Again, both magic and tech are thrown in a blender and accelerated by Rule of Cool.
• Dark Astral is heavily influenced by Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer's psykers have their analogues in the Psychonaut class who's mutation allows them to access magick spells.
• In GURPS Technomancer, NASA (National Astromancy and Space Administration) has a fully-functioning moonbase, built and kept habitable through magic, and there are also various orbital facilities. And all you need to reach them is the reasonably common Teleport spell. Getting to Mars is trickier, because the Background Magic Field drops off, and they're probably going to have to use old-fashioned spacecraft.

Video Games

• Most Final Fantasy games take place in a setting like this.
  • Final Fantasy IV is the most obvious choice, as the game takes place in a fairly standard fantasy world until you reach the Tower of Zot, a technologically advanced fortress run by Golbez, an evil wizard who is getting his tech, orders, and lineage from the moon, where the final boss and another major story character, both of whom are space wizards, are waiting.
  • Final Fantasy VIII: There's a sealed Sorceress who used to rule the world with iron-fist and magic. She's sealed in orbit of the Moon. Standard fantasy fare— but then, a space station is built to keep her sealed, crewed by actual astronauts. A significant chunk of the game is spent around what is basically a magical Baikonur Cosmodrome.
  • Jenova of Final Fantasy VII is some form of space alien, but her primary modus operandi is infiltrating the magical biosphere of Gaia.
• The Kirby series is fantasy set on a alien planet. As such space travel plays a semi-important role throughout the series and many of the villains originate from outer space. Magolor from Kirby's Return to Dream Land is even a literal space wizard.
  • The Jambastion Mages from Kirby Star Allies also apply here.
• The old Might and Magic verse had a backstory involving very technologically proficient Ancients, which directly impacted eight out of nine games of the technically main series - blasters can be found, malfunctioning robots may be enemies or the Big Bad, perfectly functional robots may be enacting Failsafe Failure Salt the Earth strategies, characters from a previous game may show up in a starship after having gone off-course... all in vaguely medieval/renaissaince worlds with a high dose of magic.
• The original Phantasy Star quadrilogy fits this. Magic, technology, and Psychic Powers are all in use in the Algol system. In the fourth game, some individuals use all three at once, and the most powerful attack in the game is a Combination Attack drawing from all three sources.
• Any game that convolutedly descended from Xenogears will have spell-casting in outer space.
• Likewise the Star Ocean series will feature this prominently.
• The optional boss Ragu O Ragula is a spell-casting King of the Monsters who's known for traveling among the stars in the Wild ARMs series.
• Level-5 had the Playstation 2 games Rogue Galaxy and Dark Chronicle. Rogue Galaxy had interplanetary travel and magic use galore so space wizards are everywhere. In Dark Cloud 2, all the problems are started by a being from the moon in the future who gains wizardly power.
• Super Mario Galaxy has the Magikoopa enemies from previous Super Mario Bros. games follow Bowser on his conquest of space, firing spells from their wands at Mario as he traverses the numerous planetoids of the game. Kamella in particular is a larger boss Magikoopa exclusive to Galaxy
• Space Station 13's Wizard game-mode fits this trope to a tee.
• Many of the early Ultima games featured sci-fi elements like space shooter minigames. (The first game featured what looked to be TIE Fighters, and Ultima VII featured an actual Kilrathi fighter.)
• The Jennerit Imperium in Battleborn are a race of space vampires, even though individuals such as Verod Rath are insistent in not being called "vampires". Considering they look like vampires, are a extremely long-lived race with certain members being at least 20,000 years old, and drawing their vitality from life-force and blood, it pretty hard to argue they aren't.
• The Seraphim from Sacred are self-replicating alien combat cyborgs left over from a failed Alien Invasion, who look almost exactly like sexy angels. They themselves have forgotten this, and it's only revealed by a random encounter with a Seraphim who went insane when she found out. Sacred is otherwise a Standard Fantasy Setting, with the Devil causing trouble for the Standard Fantasy Races with a horde of undead and corrupt nobles.
• Shadow the Hedgehog's one time foe, Black Doom, is an alien conqueror with the ability to tap into the powers of the mystical Chaos Emeralds and use Chaos Control.
• In Destiny the main character is a Guardian, allowing them to channel "light" to resurrect themselves and use their powers. And of course, lest we forget: "That wizard came from the moon."
• Any Warhammer 40,000 video game where a psyker/sorcerer appears prominently. So Gladius and Dawn of War get a nod while something like Aeronautica Imperialis doesn't.
• WildStar had Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and Espers as low-key magic. And Spellslingers, who were explicitly said to use magical pistols and ordnance.

Webcomics

• While the presence of gods and magic places Kubera squarely into the fantasy genre, it also features sci-fi elements such as interplanetary travel and multiple universes.
• The Secret Report: The dragons come from outer space and apparently can become Kaiju size if they want to, though usually chose not to.
• Klotark from Dominic Deegan is the comic's sole confirmed alien and is a practitioner of both magic and psychic powers. Though later on it turns out his species originated on that planet and had to leave after a magical cataclysm of their own doing.
• In the space arc of Arthur, King of Time and Space magic and technology are both required for FTL travel and Merlin is not only a wizard but a time traveler from the lost planet of Avalon.
• Isaac of Val and Isaac was originally from a medieval fantasy planet but he’s far from the only spacefaring wizard in the setting. Shapeshifting cyborg witch assassin Space Dread for instance.

Web Originals

• SCP Foundation: SCP-2686, the "Moon Wizard", is a wizard on the moon. Unfortunately, since he draws his power from "the light of the moon above", and while he's on the moon all of the moon is below him, he has no way of getting back to Earth.
• Pictured above is Magical Trevor from several Deranged Animations by Weebl & Bob.

Western Animation

• The Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "The Magicks of Magus-Tu".
• Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. The Queen of the Crown, Mogul and the Scarecrow are all examples of aliens who wield magical powers. Humans from the planet Xanadu also tend to focus on development of psionics over technology.
• ThunderCats (1985), full stop. Castaways from another planet led by a guy with a magic sword land on a new world with colorful inhabitants, build a fairly high-tech base for themselves out of what's left of their ship, and spend most of their time fighting the schemes of an evil wizard.
  • In Thunder Cats 2011 Mumm Ra is an alien evil sorcerer who crash landed on Third Earth centuries ago with most of the animal races and the ancestors of the Thundercats.
• Thundarr the Barbarian is set in an age of "savagery, super-science, and sorcery." Many wizards (most notably Mindok the Mind Menace) use superscience and magic interchangeably, while Thundarr's Sun Sword appears to be scientific.
• Bravestarr is a Planetary Romance set in a verse where magic works. Bravestarr, Tex Hex, Shaman, and Stampede all have magic-based powers, and all the Muggles seem perfectly accepting of the fact that magic is real.
• In Blackstar, astronaut John Blackstar falls through an Unrealistic Black Hole and winds up in an Alternate Universe where magic works.
• Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors is a Space Opera where one of the heroes is a wizard.
• In Steven Universe, the Crystal Gems are eventually revealed to be from another planet, though they describe their abilities as magic, with things like the Warp Pad being some form of Magitek. Notably, the Gems who aren't on Earth have Averted Space Age Stasis.
• Parodied in the South Park episode "Sexual Healing", where the government makes up an alien wizard to explain why celebrities are so promiscuous. The episode ends with them dressing up a SWAT officer as one whom they have Kyle and Butters shoot.
• The Imakandi in Samurai Jack use what appears to be a magic ritual to teleport them to Earth and back to their home planet.
• In line with the rest of the Masters of the Universe franchise, the 2017 She-Ra and the Princesses of Power had a little of everything. The Horde and Horde Prime use Sufficiently Advanced Technology, the Rebellion tends to favour actual magic. Entrapta has no magic but tinkers with Magitek and First Ones tech, which itself is often designed to tap into Etheria's natural magic. She-Ra (both Mara and Adora) herself has the Sword of Protection, which is a First Ones artifact, but She-Ra in fact existed as Etheria's protector long before they arrived on the planet. When Adora breaks the Sword, she's first cut off from her transformation, but later re-forges her connection directly with Etheria's magic, and can summon a new sword of her own.
• Ben 10: Alien Force: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" reveals that Gwen and Ben's grandmother is actually a member of an alien Mage Species called the Anodites.

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