In contrast to The Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth, where magic remains mysterious and arcane and it is never explained and dissected, there seems to be a tendency to technologize—or at least scientify—magic in more recent works of fantasy. In various worlds, magic is seen as a substance, a commodity, that can be altered, stored, and redistributed.

Chine Miéville conceptualizes at least one form of magic in his world of Bas-Lag as a chaotic mutating force, somewhat akin to nuclear radiation, except that truly magical (but often horrifying) results arise from it. He calls this “torque,” which transparently symbolizes nuclear weaponry (New Crobuzon’s rival Suroch is annihilated by “torque bombs”) but also exists in “natural” form, depicted wonderfully and chillingly in The Iron Council where he takes his protagonists on a journey through the Torque-ridden wasteland known as the Cacotopic Stain.

Phillip Pullman in His Dark Materials calls the substance of magic Dust, which he ties together with the mysterious real-world substance physicists call Dark Matter. In his trilogy, Dust seems to be the repository of sentience, the essence of the soul, and angels are made up entirely of Dust. There are areas of the world that are Dust-filled, whereas the depletion of Dust begets crisis.

Finally, in Final Fantasy XII (and, I suppose, also existing in the its direct predecessory Final Fantasy Tactics), the world of Ivalice is filled with a substance called Mist, the very basis of magic. There are areas called Jagd that are so filled with Mist that other Mist-based technologies cannot function properly (such as airships and scrying magic.) Mist has a similarly property to Torque in that it can turn otherwise ordinary objects and creatures into weird, mutated, magical things with super powers.

Which leads me to the notion that maybe magic could be technologized in the real-world. The concept that probably comes closest is nanotech and the ubiquitous “grey goo”—nano molecules in an unformed state requiring some sort of programming to become actual objects. (Interestingly, since I used the word ubiquitous, I suddenly recall Phillip K Dick’s story Ubik, which actually describes a similar technologized magical substance that functions a little like grey-goo that he calls simply “ubik.”) Simply put, the practice of “magic” involves transmitting instructions to grey goo. With technological and perhaps even genetic manipulation, this could eventually be accomplished by telepathy and telekinesis. Of course, if grey-goo existed, this could be accomplished by existing technology, namely wireless communications. In a world of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp—again making me think of Dick’s substance “ubik”), this would make everyone capable of practicing so-called magic.