Things to keep in mind:
The secret of incantations.
Max then goes on to make a point that I might well have made myself if I’d thought to put it so explicitly: while the technologies in our far-future SF now look more and more like numinous magical powers, our daily life is perfused by magical devices that obey relatively predictable rules—utter the right incantation and Siri tells you the weather. Which means we as readers are coming to expect an almost mechanistic causality to inform the magic in our fantasies.
—posted 2815 days ago
