When does science become magic? Or is all magic really just science? Author Lauren C. Teffeau explores this in the Big Idea for her newest novella, A Hunger With No Name. Read on to hear all about the fantastical and scientifical goodness in store.
LAUREN C. TEFFEAU:
With my new novella A Hunger with No Name from University of Tampa Press, the Big Idea I wanted to explore was technological culture shock in a fantastical context—the fuzzy boundary between magic and technology and how that demarcation challenges or reinforces one’s worldview. As a young girl, I read science fantasies like L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and the Darksword Trilogy by Weis and Hickman way before I ever knew about the Arthur C. Clarke quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’ve always been captivated by portrayals of technology that behaved magically and magic that worked in a technological way and all the variations in between depending on the character or the reader’s point of view.
That preoccupation has followed me through the intervening years and finagled its way into my own writing. Nowadays, my stories often explicitly examine the role of technology in our lives. Sometimes with an eye to unintended consequences on society or the environment (or both). Sometimes it’s a thought experiment on what the world would look like if a particular technology was not only accessible to all but also the best version of itself. And sometimes I’m exploring what would happen if the different technologies we’ve dreamt up today become arcane artifacts in some distant (or maybe not-so-distant?) future. What then?
A Hunger with No Name is very much in that last category. It explores how the fate of a young herder named Thurava from a low-tech culture intersects with a much higher-tech one, blowing up her worldview in the process and putting her values to the test as she comes face-to-face with technologies from the age before that should have been lost to time. Technologies that threaten the very existence of her culture because too many of her people view them as magic—too strong, too compelling, to fight off any longer.
It’s a feeling I share about a lot of things being crammed down our throats right now—particularly large language models and the tradeoff of privacy for access to the convenient tech du jour. Those AI gizmos can do magical things, but the cost is great, and growing…
A Hunger With No Name: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|University of Tampa Press
Source: The Big Idea: Lauren C. Teffeau
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