It is a central feature to the Harry Potter universe that technology is overlooked, because magic. That is why everything looks rather antiquated on the surface, because all the advances are made in magic and nobody bothers with other stuff that is perceived to be less effective or important.

Almost every building is rather precariously built and even absurd in details, because there is no value put in structural engineering, you just magic it all together.

Why ever would they use the Internet? They all perceive their own culture to be superior, and all their advances are bound up in magic.

I think the best one of those I encountered was an SF story where the navigation for FTL was done with slide rules.

But demanding that fiction predict the future is unreasonable and will cause upset for you and the authors. Almost all speculative fiction is based on "what if": imagine if there was something different about the world or or our technological capabilities, what stories could we tell about them?

(That's not even counting the SFF that makes no claim to be about the future or reality, but simply brings in elements for dramatic effect. That's why you can hear things in film space battles, which tend to be organised like WW2 carrier/air battles. That's why Harry Potter books make no attempt at consistency.)

> I think the best one of those I encountered was an SF story where the navigation for FTL was done with slide rules.

As in, you're impressed that someone writing in the 1950s predicted information warfare?

I can see what you're thinking, BSG passim, but no. They just hadn't predicted the miniature electronic computer.

Compare and contrast with Diane Duane's _Young Wizards_ books (which if you liked Harry Potter you should totally read), where in the later ones the characters are using their Wizard's Manuals as instant messenging/social networking clients. Turns out that books which magically contain the information you need to know have many applications.

Yes, they even go bing when a new message arrives.

> Hermoine has to physically go to the forbidden library to read books.

It's a 'forbidden library' because the books in there aren't meant to be available to the general public. You'd expect it to be locked down against scrying and other forms of remote and unauthorized access, in exactly the same way that a military data center would be locked down.

I think, to expand on your point there, you can make the general observation that there is no 'WizardNet' or usage of the internet by any wizard (as far as we know). Further still°, there is a complete lack of computer technology from any of the Wizarding World™. Was this done intentionally? Were they supposed to be shunning it? Did they need it? Were they secretly Amish?

That said, I think it would've been dramatically less pleasing for Harry to whip out his Nokia for the camera flashlight, instead of simply uttering 'lumos'.

° Please correct me if I am wrong for my HP knowledge is rather rusty indeed.

JKR's explanation is a combination of (perceived) lack of need and a feeling of superiority. [0]

[0]: https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/technology

I think the in-universe explanation is that magic messes up electric devices, and they are thus not usable in areas with a lot of magical presence. It's not really answered if that could be fixed or not, generally wizards just don't have any clue about how muggle tech works.

Which of course implies that magic is detectable using ordinary electronic equipment (even inadvertantly - would Kings Cross Starbucks notice their WiFi dropped out twice a year?)

It also raises the question of how electric something has to be to not work. Flash photography works, so capacitors are seemingly okay. Even a simple one-wire telegraph system would be an improvement on owls.

I'm not sure that I want to live in a universe where a one-wire telegraph system is an "improvement" over a magical owl postal delivery system.

The owls aren't that magical - they are established to be obstructed by such mundanities as thunderstorms and glass windows. The communication latency is atrocious. To top it off they're sentient beings, presumably in finite supply, who can die in the line of duty. Interception and denial-of-service are both established to be not uncommon problems with owl communication.

Come to think of it, we come across actual magical radio broadcasts at several points. Even magical password-protection of same. Why the hell do they still use owls?

We have strong cryptography and near-instant communication protocols. Why the hell is there a postal service in every country, and why is the quality of the postal service an indication of sophistication rather than lack of development in a country?

> Why the hell is there a postal service in every country

Because delivery of packages to rural areas is terribly unprofitable.

Certain things need to be socialized in order to keep a country connected and enable development.

Without things like the post office, rural electrification, and the Eisenhower Interstate system, vast swatches of the US would have zero economic output.

Please read the parent to my comment, and particularly the last sentence of that.

Context is important.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be rhetorical? Either way - ideally you have postal service AND electronic communication, and the quality of both reflect on the country.

It's a fair question though - anecdotally, the two main uses for the postal service nowadays (in countries with internet access) are package deliveries and unsolicited marketing (possibly print subscriptions factor in).

To my mind, the unique advantage of the Muggle postal service for personal communications, apart from the globally federated physical distribution network - the one that would make me very hesitant to scrap it - is the difficulty of conducting mass surveillance on it.

No no, you're missing the point. You see, owls are quite adorable.

Superb, even.

> Flash photography works, so capacitors are seemingly okay.

It does? But yes, these things are glossed over quite a bit, which is also odd since there are enough wizards that grew up as muggles and should have a fairly good idea about what technology can do, and would miss tech they'd have to leave behind ((EDIT: in a modern version) no smartphones, no internet would be quite a jump for kids used to them)

Any suggestions for fantasy that does it better? I can think of Charlie Stross' The Laundry Files (where technology is actively used to harness the power of the paranormal), the Harry Dresden series and the Night Watch series (which shows older wizards struggling with technology, younger ones actively using it, and at one point an army of humans with magical artifacts posing quite a challenge)

Nitpick - Harry Potter is set in the 90s, pre smartphone.

As for story suggestions - well, I don't read a lot of fantasy, but the "fanfiction" Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (by LessWrong's Eliezer Yudkowsky) is a deeply amusing take on what havoc might have been wreaked in the Harry Potter universe by someone who, finding themselves in it, applies the scientific method. (If that's not enough to pique your interest, at one point in the story Harry explores the possibility of using a time-turner to deterministically solve NP-hard problems through the forced creation of stable time loops.)

Another good story is Sam Hughes' "Ra", where magic is literally a field of scientific research and engineering. It scratches the same itch as Methods of Rationality (scientific deconstruction of magic), but in a universe built for that purpose. It's awesome.

[1] http://www.hpmor.com/ [2] https://qntm.org/ra

> It also raises the question of how electric something has to be to not work.

In the Dresden Files books, it's a sliding scale and the titular Harry Dresden drives an old VW Beetle because it's primitive enough to still (mostly) function in the presence of magic.

Strong encryption is another thing that sci-fi authors seem to miss. For example 1998's Moonwar has people sneaking communications on laser beams instead of radio waves because spies won't be able to eavesdrop on the straight-line laser without physically going to its location. That, despite the internet already using encryption for financial transactions in real life.

Yeah but how do you do key distribution and management? The physical security and "forward secrecy" (in the loose sense) afforded by an ephemeral transmission that can only be received in a fixed location is non-negligible [1].

[1] http://www.gdsatcom.com/email/3-22-11.htm

Its not about encryption, and real world concerns are echoed there. Radio (or other broadcast) gives up lots of signal intelligence; times, location, correlation with other events etc. A tightly collimeted/focused media (like laser) reduces those risks while having other benefits like a reciever detecting interception via attentuation.

I'm not sure this is what the authors had in mind, but you can imagine a post-encryption future (quantum computing or whatever lies beyond)

Okay, please look up and tell us the second sentence of page 37 of "Typolemik" by Willberg. You've got Wikipedia, after all!

May I point you to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I think you'd enjoy it! http://www.hpmor.com/

HPMOR is, amongst many other sins, pretty rapey.

Of all the many, many flaws of HPMOR (I definitely wouldn't recommend it), being "pretty rapey" is not one of them.

All the death and killing in the canon HP books is all good though.

There's a tiny little bit of a difference between 'the villains kill various members of team good' and whatever this stuff is:

“Hey, Draco, you know what I bet is even better for becoming friends than exchanging secrets? Committing murder.” “I have a tutor who says that,” Draco allowed. He reached inside his robes and scratched himself with an easy, natural motion. “Who’ve you got in mind?” Harry slammed The Quibbler down hard on the picnic table. “The guy who came up with this headline.” Draco groaned. “Not a guy. A girl. A ten-year-old girl, can you believe it? She went nuts after her mother died and her father, who owns this newspaper, is convinced that she’s a seer, so when he doesn’t know he asks Luna Lovegood and believes anything she says.” … Draco snarled. “She has some sort of perverse obsession about the Malfoys, too, and her father is politically opposed to us so he prints every word. As soon as I’m old enough I’m going to rape her.”

Also it's been many many years since I've read the books, but I don't remember a whole lot of killing on the parts of the heroes; a quick check of the Harry Potter wiki confirms that Neville killed Scabior, Molly Weasley killed Bellatrix, and various monsters bit it; I'm also going to choose not to count the obvious other example on grounds of intent.

That was a very clumsily executed attempt at shocking the reader by showing how messed up the Malfoy family is, by indirectly informing the reader that Draco believes he is above the law and has no compassion. I don't think there's much more you can read into it

Would you like to elaborate?

The obvious first example is Draco's comments re: Luna in chapter 7, and also the whole Bellatrix stuff. (which is where I stopped reading).

See also: https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/ and http://stormingtheivorytower.blogspot.com/2013_08_11_archive...

What do you mean by 'rapey' then? There's no way the book was on Draco's side when he made that comment. And I'm not sure what you mean by 'the whole Bellatrix stuff', but wasn't she a victim of the evil antagonist? If you think those bits were awkward, inappropriate, badly written, ineptly conceived, or whatever, I'm sure you'll find plenty of agreement. But calling the book 'rapey' seems to imply that it displays some kind of pro-rape message or attitude. That's a really harsh claim to make without strong evidence.

edit: maybe you just mean that it contains gratuitous references to rape? I guess that's a fair opinion to hold, but I think it's clear that the Draco thing wasn't included for the fun of it, but was intended to show how messed up his upbringing/society was in a way that would genuinely shock the reader. And I can't remember exactly what happened to Bellatrix, but I also don't remember getting the sense that the book was revelling in the grisly details or anything like that.

The HP books are not always internally consistent with regards to time, but a careful reading suggests that Harry was born in 1980 and so the books take place in the early-mid 90s.