The Magic Goes Away

The Warlock's Era (The Magic Goes Away)

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The fictional setting of Larry Niven's logical (as opposed to high) fantasy series. Treating magic as a non-renewable resource and set 12 000 years BC, the stories detail how magic was replaced by engineering. In the series, mana is the source of magic. The stories also serve as an allegory for the energy crisis.

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The Warlock discovered that mana was a non-renewable resource and was slowly being depleted by the use of magic over time. He developed a magical device (the Warlock's Wheel) consisting of a copper disk with an open-ended enchantment that caused it to spin at an ever-increasing rate, with a secondary enchantment holding it together against centrifugal force. This pointless but high-powered usage of magic would rapidly use up the mana in the local area, causing the disk to explode when its structural enchantment failed and leaving a permanent magic-dead zone.

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It was eventually discovered that mana was originally carried to Earth and the other bodies of the solar system on the solar wind, replenishing mana slowly over time. However, at some point in the "recent" past a god created an invisible shield between Earth and Sun that intercepted the solar mana and caused the eventual decline of magic on Earth.

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