Sulphur on 3/9/2018 at 05:19
I'm afraid you're missing the point. It's fine though, I don't think either of us need to elaborate any further on our personal viewpoints. We can move on now to more important things, like will Leia float back into Episode IX holding BB-8 like Mary Poppins with a robotic umbrella, and has all this chewing of the Star Wars fat given Piglick heartburn yet.
Starker on 3/9/2018 at 05:29
It's not that I'm missing the point -- I just don't agree with you that the sci-fi elements of Star Wars are window dressing.
Sulphur on 3/9/2018 at 05:33
Which is also missing the broader point I was making, again. And that's fine, if you want to focus on world elements that may or may not be technology to describe how sci-fi works for you, that's one way to look at it if you want to. Be my guest.
Starker on 3/9/2018 at 05:36
Your entire broader point rests on this premise, though.
Also, talking about points, you're ignoring my point that calling Star Wars science fantasy doesn't mean it's therefore not sci-fi.
Also also, I'm not focusing on world elements. As I said, the world elements are just an indicator, nothing more.
Sulphur on 3/9/2018 at 05:43
You're going to have to explain both of those to me, but I guess that's better off in more of a freewheeling chat discussion than a series of forum posts.
Again, if the difference you want to specify is that individual elements of Star Wars technology mark it out as sci-fi, that doesn't work because AFAIC sci-fi is more concerned about exploring technological implications. Star Wars' broad strokes from the original trilogy are: family is good, the bad guys favour red and black, fascism/war is bad, Ralph McQuarrie was a phenomenal visual artist, and The Hidden Fortress was a really good movie. Maybe the one defining attribute of Star Wars from a sci-fi angle is that technology lets people lose limbs, hair, and skin and still come back just fine with no psychological trauma because robotic prostheses.
Renault on 3/9/2018 at 06:21
It's not an official definition or anything, but Science Fiction seems like it's almost always based on Earth, or rather a future Earth. Most of the technology is presented as an evolution/advancement of our current technological level of knowledge. To me, Star Wars was always just fantasy, because everything is made up and the laws of our science don't always apply. How do you explain The Force? Lucas tried to give it a sci fi type of definition with midichlorians, and everyone hated it. Nobody really cares how a lightsaber works, just that is looks cool and only the elite warriors know how to use them. Did anyone ever both to try to explain how a moisture farm works? No, because nobody cares about how realistic it is - it's all make believe.
Look how much of Star Trek lore is spent on explaining how warp drives came into existence. In Star Wars, no one really cares about he origins of hyperspace, just that it works and lets you move from Tatooine to Alderaan in a couple of hours. A proverbial means to an end.
Starker on 3/9/2018 at 06:26
Okay, first of all, it's not just individual elements that make Star Wars sci-fi, but the whole setting. It's not a fantasy world, it's a sci-fi world, with aliens, interstellar travel and advanced technology, such as robots and cloning and whatnot. Sure, it's pulp sci-fi instead of "serious sci-fi", but it's sci-fi nevertheless.
Secondly, as far as I'm concerned, dealing with the impact of technological advances is not a requirement for something to be sci-fi. The Left Hand of Darkness is still sci-fi, even if it doesn't deal with the impact of technology, but instead uses its sci-fi setting to examine the implications of gender instead. So, why is using a sci-fi setting for adventure and intrigue not sci-fi? Farscape doesn't make a point about the impact of technology most of the time, so does it only become sci-fi at the very end, when it becomes about the destructive power of wormhole techonology? Is Star Wars not sci-fi because it uses its advanced technology in the "wrong way"? Is Mass Effect not sci-fi, because it has a focus on adventure instead of the impacts of technology?
Sulphur on 3/9/2018 at 07:03
The Left Hand of Darkness qualifies because it refracts the idea of human gender through the prism of an extraterrestrial culture (IIRC, it's been a while since I read it) - it's an examination of our attitudes through alien biology, which is not 'technology' (my error in narrowing it to that, I admit) but definitely the 'science' part of sci-fi, and essentially what 'serious' sci-fi is.
Farscape fits firmly in the Star Wars category of pulp space opera (not least because it was pitched as Buck Rogers in space) because the underpinnings of its wormhole technology never go beyond nebulous and implausible, plus it doesn't really have anything to say except weave a very entertaining set of conflicts and stories around some great characters. Mass Effect is also pretty much Farscape with a different set of things going on (and subjectively not as great storytelling). So: space opera. If you want to include that under the banner of sci-fi, go ahead, but it's obvious the focus isn't the science so much as the fiction.
Going back to the original point: Star Wars has people dying and coming back as force ghosts across the universe at will, people born with the ability to violate energy conservation laws, a 'force' that binds things together and can be manipulated at will that isn't gravity, immaculate conception, and a trade union becoming a fascistic galaxy-wide force. Beyond the last part being the least fantastical of these things (it's a joke, please take it as a joke), they co-exist with your ships and lasers and yadda yadda yadda as a mystical counterpoint to the 'science'. If that's not an interweaving of science and fantasy, then what is it?
Starker on 3/9/2018 at 07:53
Indeed, for me, science fantasy, space opera, and cyberpunk is still science fiction, even if it's not all that serious and scientific.
Also, a lot of science fiction contains things that are nebulous and implausible. Star Trek has entities like Q that can pretty much perform miracles, Left Hand of Darkness and Babylon 5 have telepathy, and Asimov's robots with mind control powers are really no more explained than that. Not to mention a lot of the things that go on in Dune and the way psychohistory in Foundation is used as a little more than a plot device. Really, what such criteria accomplish is the exclusion of a lot of works that most people recognise as science fiction.
Sulphur on 3/9/2018 at 08:02
As I said, the broader idea of what these things do is what I prefer to focus on, as opposed to one-off things we want to nit-pick, and we've reached an impasse if we're unwilling to concede that films like 2001 or Solaris set out to do very different things when compared to the makeup of Star Wars. It's not about being exclusionary, it's about defining the limits of where one thing ends and the other thing begins, and sure, there's always going to be sticky grey areas and subsets. Star Trek has Q, yes, and frankly the entire warp drive and impulse engines and a lot of the tech aren't terribly well-explained (it did help add the word 'technobabble' to our global culture after all) either if we want to pore over it in detail, but I'd say its ambitions aren't about making an action/drama romp that merely uses science as a prop.
Well, except Star Trek: Discovery, which is... ugh. I'm perfectly willing to include it in a new category all its own: the 'space nopera'. And the recently rebooted Trek movies are going the way of full-bore Spock opera if you ask me.
