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| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
i'd read it!
i dont really see what distinguishes star wars from any other form of soft scifi. maybe SW is softest scifi.
i like the term speculative fiction anyway, to cover all the best stuff. |
Okay, the cut down version:
Science fiction is a fantastic (IE: non-realist) genre, and like all fantasy genres the textual universe is characterised by points of difference from our own reality. In SF these points of difference (or nova) are rationalised through a pseudo-scientific discourse. Star Wars is a science fiction/fantasy hybrid, much like Dune, because many of its nova are pseudo-scientific: TIE fighters, alien species, blaster weapons. The science is never explained, but the language of science is used around the film: light speed, proton torpedoes, ion cannon hyperspace, implying there is an advanced level of science that makes everything we see possible, we just don't understand it yet. SF profitably utilises the thinking encapsulated by Arthur C Clarke's famous quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"... in other words, we're surrounded by technology we don't understand anyway, so if men in white coats told us deflector shields and X-Wings were possible, we'd believe them.
In this sense, Star Wars is science fiction. However, it contains other points of difference (namely, the Force) that are not rationalised through pseudo-science. The Force isn't rationalised at all, so it becomes magical, spiritual, some mystical force. That's a pure fantasy element - although George Lucas infamously tried to recalibrate it as science fiction through that disastrous "midichlorians" idea in The Phantom Menace. Note how different it feels, despite acting exactly the same within the plot - from spiritual essence permeating all living things in the universe to the side-effects of weird bacteria. Science fiction is a despiritualised genre, one where fantasy and escapism are possible, but they are rooted strictly in a godless, scientific perception of reality.
So Star Wars is basically a science fiction/fantasy hybrid. Another example of this would be Dune. It's sort of implied in Dune that all the visions and prophecies and religious aspects are side-effects of melange consumption, but there's no attempt at rationalising why.
There are obviously various levels of science fiction, based on how much they want to say. The "softest" science fiction operates just like fantasy, it's purely escapist and uses science only as a plot device to justify unrealistic features. The hardest science fiction is extremely rigorous in its pseudo-science. It doesn't mean it's necessarily accurate - Larry Niven's Ringworld made it to print with some massive errors in its mathematics, but hard science fiction is much more concerned with the maximum amount of science and the minimum of fanciful extrapolation. The science fiction critics love the most tends to be allegorical, its nova becoming metonymical devices in a metaphorical text that comments back on our own reality. That, by the way, doesn't necessarily make that kind of SF better than the rest, but critics tend to like something more if they can write an essay about it. Godzilla is an extremely potent piece of allegory, and so is much-lauded even today, but it's quite a shitty film in all honesty.
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