More Words, Deeper Hole

Star Wars is SF.

I think that Star Wars is both sf and fantasy.

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Why is Star Wars Science Fiction? What does any of it have to do with science? (Apart from anything else, it explicitly does not posit a possible future for us based on scientific or socio-political development.)

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graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)

Three reasons.

It's marketed as Science Fiction.

It attempts to postulate a material explanation for the strange powers. (However horrible midichlorians are in so very many ways, they're canon.)

It has spaceships in it.

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(a) Fast food burger contents are marketed as beef. That doesn't make them actually beef. Marketing is not an accurate representation of the contents. "Sold as ..." argumentation doesn't particularly convince me.

(b) Fantasy also often attempts to postulate a material explanation for strange powers: mana, principles of sympathy, contagion, imitation and so on.

(c) So what do spaceships have to do with anything? Lord Of The Rings has boats. This makes it fantasy? (I realize that this is a disingenuous point in that the artefacts in SW are ostensibly technologically advanced past our current understanding. But then so are the Rings of Power. I would argue that the spaceships in SW are not in fact science-fictional artefacts, they are fantastic artefacts: there is no attempt to explain their functionality as a technological development over our current paradigm, or to carry through the consequences of that technical progress.)

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doc-lemming.livejournal.com

And that's the conceit of the fourth Avengers movie: Ultron has secreted an important part of his psyche in an arm bracelet, originally worn by Pepper and later given to Tony Stark, but it has to be destroyed in the ~~fires of Mount Doom~~ forges of Odin (which have no computers, unlike Tony's factories). Wackiness ensues, with Captain America, Hawkeye, and Black Widow standing in for the hobbits, the Sinister ~~Six~~Nine as the Nazgul, the Winter Soldier suborned again and playing the role of Wormtongue, and Ian McKellen as Magneto (by then they'll have the rights back from Fox).

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dbdatvic.livejournal.com

And note that at least twice we have importance attached to the boats _sailing off into the sky_, to reach another plane. (Elven boats seeing the edge of the world drop below them as they journey to otherwise-now-unreachable Valar lands; E\"arendil's boat with him and the Silmaril set as the morning star in the sky...) So yeah, primitive spaceships.

--Dave

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houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com

"It"?

Star Wars 1977 was fantasy with SF props. The prequels are SF -- bad SF.

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avram

Spaceships. Also robots and laser-guns.

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Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun has these. Science Fiction? Fantasy? Why?

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It's a science fiction story where most of the characters believe that they're in a fantasy story. Isn't that the whole point?

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Because most of the setting pretends to run on science. It's only the Force stuff that doesn't. (and in the prequels, that turns out to be science too)

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I don't see much evidence for this, actually. It is strongly implied that the technology employed and presented in the film is mechanical and can be used, repaired, and extended using mechanical principles, so yes, I'll bend on that point. But I don't think that makes it science fiction. Is steampunk science fiction? I don't think it is. Many people disagree on it.

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blpurdom.livejournal.com

Isn't faster-than-light travel and weapons that can destroy an entire planet in mere seconds inherently in the realm of science fiction? The mystical mumbo jumbo is fantasy, sure, but I think that's why the answer upthread was both science fiction and fantasy.

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Is steampunk science fiction?

A definite borderline case, that. Steampunk is meant to emulate science fiction written in earlier centuries, isn't it? Its conceit isn't that its stories could possibly happen in the future, it's that its stories could possibly have happened in the future as envisioned by people in the past. It's kind of retro-science fiction. Which makes it weird enough to be outside of easily defined categories.

Star Wars, on the other hand, implicitly says, "let's say, for the sake of the argument, that if our technology was sufficiently advanced we could build stuff like this." It's science fiction, at least by my definition of it.

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I see it as stories that we modern folk would like to think could have happened in the future of a past rosily envisioned by we modern folk. Therefore, it falls into the "if only" category of fantasy, and not the "what if" category of science-fiction. But then steampunk and I don't exactly see eye to eye, so I'm cognizant that others might have entirely different opinions about it.

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I see it as stories that we modern folk would like to think could have happened in the future of a past rosily envisioned by we modern folk.

Probably, though that just makes it even more... meta. "Let's pretend that there was a past in which people might have pretended that this was the future." It doesn't make it fantasy, though it does make it a weird sort of hybrid.

I think we differ less in our view on steampunk and more in our view on science fiction, to be honest. What you call science fiction, I think I'd call "hard" science fiction - thought experiments about what might plausibly happen. Most science fiction I see is less that and more stories that are about robots and space ships because robots and space ships are cool. If fantasy is everything that's "if only," then a whole lot of things are fantasy that we don't normally recognise as such. I see the difference more as what sort of thing you are required to pretend makes sense in order to enjoy the story.

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The couple of times I briefly committed steampunk, I was thinking of it as a pastiche of specific works of actual 19th-century science fiction. (But I suspect that by now steampunk has migrated far from that place.)

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...and the ur-steampunk novel, Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine, was definitely not that.

(no subject)

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ross-teneyck.livejournal.com - Date: 2013-09-03 07:55 pm (UTC) - Expand

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seawasp

Because that's the popular perception, and that trumps any grognard arguing for his purer definition. If you go to the average person and ask for three examples of popular science fiction, not fantasy, you'll get Star Wars as one of the three a large majority of the time.

If it involves spaceships that look techy, and zap guns instead of staffs, and super-tech laser-swords instead of Magic Swords, it's science fiction.

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My 7-year-old daughter recently saw the original movie (in unaltered 1977 form). I decided to ask her the demarcation question.

"Is Star Wars science fiction or fantasy?"

"It's science fiction."

"But The Force is basically magic, isn't it?"

"No it's not!"

OK then.

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...come to think of it, I didn't ask her whether The Avengers is fantasy or science fiction. (All the Asgardian god stuff there is generally portrayed as Sufficiently Advanced Technology and otherworldly science, Kirby-style. But it sounds like the Scarlet Witch is going to be in the sequel, which brings in the superhero version of magic and kind of throws a curveball if you're trying to draw the SF/fantasy distinction.)

Edited Date: 2013-09-01 11:29 am (UTC)

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seawasp

One of the reasons, I think, that psionics, and variants such as The Force, are often seen as more SF-y than Fantasy-y is that in general "magic" is often portrayed either as being able to do anything, or at least with no clear limits on what it could do. While comic books and some others have created "psionics" that were, basically, unlimited magic, a lot of such things, including the Force, are depicted as tools that have specific and limited uses and capabilities. No one's turning people to frogs using the Force, for instance.

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I can think of exceptions to that, though. Tolkien is an obvious one: magic in The Lord of the Rings is a lot like the Force (and this may well not be a coincidence). The foreground instances of it, especially as used by the good guys, are pretty limited, and it's implied that there's cosmic significance and immense potential power there but we're not shown all of it. The most powerful applications of it that we do see are evil, and associated with the temptation of power (much like Palpatine zapping Luke with Force lightning and telling him to give in to his anger; but in LOTR some of the most notable manifestations have to do with information, concealment and revelation, like the palantirs and what happens when you use the One Ring). But powerful good magic is more backgrounded.

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