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Post #1241588

Author
DominicCobb
Parent topic
Science Fiction or Space Fantasy - what is Star Wars
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1241588/action/topic#1241588
Date created
20-Sep-2018, 2:14 AM

yotsuya said:

And the difference between science fiction and fantasy can be summed up by Arthur C. Clarke himself. Any technology sufficiently advanced will appear a magic. Soft science fiction leans toward assuming we will find those advances and tries to not explain them very clearly (often not explaining typical tropes at all). When the tech is low and you still have magic, that is when you have fantasy. That is the line between science fiction and fantasy. If you provide tech to do the things that seem magic or provide even a quasi scientific explanation for it, it is science fiction. If there is some mystical source of the power - some deity usually - then you have fantasy.

Even by your arbitrary definition, Star Wars is still fantasy. The only time in the films provide a “quasi scientific explanation” for the force is TPM, and it’s no surprise that that’s one of the things people hate the most about that film.

And since we’re quoting Clarke:

“Science Fiction is something that could happen – but usually you wouldn’t want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen, though often you only wish that it could.”

You can split hairs any way you like, but the fact of the matter is simple. Star Wars does not care about how tech works. It never has. How does a lightsaber work? Oh, a crystal of course. A fucking magic crystal. The laws of space physics are completely irrelevant. It’s not just ‘sound in space,’ it’s how the ships move, it’s how an asteroid field is dangerous to traverse when in reality it never would be, it’s how long it takes to get from place to place, and yes, it’s whether or not you can see a beam shoot across the galaxy. When a new piece of tech arrives in the Star Wars universe, checking to see if it fits into how things work in reality is the exact wrong way to do it. Whether you think it’s fantasy or not (it is), you cannot disagree that is is a significantly fantastical world, where tech and physics follow a fundamentally fantastical set of rules.