DominicCobb said:
Absolutely baffles me. Technology is of exactly zero importance in Star Wars. It’s there, that’s it. The films are not about that at all. They are modern myths, and very clearly so. You cannot with a straight face tell me that Star Wars is more similar to Shelly and Verne than to Tolkein and Arthurian legends.I disagree with this statement. The original Star Wars trilogy was very much about technology. In fact the original Star Wars can be seen as a critique of the modern world, where technology supersedes spirituality punctuated by Motti´s remark “This space station is now the ultimate power in the universe!” This to me is one of the more interesting aspects of the first movie, namely that the Jedi and even Darth Vader himself are seen as relics of the past in a galaxy dominated by technology.
I’m not at all speaking for Dominic, so he should correct me if I’m off. I think he’s noting that technology doesn’t drive the story in-universe. Luke has a speeder because that’s how you get around, vaporators are how you get water, droids are the labor pool, space ships are how you travel from planet to planet, etc.
I had that in my original response as well, before I trimmed it. Technology, far superior to ours, is the world in which they live. The story at its roots is; old man enlists the help of a farm boy to go rescue the princess and fight the bad guys.
That story can be told in just about any timeline or setting.
Yes, but the genre of the story is tied to the setting. Set it in the 19th century in the southwest and you have a western. Set it in the 9th century in France and you have a historical fiction. Set it today and you have contemporary fiction. Set it in the future (or a long ago high tech society) and you have science fiction. The setting is where you find most of the tropes. If you can tie the tropes into the story in such a way that the story really isn’t the same without them, then you have something indisputable. But what Lucas did was tie Star Wars to Campbell. Campbell’s work is not tied to any genre - it is tied to story telling in general. So what Lucas did was to tie into science fiction tropes to tell his samurai story based on Campbell’s work. He pulled in space ships, robots, FTL, artificial gravity, ESP, and a galactic empire. He envisioned an series of full length movies in the spirit of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, but left the camp behind. He kept the whimsy for the kids, but also crafted a serious story for all ages (that was the purpose of Cambell’s work). Outside of Campbell and the Samurai, his influences are all science fiction.
And the choice is not hard science fiction (based on real science and plausible futures) or fantasy. If you think that you are not much of a science fiction fan because you just dumped 3/4 of the genre into fantasy. Most science fiction is soft science fiction, meaning that you tell a plausible story and make it sound possible. Hard science fiction is just telling a possible story with little to no exploration of things that have not been proven to be possible. Fantasy on the other hand is telling stories of the impossible. Usually mysticism and magic provides the suspension of belief. Face it, we have no record of demon hoards ravaging the world or super demons breaking their bonds to endanger the world. We can conceive that FTL and artificial gravity could exist some day even though science currently says it is impossible (they once said going faster than sound was impossible). Older stories that explored our solar system before we really knew what it was like have not been rendered fantasy by new scientific discoveries. They are still science fiction, just outdated. Jules Verne’s works have not ceased to be science fiction just because some things have come to pass and others have proven impossible. They are still science fiction and always will be. The science is just outdated.
The force is 90% ESP and is a minor part of the story told. Luke’s journey is mostly to become a warrior to defeat Vader and the Emperor and then Luke makes a twist by sacrificing himself to save his father and his father kills the Emperor, sacrificing himself in the process. Luke’s main story is not dependent on the force, but on his own character. You could set Luke’s story in any genre, but Lucas chose to borrow from science fiction for the setting. Star Wars is as much science fiction as Foundation, Dune, Buck Rogers, and Flash Gordon.