Man, people have such rigid definitions of what is and isn’t sci-fi…
Most are confusing hard science fiction with science fiction in general. They are letting less than 10% dictate the entire genre and that is not accurate at all.
I guess the point I was trying to make that one time a couple days ago was that Star Wars isn’t and never was hard science fiction, and as such trying to find a scientifically plausible explanation for how anything works within the franchise is futile. Which is why I consider it fantasy within a sci-fi setting.
No, it isn’t hard SF, but at the same time, Star Wars by Lucas always stayed on the edge of probable and didn’t blatently tear apart the laws of physics. Abrams was 100 times more blatant and obvious and when you look at both what Lucas did in his 6 films and what most SF properties strive to do, they want you to believe so they either explain it or try not to be too obvious.
So I guess if I were to try and pigeonhole it into a genre, I can’t. It’s (soft) sci-fi. It’s space opera. It’s fantasy. It’s adventure. But I’d argue “sci-fi” is the least important of those to the franchise.
It isn’t fantasy. It doesn’t share anything in common with typical fantasy worlds. It does, however, share every single point with space opera (which is the most popular and dominant sub-genre of science fiction).
It’s absolutely not, however, hard sci-fi or speculative fiction or whatever label you want to put on stories that are about scientifically plausible technologies.
Well, it is speculative fiction. That is the joint genre name for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. And I’m arguing that it is not in any way hard science fiction and that those who are saying it isn’t science fiction are only using the definition of hard science fiction and are ignoring over a century of literary history of the larger science fiction genre. Lucas didn’t ignore it. He copied it. He hit every trope for it to fit into space opera and general science fiction.
There is no genre of space fantasy. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t need to because it is either a cross over story that has aspects of fantasy and SF (and Star Wars has no aspects or tropes of fantasy), or it is standard Space Opera.