Yes, I read Kathy’s anti-Star Wars, and sci-fi and computer games, piece in bemusement. Consider this my polite reply.
When Star Wars first came out in 1977, it stirred the chords of my then six-year-old heart like nothing ever had before. The buzz about the film went on for months, all through the year, and when I finally saw it in the theater in late 1977, it didn’t disappoint. It was glorious — fun, macho, funny, dazzling — a ticket to another universe. The experience was incredible. The buzz continued straight through to The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, and Return of the Jedi in 1983. It’s fair to say that Lucas’ arts dominated my childhood, but more importantly, the films he churned out in that period were actually good films. Empire’s foreshadowing, defeats, pacing, and twists make it one of the greatest films of its decade, if not the 20th century.
But here’s a little known fact about Star Wars: More than just being a series of two very good films, a pair of decent films and a pair of bad films, it bequeathed a whole industry. I’m not talking about the parallel marketing of the toys, many of which I used to own and now wish I still did because they would be worth a pile of money. I’m talking about Photoshop, and the broader digital imaging industry.
Photoshop was created by brothers John and Thomas Knoll. John Knoll was on the ILM team that breathed life into the Star Wars universe. He wanted to improve ILM’s processes for flying TIE fighters around and creating light sabers and blaster bursts. His brother, Thomas, was a coder on early Apple computers. Thomas built the code for a program that allowed Apples to manipulate photos. John saw the program’s true potential, and together they built Photoshop. Today it’s one of the most useful and ubiquitous programs on the planet, a powerful tool for serious photographers, artists, editors and hobbyists alike. I owe much of my career at NASA and in blogging to Photoshop and After Effects, and thus to Thomas and John Knoll, and thus to Star Wars. Not because I go around dressing up like a storm trooper (I never have, don’t, and never will) but because the team behind Star Wars helped advance and democratize the technology behind the film making industry. Photoshop led to Premiere, to Avid, to Final Cut, and back to Avid and Premiere and iMovie and Movie Maker and to editing video on your iPhone, and also to the broadening improvement of more advanced programs like Maya and Lightwave. Would Apple have become the preferred brand of digital artists if Photoshop hadn’t existed? Or would it have died as many other early computer brands did? ILM and its competitors, and some of us in the digital arts industry who never worked for any of the big effects houses, have pushed relentlessly to expand what computers can do for film, which has in turn led to more powerful computers and cheaper digital video technology. This impact on our daily lives isn’t as profound as the impact the space program has had on the technology we use every day in the first world, but it is far reaching and has enabled an awful lot of success for an awful lot of people.
I’ll grant that the SW prequels until Revenge of the Sith are awful films (Revenge goes in the “decent” pile, along with Jedi, though the Darth Vader “Nooooo!” nearly kills the whole film and Lucas seems determined to ruin the good ones now). They’re lifeless, predictable bores, not just because we know what that little boy turns into, but because the dialog is awful and, other than Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan and Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine, all of the performances are terrible. Lucas is a great vision man, but his directing skills just don’t exist. He should hand the writing over to someone like R. A. Salvatore and the directing to, well, just about anyone. Go play with your spaceships, George.
Since when is Star Wars “Science Fiction”? In the same way that Lord of the Rings is “Speculative Anthropology”? Star Wars is closer to “Sword and Sorcery” than it is to Science Fiction.
Star Wars is a nice story, but there’s no “science” in it that I can see.
“Since when is Star Wars “Science Fiction”? ”
Seriously? Do you honestly not realize that there’s a genre called “science fiction” and that movies involving spaceships and laser guns are almost always considered part of it?
Just because people say the Chicken Mcnugget is food, doesnt mean I want to eat it.
Sci-Fi is a fairy tale with a technological patina over it. I prefer the originals.
“Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief, all kill their inspiration and sing about their grief…”
In most cases, you could say that. For most, though not all, originality is the art of concealing your sources. The last sci-fi book I read was Herbert’s “Dune.” I enjoyed the story as far as that went, but knowing a great about history by this time, the game was pretty much up.
Perhaps the most memorable line to come out of the remake of True Grit was Col. Stonehill’s retort: “I do not entertain hypotheticals. The world as it is is vexing enough.” Just so. Perhaps the least appealing sub-genre of Sci-Fi is Alternate History. It has, as its central, crowning folly, the belief that we understand the what and how of history so well, that we can say how and when it would have gone differently had anything been different. So its literary merit consists of taking a sophomoric two-minute thought experiment like “What if Germany had used the First Moroccan Crisis (1905) as a pretext to go to war with France?*” and turning into an “I’m the smartest kid in class,” full-length academic exercise. You’ll learn much more trying to puzzle out what actually happened and why, than you will from AltHistory.
If that’s your thing, I wish you the enjoyment of it, but if you take it as seriously as I’ve seen after a brief perusal of some AltHistory message boards, you need to, as they say, get a life. Preferably on this planet.
*Conclusion: I don’t think the Entente Cordial would have held, the demographics suggest France would have been rolled and Germany would have been the big dog on the continent. In that or any other case, it might have avoided the utter catastrophe of WWI. Anything would have been better – or at least less bad, than that. And what is my conclusion worth? Well, it and $10 bucks will get you a cup of burned coffee at Starbucks, or a cumulative 5,000 wasted man hours at an AltHistory board.
So what is with this whole deal of going out of your way to piss on people whose tastes and hobbies aren’t what you consider “worthy”? All this “get a life”, “I don’t entertain hypotheticals” and the like is really a case of bolstering your own ego at the expense of someone else – a despicable habit.
If you can’t accept that other people don’t like the things you like and other people like things you don’t without having to belittle them, I humbly submit that it is you, not the other people, who need to get a life.
p.s. Langenbahn, you’re just the latest of a series of this kind of nonsense, so you got the cannon blast. If you didn’t mean to sound oh-so-very superior, I apologize for taking your words as they read. I’m getting very tired of this whole “let’s put people down for liking something I don’t” deal.
Snobs like him are petty fascists (liberals, really) who try to force their opinion of what is artistically correct and acceptable on everyone else. Just ignore him. Like we used to say in the Army, “Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one.” He’s entitled to his opinion and you’re entitled to yours. He just can’t seem to accept that second part.
The contempt runs both ways. I floated around the periphery of the fan community for some years. Although I often felt sorry for the hardcore nerds/geeks who were laughed at by non-fans, I also witnessed a great deal of overt fan snobbery. I definitely got tired of the general assumption that science fiction fans were superior to all the “mundanes” who liked “normal” stuff like sports and Christianity. I often wondered why folks who spent so much time living in *other people’s* fantasy worlds would regard *themselves* as so much more intelligent and imaginative and creative than the rest of humanity. I don’t know any other type of genre fiction that gives rise to attitudes like that, or that attracts people with those attitudes.
BUGS — I definitely got tired of the general assumption that science fiction fans were superior to all the “mundanes” who liked “normal” stuff like sports and Christianity.
Yep, there are plenty of those. In minneapolis is a group that will convene tomorrow evening and sit in a resort hotel until sunday night playing games like “magic the gathering” and commiserating about star wars etc because they’re so smart and the big football game isn’t up to their intellectual standards. Wankers, the lot of them. The equal and opposite idiocy of bible thumpers.
These are people who watch the “big bang theory” and assume it’s about THEM when in reality bigbang is about accomplished nerdy geniuses with PhD’s and the geek collection who claims to be better as a rule are neither accomplished nor educated. They seem to assume that since some nerds (as per pop culture belief) are socially awkward that their awkwardness means they’re super smart, too. This appears to be the source of their condesension; they actually believe they’re more intelligent than the rest of us.
I figure Kathy Shaidle ought to get along with them quite well.
Thanks for the PS, because, y’know, what you said earlier was really gonna keep me up tonight.
My point was, I have only one life to live or I might be willing to get into hypotheticals. But for my three-score and ten just figuring out this one is sufficient. The real world, the one I have to live in 24/7 with all its people and problem is far more fascinating to me than any Sci-Fi could ever be, for the reasons Chesterton pointed out when he said, “Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and is therefore congenial to it.” Indeed.
I agree the “get a life” stuff is arrogant and obnoxious. (And remember this post in in response to just a “get a life” post on PJ Lifestyle, by Kathy Somebody.) It’s also shortsighted.
My grandfather was a “Civil War Buff”. He had lots of books on it, and he’d drag us around to various battlefields. It was his enthusiasm.
Star Wars fandom seems a more eccentric enthusiasm, but is it less “useful”?
Lots of geeky Germans in the ’30s got all enthusiastic about armbands and goosestepping. Others drips today are reading Marx and practicing dialectic drippery – but with nasty implications for the rest of us.
Brainy guys with time on their hands are trouble. We should look quite benignly on AltHistory and such. Knock yourselves out, fellas.
Thank you for that comment, Kate. The central issue in this article and the impetus for its creation in the first place is the need people feel to define for other people what is good for their lives. “If I don’t like it then you cannot like it either.” If you do then you are wrong/faulty/demented and in need mental reprogramming.
There are a great many popular things I have no interest in; Twilight and Harry Potter leap to mind. But I don’t claim moral superiority over others who do like them. It is simply a matter of choice, interests and in some cases talents.
In my youth I was quite a jock, but even before then I was a hard-core sci-fi nerd. I was early into programming computers before they even had computer screens (Yes, I am that old! LOL). I went into nuclear power as an adult in part inspired by Scotty on STAR TREK and NASA.
I mingle with most groups and get to observe the arrogance and snobbery in most of them. The only thing that has changed over the years is the Internet gives people the mistaken impression that their opinions matter. No matter what you say, if you have thousands of followers it gives people the illusion that a large group of people agree.
In reality, a Moron at the head of a large crowd of morons is still a moron.
I too am tired of the explosion of alternate history in fantastic literature; it smacks too much of people who’ve run out of ideas and things to say and it tends to be a one note joke. Novels that depend on what amounts to a one-liner tend to be tedious dead-enders. Alongside of this are such things as equally tiresome too literate re-imaginings of Napoleon-era English fleets.
Speaking of crowning folly, perhaps the least creative and most ill-advised expression of history in SF is Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserker Fury,” which re-does the Battle of Midway right down to using the original airplane designations in one of the stupidest novels I’ve ever read. Even Captain Future is more creative than that.
If you want solid and fundamentally sound expressions of creativity in SF, try “Beyond the Blue Event Horizon” by Frederik Pohl and “Infinity Beach” by Jack McDevitt, perhaps the two finest mystery novels in SF ever written.
Really, they are the same as time travels stories. There are some good time travel stories but David Gerrold’s “The Man Who Folded Himself” pretty much boxed in the possibilities, and from then on Time Travel became more and more the crutch of exhausted and / or mediocre imaginations. I will say that C.S. Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy is the one thing I’ve read since Dune, and is worth coming back to again and again. Although it was one of the early entries in Scienti-fiction – as it was once briefly called, I wouldn’t really classify it as Science Fiction today. Especially, Perelandra. Other than the fact that it takes place on Venus and involves the necessary conveyances, it’s not even really a story. Its plot is as rudimentary as it gets. Its really more of a Botticelli painting in words.
Alternate history SF does occupy the same basic space as time travel stories but they are long on tedious exposition and short on clever uses of time paradox. The former are more like what if General Robert E. Lee captured a weapons squad of Marines that fell back in time rather than exploring the concept itself. For me it’s not a question of doing it but over doing it. Fantastic literature has no crying need for more dragons or “mercs” either.
I certainly don’t fault people who write these stories but the problem is that once a new frontier is explored it becomes a cemented over mall eventually. It’s just bad luck to come in years after Lewis and Clark when it’s simply been already done and done well. I prefer All You Zombies to Christopher Columbus falling into a dinosaur ridden America. SF suffers from its own popularity which is its own paradox.
My point was, I have only one life to live or I might be willing to get into hypotheticals. But for my three-score and ten just figuring out this one is sufficient. The real world, the one I have to live in 24/7 with all its people and problem is far more fascinating to me than any Sci-Fi could ever be, for the reasons Chesterton pointed out when he said, “Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and is therefore congenial to it.” Indeed.
So, how is this argument not applicable to all fiction? And what is the difference between a hypothetical as a starting point for a story in science fiction or a starting point for a story in any other genre?
In real life, historians and other scholars of the past–archeologists, linguists, textual critics, anthropologists–engage in speculation all the time, formulating theories about past events that interpret limited evidence. Military planners think up all manner of “what ifs” and engage in war games to anticipate the enemy and train for eventualities. In both pursuits, they use counter-factual models, more commonly known as alternate history.
Fiction, in its own way, does something similar. It is the mirror by which we view life at angles denied to us with our regular vision. It allows us to personify ideas and give them concrete expression, to see the world as it might be, or as it really is. Science fiction, as a genre, imagines the consequences of change. Fantasy imagines mythology as history, allowing to regain a sense of awe and wonder in the world.
Alternate history, besides wanting to imagine the consequences of different choices, is a pursuit to understand history by stepping out of our typical unconscious attitude of viewing the past like it was set in stone, of taking it for granted. We already imagine “what might have been” or “what will be” in our own lives. Why is that in any less valid on a larger scale? The only thing you’ve pointed out is that it’s typically done badly, not that it isn’t worth doing.
All this added up, it merely points to the fact that Man is a creator by nature, and he creates by imagining possibilities. It should hardly need pointing out that civilization was built by this process.
And finally, I find it an irony that you quote Chesterton, who was a master of using the fantastical the the speculative in fiction and was a major influence on authors like Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and Jorge Luis Borges. To end, I quote Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Hmm. I seem to recall Star Trek describing a communicator, about hand-sized, that flipped open, and allowed conversation over orbital distances. I guess if that ever actually comes to pass, we’ll find out how worthless spec-fic is.
I recall several SF novels describing improvements in prosthetics, to the point where injured troops could return to the battlefield. There were discussions over if prosthetic limbs might enable athletes to exceed flesh and blood capabilities.
In 1948 or so, Murray Leinster wrote a story about computer networks being in every house and business, essential to business, and how a corrupted unit could cause damage throughout the network. I guess that’s a risk we shouldn’t worry about, since it’s only SF and not relevant to anything. It’s not as if anyone’s ever going to develop such a network.
Yup, SF is just a mindless waste, unlike Salinger’s story about an obnoxious, whining brat in the 1950s getting the crap kicked out of him for being an obnoxious, whining brat. THAT’s relevant.
Why have people suddenly lost the ability to type the words ‘Space Opera’?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera
The general rule of thumb is, if it has spaceships, it’s sci-fi as opposed to fantasy.
Of course, there’s a lot of overlap. A lot of sci-fi reads more like fantasy (the Entire and the Rose books by Kay Kenyon comes to mind) and a lot of fantasy has strong sci-fi elements, especially those fantasies set in a post-apocalyptic world where science has been replaced by magic (the Shannara series by Terry Brooks is probably the best known of these).
Arthur C. Clarke himself once pointed out “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (I’m quoting that from memory, so don’t complain if it ain’t exactly right), so there’s the overlap again… the lightsabers of Star Wars are so advanced that they can’t be distinguished from magic.
Personally, since I enjoy both, I just lump ‘em both under “speculative fiction” and don’t try to categorize further.
Well, there have been numerous books, movies & miniseries done on the science of Star Wars, so that’s good enough for me in terms of validating its existence. Although, I distinctly remember the lightsaber being the least feasible of the inventions, sadly.
Science Fiction doesn’t necessarily involve science, per se. SF as a genre involves looking at how people react in situations and settings that are A) not part of our normal world, and B) scientifically plausible. (A and scientifically implausible = fantasy).
There was a very good exhibit at the Smithsonian a while back that looked at how Lucas wrote the stories for Star Wars. He rather carefully studied classical epics and the nature of storytelling, and incorporated many themes and elements into the saga. These stories are not just tossed together.
BTW, just as a note, if you look carefully, nowhere does it say that Luke & Co are actually human. Isaac Asimov, in the prolog to his classic story “Nightfall,” pointed out that he used humanoid characters because to make them alien would distract from the story that he was trying to tell. The important part of the story was: what would happen during an eclipse on a world that otherwise never knew night. If he had to keep explaining the nature of the characters (tentacles, etc) it would detract from the essential story. Likewise, Lucas used humans because the alien nature of the heroes is irrelevant.
Oh god, no.
This means that in some future release of Star Wars (4k retina 3D?) Lucas will digitally remove Mark Hamill, Harrison, Carrie et al. and replace them w/ how he originally envisioned the characters. I think Solo was supposed to be a lizard w/ a robot head.
*shudder*
…and why most have everyone speaking english. To be completely realistic would slow down the storytelling. “How fast is our spaceship? It travels at the speed of plot.” (Though it was cool when Kubrick broke the barrier by actually showing a space toilet.)
At risk of sounding like a star wars nerd, actually, the human characters in the star wars universe ARE in fact, humans. The story is that humans were brought to the star wars galaxy by another race of aliens who build structures like Centerpoint Station and terraformed worlds like Coruscant, Corellia, etc. to make them habitable, some 100+ thousand years ago (i.e. when humans on Earth were cavemen some of them got abducted and transported to another galaxy). This is all documented in the canon star wars wiki.
Star Wars is science fiction; it’s not fantasy. A Princess of Mars is science fiction; it’s not fantasy. Star Trek is science fiction. Not liking a thing doesn’t kick it out of a genre. Obviously there are works in prose and film that blur the line; those few works do not define a genre. So-called tawdry sci-fi is not a distinct genre but a matter of taste and so doesn’t exist. Denying simple genre classifications amounts to semantic pedantry or lack of knowledge. One could argue Star War is as much a Western as fantasy. Having a princess doesn’t define fantasy as there is plenty of royalty in great SF from Van Vogt’s Isher Empire to Asimov’s Foundation and from Herbert’s Dune to Hamilton’s Confederation nor does rescuing a princess define fantasy.
Star Wars has nothing to do with Sword and Sorcery. Having elements of fantasy doesn’t make it fantasy. Virtually 100% of the science in science fiction is fake or unworkable; that doesn’t kick it out of the genre. Having convincing fake science doesn’t make a novel or film more firmly withing the genre than an almost magical science. There are works with almost no conspicuous use of science that are science fiction because another well-known tradition with the field is societal speculation such as 1984 or Fahrenheit 451.
There are recognized sub-genres that employ a common language everyone uses such as Howard, Moorcock’s or Lieber’s Sword and Sorcery as opposed to high fantasy like William Morris or Lord Dunsany. There is the planetary or scientific romance that help define Burroughs or Otis Adelbert Kline or Ralph Milne Farley. It’s fun in discussion to further sub-divide but not very useful – just read and watch the stuff.
Star Wars literary ancestors are clear to those who know the genre and they are almost entirely SF. These influences don’t reside in the plot so much as the way the plot is presented and the window dressing that frames that plot. There’s not a hell of a lot of Kurosawa residing in kilometer long star ships, cleverly circumventing otherwise plot-breaking language barriers or the Dune-invoking use of getting around force field tech by employing Imperial Walkers in an echo of the Baron Harkonnen’s use of obsolete field artillery to destroy Duke Leto’s troops. Those considerations are what helped make Star Wars a blockbuster and not Kurosawa. Audiences responded to the background nuance purposefully introduced from literary SF and grafted onto the film.
Once again plot seems to be everything when attempting to address film and literary SF, as if the prose, pacing and casual introduction of backstory tech in literature and the art direction, invocation of music and editing are afterthoughts in film; they are in fact the true language of more or less exchangeable plots and in this sense Kurosawa is almost completely irrelevant; who cares if Empire of the Atom is superficially like Robert Graves; it’s success does not depend on this consideration and so amounts to little more than a pun in sum effect.
The reason Joseph Campbell sees the myth in Star Wars is because that is the space he himself resides which is not a space that includes Van Vogt’s small unit system of pacing, Leigh Brackett’s purple prose or Ralph McQuarrie’s amazing storyboards for Star Wars. Science fiction is better served by learning and seeing what is presented than by saying its parameters are defined by our own experience.
Doing that denies the individual artistry that is what in fact is the pure essence of art rather than reducing all to the background noise of our own lives; doing that defines our enjoyment of art, not what the construction of that art is. Being ignorant of editing in a film or authoritative pacing in a short story doesn’t delete editing in a film. It behooves us to learn the language that is being presented rather than wandering around Rio de Janeiro asking directions in English. You’ll still enjoy the city but not as much as if you learn Portuguese.
You misunderstand the distinction between sci-fi and fantasy. Involving swords and/or space is irrelevant.
How does your categorization address a film like Masters of the Universe, which is all magic and swords, until that little dwarf pulls out an inter-dimensional time machine.
It is addressed like this: “Obviously there are works in prose and film that blur the line; those few works do not define a genre.” You just have to actually read the comment.
Please don’t tell me I misunderstand the genres which comprise fantastic literature and film. They were already in place decades ago and have nothing to do with what one person thinks and everything to do with commonly agreed on divisions. Comparing Star Wars to Clark Ashton Smith or Lord Dunsany in this sense is ridiculous. Let me know of a “fantasy” anthology that would include such works together.
Actually Star Wars belongs to a genre called Space Opera whpo is closer to a kind of arthurian legends with space ships than to science fiction proper
They key is: don’t let Lucas write the dialog. Everything else, ok.
One interesting item is that his robots and most of the rest of his technology is, from an engineering point of view, correct. The ones that need to be humanoid are (C3PO is an interpreter), those that don’t aren’t (R2D2 is, essentially, a Swiss Army knife). The ships look real (i.e. used/beat-up) and plausible, and if you look at most of his aliens you can really imagine a home planet full of them.
And then Photoshop helped, along with creative political authors and fixers like Ayers and Rezko, to bring us the surreal dystopian Obama Era, a freakish glitch in the fabric of political spacetime. So now we must retreat to the safe, intelligent realism of video games and movies to avoid the mind-numbing lost wasteland of the GOP primary: where presumably intelligent lifeforms arrived to save the day, but now all threaten to leave us defenseless and stranded on Planet Obama.
The End.
Thanks for the unsolicited plug, Bryan.
Amen. I have always been a sci-fi fan. That doesn’t mean that all scifi is *good*. But sci-fi is just a different story *context*. There are as many types of scifi stories as any other genre: adventure, cerebral, mystery, horror, even comedy. Underneath it all, a good story is a good story – either fun, emotional, or smart – and a bad story is a bad story. Of course, it’s best if it is all three, but hey, sometimes you just want to watch something dumb. (Even in that area there is good dumb and bad dumb.) Anyway, I will always be a scifi fan – it’s just my inner geek showing through. I remember as a kid my family tuning in the car radio to listen to every rocket launch. We would count down with the announcer “ten, nine, eight…” until we heard “liftoff!” and our hearts would beat faster as we heard the roar of the engines. Wow!
I was seriously disturbed by the tone of the original review. Obviously the author was one of those people that will never understand scifi. Why bother to write an article on that, then? It would be like me writing an article about why I don’t like rap music or whi I hated the movie “Mama Mia”. What would be the point, other than irritating people who like those things?
Now if we want to discuss relative merits of the star wars movies, most agree that episodes 4 & 5 were the best. I actually like 6, too. The pacing was good, and I could forgive using Ewoks, mostly. The point of drama when Vader finds out that Luke has a sister, triggering the final confrontation, is one of my favorite moments in the series. Ep 1-3 – meh. It’s the same with Star Trek movies. 2 & 4 were the best (IMO), 1, 6 and 7 were okay, and 5 – yecch. Is the story engaging? Is it well written? Do you want to see it again? Then it’s good for you. Have fun! Don’t watch what you don’t like, for goodness’ sake.
One final note about the first movie (Ep 4): it had several great things going for it:
* a return to the format of our parents’ old adventure movies,
* an unashamed return to good-vs-evil storytelling that was being systematically wiped out by stories filled with anti-heroes and morally ambiguous situations where nobody is likable and everybody dies at the end
* a rollicking good time, corny dialog and exploding space ships that left a smile on your face
* a new standard of state-of-the-art SFX that left everybody’s jaws hanging on the floor – from the opening scene to the “trench attack run” near the climax.
* a wonderful adventure movie score by John Williams
* a big life-or-death story of galactic scale
For anyone who went to Star Wars in the 70′s and did not feel like they were driving an x-wing fighter down the freeway when they went home while they hummed the theme to the movie: I don’t understand you – I probably never will. Sorry you didn’t ‘get’ it. We all had a blast, and won’t forget it.
I loved how the plot evolved to have a 3-scene climax with a full battle in one place, a special mission by a command in another place, plus a moral conflict going on between individuals in a third place.
For anyone who went to Star Wars in the 70′s and did not feel like they were driving an x-wing fighter down the freeway when they went home while they hummed the theme to the movie: I don’t understand you – I probably never will. Sorry you didn’t ‘get’ it. We all had a blast, and won’t forget it.
^^^THIS.
Bryan is right on this one. Except for me the moment came walking into the crowded Boston Cinerama theater two minutes into the film 2001 — and somehow finding a seat without ever taking my eyes off the screen. The sense of wonder has never left me, matched in part when I hitched from New England to Florida to watch the brighter-than-the-sun, louder-than-a-thunderstorm liftoff of the Saturn V carrying men to the moon for the first time. The best science fiction lifts the mind and spirit to heights few politicians can imagine. Kathy’s bit had a point, though: McDevitt, Heinlein, Asimov and others, I am sure, would have refused to work with any director unless he stopped adding jet fighter sound tracks to spacecraft.
Isotherm,
Actually, Asimov was involved in Fantastic Voyage – despite his objections to something rather more of a problem than jet fighter sound tracks with space craft. Quotes I’ve seen suggested he was rather amused by the whole affair.
The good Doctor doubtless laughed all the way to the bank.
2001 is hands-down my favorite, movie, ever. I read the book first because I wasn’t old enough to see it when it first came out. I’ve heard that going to see it after partaking of various mind-altering drugs was the thing to do back in the day.
I waited months to go see the first (or 3rd, depending on your nerd level), and took my 6 year old sister to the theater as a birthday request. She insisted that we sit in the FRONT row (my neck has never been the same).
When the first ship flew (or traveled…not sure you fly through space), I was immediately interested. But when that 2nd sucker passed over (mind you, I was looking almost strait up), I was throughly impressed.
I was stationed on submarines soon after. After a particularly looong patrol, we came back to find the 2nd installment (or 5th, I get so confused) playing. I fell asleep sometime in the first half hour, I awoke during the closing credits. Now to be fair, I paid $4 to see it. But I’ve paid almost $80 for the same nap when I take my wife to the ballet. So if you look at in that light, it was a pretty good value
I love science fiction…Although, I’m more of a life aboard the Nostromo kinda guy. I just prefer a little more adrenaline in my entertainment. But even then, it could be argued that the alien in that film was just some guy in a rubber suit.
But it’s not for everybody.
And hey, I’ll even watch and enjoy the (so rare) good chick flick.
I have a number of original (including the egg from Alien and Blade Runner) movie posters that have been professionally mounted and framed. The guy who owned the gallery who did the work for me used to remind me every time I’d pick one up: “You know, that’s not really art.” and point out what he considered “true art”
See, I guess that’s my point. Art, like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder.
I read the article yesterday with a more than slightly amused eye, I must say. I will confess I despise sci-fi and fantasy both, never read either if I can avoid them. I do see movies, Star Wars and Star Trek and Star everything-else-under-the-sun, but I don’t particularly care about the plots or the characters. Mostly I go to be sociable; they’re not completely objectionable. It’s not like they’re The Hours or something.
Lest you get the idea I don’t read fiction, that’s not entirely true. You’d think from the above that I read *serious* stuff, and I do, but it’s not all that I read. I consume a lot of detective, suspense, and historical fiction. I even have a taste for John Connolly, an Irish author whose books are outwardly detective novels; when you’ve read a few, you come to understand they’re horror novels also. Someone who only reads serious non-fiction reminds me of one of those food Nazi types who insists that everyone should only eat food that’s healthy. Good ol’ Jack LaLane: “If it tastes good, spit it out.” Pulp and genre fiction has always gotten a bad rap from the more literary highbrow folks. Famously Raymond Chandler used to get asked when he would write something that he took seriously, and he always replied that he took everything he wrote very seriously.
And as to Lucas’s stuff being derivative: all fiction is derivative these days. At least Lucas acknowledged his debts.
Read a short story called Vintage Season; if you can despise that maybe artistry isn’t you’re bag and despising what you don’t read is.
I think he came in as a scif-fi hater defending sci-fi fans right to be fans. Don’t be the nerd snob that non-nerd snobs accuse us of being to justify their unfair judgement.
No offense intended, but it kinda sounds like that’s what you’re doing to sci-fi and fantasy.
I’d recommend trying Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell if you wanna dip your toe in the shallow end of science fiction someday. It’s primarily a story about a young man learning about life, making friends, and learning a new job. The fact he’s doing it on a spaceship is pretty incidental to the story. I promise, there’s no laser pistols, spaceship battles, or save-the-universe plots in this series.
Star Wars is not Sci-Fi…
article fails on this basic premise…
Fantasy is fantasy.. guys dig fantasy… especially Leia in bikini bondage owned by the fat basement slob that Jabba represents..
did I just describe Democrat trolls? no wonder Dems love islam..
SW is sci fi. The sci isn’t particularly good (The Death Star couldn’t blow up a planet if it converted 100% of its mass to energy). But it is SF, and has scientific and technical content without which the story can’t exist. That’s the definition of SF.
Fantasy has magical or supernatural content without which the story can’t exist. So you could argue it’s also fantasy, given this Force thing.
at least Tolkien went and actually wrote many books fleshing out the Middle Earth of his fantasy..
don’t knock a man that created languages for his world.. Tolkien and Lewis shared droughts for a reason..
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/news/2003/aug29.html
Early in their relationship, in 1936, after Tolkien had written the children’s story The Hobbit, the two men had a momentous conversation about their desire to bring such stories to a wider audience (see below, at the end of this interview, for Duriez’s re-creation of that conversation). They actually decided to divide the territory—Lewis would take “space travel,” Tolkien “time travel.” Tolkien never got around to finishing his time-travel story, concentrating instead on his more “adult” trilogy, in which he placed hobbits in the context of his Silmarillion stories. But Lewis did write his space books: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.
=============
Love me some sci-fi. More pictures please.
Sci-fi, in general, doesn’t suck. It’s just another genre. If you can read, you can understand and enjoy science fiction with no undesirable side effects.
I agree with those who say Star Wars isn’t really sci-fi. Obi-wan’s advice to Luke has nothing to do with using his intellect to solve problems. It’s all about emotions. “Clear your mind! Turn off your computer! Reach out with your FEEEEELINGS!” From a science fiction point of view, that’s as effective as telling him to wish upon a falling star or say fifty Hail Marys. Emotionally satisfying but definitely not gonna work in a sci-fi universe.
Star Wars is space fantasy. The good thing about it is the space part – space scenery, space ships, space robots, space battles. That’s why Star Wars is great. The dialog, the Force, all that other stuff – completely disposable. An excuse for (in its day) the most amazing special effects anyone had ever seen. They’re kind of old and cheesy now, but I still respect Star Wars for giving me and others that experience back in 1977. That’s why Star Wars doesn’t suck.
I agree with you that Star Wars doesn’t suck, but to a great many people it doesn’t suck because of The Force and all that emotion. I don’t know what future you might be thinking of, but how humans feeeeeel and their thoughts about religion aren’t going to go away anytime soon, nor are they incompatible with science.
I’m quite fond of Babylon 5 for that reason, and the considerably more postmodern Battlestar Galactica. Although it’s its truly a tough assignment to try to write believable drama in a believable ‘verse, hence the dismal failures like Stargate Universe. Space battles are considerably easier to do, I think.
I know you you’re saying, but maybe I wasn’t clear about what I was trying to say. I understand that all dramatic fiction, even science fiction, deals with human feelings and human beliefs. It cannot do otherwise because emotions and beliefs are ultimately what make us go. Science fiction would be pretty tedious if the characters all acted and reacted according to logic and probability. I also understand that in some of the best science fiction – Dune, for example, or Battlestar as you said – characters’ religious beliefs are central to the plot. Most science fiction assumes a natural rather than a supernatural basis for religion. It could be a purely cultural/psychological phenomenon or it might involve God-like alien intelligences, psi powers, sufficiently advanced technology that’s indistinguishable from magic, etc.
I think the Force skirted the natural/supernatural issue. Force is a word from science. The religious equivalent is probably Spirit. It’s something that moves things, induces change, makes things happen. YMMV, but taking Obi-Wan’s statements together there seems to be a strong anti-rational, anti-materialist message in the story. Even though it’s a “science fiction” story, you don’t really need science, logic, technology, material things. All you really need is willpower, feelings, intuition, confidence, belief, and things will happen for you. This strikes me as a strongly Romantic/mystical/New Agey sort of message. Maybe it sounds quasi-mystical because the characters don’t really understand the Force – only that they have to be in a certain state of mind for it to work. I’m not sure I believe Lucas thought it through that well, though. He had to backtrack later on and invent “midichlorians” – a pure, unmistakably materialistic explanation for the Force.
The “force” struck me as something more or less on a religious level in that one had to have faith in it in order to be able to exhibit the evidence of its presence. Only the very practiced & skilled in it were able to harness its power. If it were to be so easy, everyone would be a Jedi, something that was far from the reality for most characters in these stories.
SF isn’t just another genre: first of all, once you posit this kind of separation, one genre may, for example, be more demanding than another in terms of the level of artistry and self-reference it demands from it’s writers. Many SF novels take it for granted one has read lots of SF. “Gone With the Wind” takes it for granted one is acquainted with larger and more generic American culture.
Secondly, adapting novels like “Gone With the Wind” and “Dune” to film have similar problems: length. Beyond that “Dune” had an extra problem and that was the mainstream public had to be educated by way other SF films and TV to understand “Dune” in 1984 which it couldn’t be trusted to do and so that 1984 film was compromised. It wasn’t til some 20 years later that “Children of Dune” found a public that had a sufficient grounding in the vocabulary of SF that success could be achieved.
And there is no such genre as “space fantasy.” “Star Wars” is as firmly within the realm of SF as any movie out there. Just because an aura of plausibility is thrown over one kind of fake tech as opposed to another kind of fake tech is meaningless. The distinction is sometimes made between “hard” and “soft” SF but Star Wars contains elements of both.
Just as SF has a vocabulary for the mainstream public to learn, so it is with speaking of the history of SF. Making up distinctions by individuals reveals a lack of knowledge of that history and a Tower of Babel when trying to discuss it. Call a wrench “Fred” or a nonsense word or use Farsi and see how far you get in fixing things with other people.
Speaking of games, does any other scifi fan out there find BioWare’s Mass Effect series of games to be both engaging and impressive in their storytelling and in the depth of the universe they have created? Playing one of those is like *being in* the story, and many results of the choices you make actually effect the flow of galactic politics and war. Very cool. I am looking forward to experiencing the conclusion next month!
More of an open-world type Elder Scrolls fans, but, yes, Mass Effect has a brilliantly conceived story and characters you feel close to.
Fittingly enough, both their single-player Knights of the Old Republic and new MMO, The Old Republic are very well done in settings and in writing.
i loves me some scifi too. exspecially when they come with bodacious broads, and a good story line that everybody can believe, like killing bad aliens and such. they have really evolved through the years. star trek to star wars to next generation to enterprise and dozens in between and since. it really is an art form.
imho, jrr tolkien was a story telling genius. i read his books as a kid, and was glad to see them reproduced in excellent movies. the first book about bilbo baggins, “The Hobbit” is coming out as a movie soon. he found the ring when gollom lost it. hot babes there too. liv, marry me.
– ComicCon? We ought to have a panel debate this!
NOLA (new orleans) was just last weekend. You can look up the two primary comic con players — wizard world and comiccon international. You can see the show dates there. New Orleans was a wizard world show.
Ahhh…Olivia Munn…When I drool over her, my wife understands.
Well, his freelordship DID kinda invite the peaniut gallery peanuts to wander over to the districts of Scifistan closest to the Gulf of Porn.
Happy days.
Do you have to use that many words to be so wrong? I bet you could’ve been that wrong far more efficiently if you’d tried.
Please be more pithy or correct in the future.
Minecraft gets a big thumbs-up from my 13yo and his friends. It’s one of the few games he can play with all of them because it’s not a shooter game and so it gets parental approval. His older brother showed it to him and now half of his 7th grade class plays it- all by word of mouth. I just think it’s hilarious that he’s got pigs trapped in the basement because they’re too cute to eat, but too annoying to run free. Life is full of little compromises like that.
Personally, I think that scifi, like other genres, can run the gamut from the ridiculous (Jar-Jar Binks) to the sublime (2001: A Space Odyssey) just like any other genre. But it’s much harder to write good science fiction, because of the interplay between science, characters, and the overarching theme or message the writer is trying to convey. Ordinary fiction doesn’t deal with the science and much of the time doesn’t bother with a theme, either (at least modern fiction often doesn’t). I think science fiction writers struggle with characters, and since that’s what most other fiction writers (and readers) focus on, scifi takes a lot of heat over it.
“I don’t just read sci-fi/fantasy for the escape. I read it because, right now, it’s where the intellectual action is in fiction. Stop laughing, you snobs out there, . . .”
I would say it has been there for decades, in fact the three people you cite span at least half a century IIRC, and I’m sure many of us can add other favorites to easily cover from 1850-1990, and 1750-2012 with a bit more effort.
As for the general comments regarding whether Star Wars is sci-fi or not, if we are going to go down that path let us be fair and start from all of it being Fiction, and start defining genres, sub-genres, and tropes from there. And yes, I am sure we can get all academically precise about it and “properly” classify Star Wars as Space Opera or Space Fantasy or whatever other ultra-precise little niche someone prefers instead of being “pure” Science Fiction, but for casual use calling it sci-fi is good enough, particularly for people who don’t give a rat’s about said technical distinctions.
I got as far as Why Star Wars and Sci-Fi Actually Don’t Suck when I stopped reading. Sorry, can’t do it…
You apparently found it interesting enough to comment on it.
Kinda like the TV ad where the girl calls the boy to tell him she’s giving him the silent treatment, hmm?
Both Star Wars and Star Trek suffer from the slow onset of a subtle disease, gratuitous weirdness. The later films are a prime example. Story and character development go flying out the window.
The Dark Side has nothing to do with character — or as Yoda originally put it, “That is why you fail.” It has everything to do with the commercial and artistic (sic) seductions of CGI.
It is as if the software developers said, “If we build it, they will come,” where the concept of “come” is a physiological excitement exhibited by the film makers when they see all the new things which can be done since (*gasp*) only last year.
I’ve been around hi-tech far too long. I’m not impressed when it’s used as a substitute for thought. I read sci-fi in the Fifties and Sixties. Today’s does not think. Screw it.
I first went to see the original Star Wars at the theatre with my favorite aunt in 1977 when I was 8 years old, and loved it. I went home from that movie in the back seat of my aunt’s car, facing backwards and pretending I was a gunner on the Millennium Falcon, and all of the other cars on the freeway were attacking Tie fighters that I desperately had to shoot down. Of course, it became a big event for the two of us to go together to each of the subsequent sequels, in 1980 and 1983 or thereabouts.
I recently re-watched the original series for the first time in a very long time (a friend gave me the boxed set as a Christmas present), and I share the conventional wisdom of most Star Wars fans: the first two movies in the original trilogy were true classics that stand the test of time. The series begins to run badly off the rails about halfway through Return of the Jedi, when a band of furry teddy bears armed with rocks and sticks defeats the Emperor’s most elite, heavily-armed shock troops, and then celebrates with a teddy bear luau around a campfire. That was the point where it became irretrievably obvious that Lucas had become far more concerned with the toys and merchandise than with the integrity of the story.
The later “pre-quels” were awful and almost unwatchable. Yes, this includes Revenge of the Sith.
These are just my own personal opinions, of course. If you loved The Phantom Menace or whatever, good for you: watch it over and over and over again if that’s what floats your boat. I would never presume to declare your interests illegitimate just because I don’t like the same things. Unlike a certain PJMedia blogger who shall remain nameless. To that nameless woman: how dare you piss all over the favorite memories of my youth? Just to stir stuff up and generate hits? Shame on you.
Right there with you, Hayabusa.
Star Wars IV & V were/are amazing to this day.
I was playing Molkky (Finnish wooden peg game) at our place with friends when their son came outside and told their father, ‘Skywalker’s on t.v.’
Mark Hamill had a cameo on the t.v. show, ‘Chuck’. A corny, bit part but nostalgia stirred in all of us approaching 40.
Heck the stylish, encouraging messages of, ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ episodes are respectable as well.
The latter Star Wars movies.. awful. Some of the WORST acting I think most of us have endured.
I haven’t watched any of them in their entirety for the acting is frighteningly stoic, lifeless and just pitiful.
McGregor’s Kenobi was alright but he’s no Alec Guinness.
‘The latter Star Wars movies.. awful. Some of the WORST acting I think most of us have endured.’
Can’t argue with that one.
You have to hand it to Lucas, you have to work real hard to make Samuel Jackson give a horrible performance, but George managed it.
I still enjoyed the movies, though.
What everyone is missing here is that in 1977, there had NEVER been a movie like Star Wars before. I was 23 at the time, and it blew me, and everyone else, away. Ya gotta remember I grew up on 50′s era science fiction movies like “Attack of the Mushroom People”, ancient Godzilla movies, and “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.” Believe me, Star Trek was a vast improvement in 1968. Star Wars was such an incredible step forward beyond the tv series. Movies were NEVER the same.
Which brings me to Harrison Ford. I fell in love with him in Star Wars and followed him through Indiana Jones and beyond. He was so YOUNG in Star Wars, but then, we all were.
Exactly. I remember seeing the original Star Wars several times. There was just so much there for a scifi fan. I always noticed a new detail with each viewing.
However, I did find the novelty to have worn off after “Empire”, and the last three Star Wars installments to be horrible, and no longer see why they draw so well at the box office.
Kurosawa? Duel at OK corral with swords is a more aproppiate description. It is a western in space. The parents killed, the young kid taking the arms to revenge like the Lone Ranger. And the showdown to see who is faster.
For sure the Leni´s bit passed unacknowledge because he is left lenning
The main problem with Revenge is the politics. it was a critics of Iraq war. Beside the rupture of continuity makinkg Obi Wan a lier( Vader jumped into the dark side for his family not out of pride)
I read somewhere George Lucas is the supreme symbol of baby boomer sell-out and betrayal and that the Star Wars prequel horrors – indicative of among other things, Lucas doing it all his ego-maniacal way instead of getting a real writer and director to helm the projects – are more representative of Hollywood’s decline into utter commercial drivel than anything else. Like so many I loved the first two films (I was seven when Star Wars came out). I didn’t even go see the last prequel, Revenge of the Soth/Shit/Sith or whatever that tripe is called. I was so tempted to walk out of ‘Attack of the Clones’ or whatever that was called, one of the worst films I have ever seen and that is saying a lot. Red Letter Media have done the best critiques of the Star Wars prequels you will find, brilliant stuff. If you haven’t see their three very professional, insightful and hilarious reviews of each of those horror shows, do yourself a favour.. After checking out their video reviews (each is an hour long or so), I realized that these Star Wars horrors were even worse than I first thought!
PS To those who love science fiction, my blog’s tagline is ‘Politics and Prejudices of the Science Fiction Genre Community’. Its central focus is exposing (often rabid and extreme) anti-Semitism and related (moral and cultural relativism) in the professional genre community, that’s among notable writers, editors..
Actually, Lucas lifts from a lot more than Kurosawa. The podrace in Episode I is, shot-for-shot, lifted from Ben Hur. When Anakin sneaks into the Tusken Raider camp in Episode II, it’s once again, shot-for-shot, lifted from “The Searchers” where they sneak into the Indian camp. Vader’s first appearance in III looks like it’s lifted from Frankenstein, but I’m not 100% on that.
Honestly, the BEST Star Wars outside the original trilogy is, believe it or not, in the Dark Horse comic spinoffs. You’ve got writers there who have taken the original property and inserted their own creations into it, so you’re basically getting new (not rehashed) story inserted into Lucas’ world. Great examples: John Ostrander’s Star Wars: Legacy (about Luke’s drug-addicted great-great grandson–and it’s NOT cheesy), Agent of the Empire (about a James Bond type of Imperial agent), and Dark Times (a Jedi struggles to find his place in the universe after Order 66).
I’m old enough to have actually seen the 1st film in the theater – loved it! As well as the 2nd, but when Ewillies were introduced, I lost interest in a BIG d@mn hurry. Saw the one mostly about sith-lords 6? – 8? yrs. ago, and fell asleep. Hubby & I went w/his siblings, 2 from out of town; 1 lives here. The men (except my darlin’) were, “oooh, how kewl!” We just looked at each other, considering both of them are on SSI because they’re justifiably mentally ill.
After myriad comments on here about the bodacious bods, hot babes in bondage, etc. (some edging up if not over into porn), I think we can logically state that the Sci-Fy geeks, gamers & dressing-up losers to cons are all NOT getting any. Therefore they enjoy porn of ANY and ALL types. Nauseating and disgusting. Unfortunately the article’s writer had it right when he said “get a life”, but I think it applies to a bunch of adolescent/immature males such as he.
After myriad comments on here about the bodacious bods, hot babes in bondage, etc. (some edging up if not over into porn), I think we can logically state that the Sci-Fy geeks, gamers & dressing-up losers to cons are all NOT getting any.
It’s one thing to be as ignorant as you are; it’s astonishing that you seem to consider it a virtue. Go to a con sometime. Not only is there a lot of hooking up by good looking people, but *most* of those dressup “losers” are far more successful than you and get paid a craplod more than you.
I was lucky enough that first time I watched Star Wars IV it was in a theater who had a semispherical screen where part of the action was projected over the heads of the spectators. The result was that it appeared like as if the Imperial Cruiser was overflying us. It made me lower on my seat as I was overwhelmed by the seemingly inmense size and power of the cruiser. Instant love for the franchise. Of course the stupid ewoks and the ridiculously easy demise of the Imperial Battleship killed that love.
While entertaining for the 16 and under crowd, I never thought Star Wars was actually meant for adults to take seriously enough to debate over. Kathy Shaidle also prefers The Monkees to The Beatles. ‘Nuff said. As for Bono,
“There must be some way out of here,
Said the joker to the thief.
There’s far too much confusion,
And I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen they drink my wine,
Plowmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line,
Know what any of it is worth.”
– Bob Dylan
Seems like a bunch of people who can’t exercise their imagination beyond the point of “Should I wear the dark blue socks or the darker blue socks today” dumping on a literary/social genre that is completely beyond the scope of their minds.
If you can’t get why sci-fi is important as you flip your cell phone or play on the screen of your smartphone, both at least partially inspired by Star Trek (Cpt Kirk used to flip his communicator open and Mr. Spock and Dr. McKoy used their tricorder to analyze new life forms) then you have no inkling as to what inspires mankind.
Go to any place in the silicon valley and reference basic geek stuff (e.g. classic trek ‘it’s dead Jim’ or anything else) and *everyone* gets it. No exceptions. It’s the so called loser nerds and geeks who like sci-fi who have invented all this stuff.
For you non-loser types who think you’re serious, how about that Armadillo Aerospace company? You know, the one that just blasted the world’s first REUSABLE rocket to 50km the 28th and is working with USAF and NASA and SpaceX re tourism? Run by none other than John Carmack, the loser geek gamer who brought you Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake. What a loser.
Any Robert Jordan fan obviously has exceptional taste.