Scifi and Fantasy: where do we draw the line?

[M. Robert Gibson]

Star wars is Space Opera

Actually, according to Lord Lucas himself, it's Space Fantasy. But then, who listens to the authors anyway

George Lucas: The Wizard of 'Star Wars'

Conversation with 'Star Wars' creator George Lucas, who reveals the voice behind Darth Vader, where Wookies come from, robots need love too.

www.rollingstone.com

You firmly establish that at the beginning of Star Wars with the words: “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”
Well, I had a real problem because I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, “You know there’s no sound in outer space”. I just wanted to forget science. That would take care of itself. Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science-fiction movie and it is going to be very hard for somebody to come along and make a better movie, as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t want to make a 2001, I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes.

Yes, I know, I've quoted this before. Good article though

 

[Venusian Broon]

Actually, according to Lord Lucas himself, it's Space Fantasy. But then, who listens to the authors anyway

George Lucas: The Wizard of 'Star Wars'

Conversation with 'Star Wars' creator George Lucas, who reveals the voice behind Darth Vader, where Wookies come from, robots need love too.

www.rollingstone.com

Yes, I know, I've quoted this before. Good article though

Actually, actually he also called it Space Opera as well. If you want confirmation, he says it on the directors commentary track to the version of The Empire Strikes Back that I have. In fact he goes on to define what Space Opera is to him and of course mentions fantasy and SF. So him calling it space fantasy makes sense as well. I'm sure he's used all sorts of similar terms in the numerous interviews he's had.

 

[Swank]

Actually, actually he also called it Space Opera as well. If you want confirmation, he says it on the directors commentary track to the version of The Empire Strikes Back that I have. In fact he goes on to define what Space Opera is to him and of course mentions fantasy and SF. So him calling it space fantasy makes sense as well. I'm sure he's used all sorts of similar terms in the numerous interviews he's had.

Lucas isn't an expert on SF classification. He's a movie producer attempting to distance his SF adventure from the dystopian and egghead SF TV and films of the '60s and '70s so people aren't too turned off to buy tickets. He specifically was not making another 2001, Logan's Run or Star Trek and wanted the public to know that this wasn't going to be the sort of preachy stuff they had come to associate with the genre.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Actually, according to Lord Lucas himself, it's Space Fantasy. But then, who listens to the authors anyway

Damn straight!

Ray Bradbury said that Martian Chronicles was not science fiction. Humans won't have any problem breathing that vacuous atmosphere.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Just to be a trouble maker and add to the confusion I make the distinction between iSF and eSF.

Intellectual/Informative versus Entertaining SF

For examples I'll choose trusty:

A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C Clarke

And

Galactic Odyssey by Keith Laumer

Moondust was informative about infrared, la grange points, Plato and CO2 poisoning.

Odyssey was just a swashbuckling interstellar adventure story. At least it was in my teens, it might bore me out of my skull today or just push nostalgia buttons.

But I think there are reasons why people who are not into SF or reading very much could benefit from reading science fiction. Of course making informative SF entertaining is the ideal. But Ray Bradbury was certainly a better writer than Asimov though I read more Asimov.

I put Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin into the intellectual category though it is scientifically uninformative. It raises the questions of who owns knowledge and how we should educate children.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Actually, according to Lord Lucas himself, it's Space Fantasy. But then, who listens to the authors anyway

Space Fantasy may simply be a subset of Space Opera rather than a separate category. Some other Space Operas just don't have fantasy elements but are merely inferior science fiction.

In the bad old days of my youth, space opera was a derogatory term.

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[Swank]

It always amazes me how much some dedicated SF fans hate SF.

 

[paranoid marvin]

I could never understand where the term 'space opera' came from anyway. Tv dramas were only titled 'soap opera' because they were (originally) sponsored by soap companies. Star Wars is nothing like opera and is nothing like serialised family drama shows. And despite Admiral Motti describing Vader as a 'sorceror', 'the Force' in Star Wars is not magic, but the ability by some to use their minds to manipulate energy fields. Whilst this might sound improbable, it isn't entirely fantasy. So I would definitely class Star Wars as 'science fiction'.

 

[BAYLOR]

Okay Mr Pedant, let's refine it further.

Is the main focus space, the future, or time travel? Then it's science fiction.
Is the main focus the distant past, or mythological creatures? Then its fantasy.

Then you have books and stories that don't quite fit, for example.

Zothque by Clark Ashton Smith
Tales from the Dying Earth by Jack Vance
The Sword of Shanara by Terry Brooks
Magus Rex by Jack Lovejoy
Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen

In these stories you're dealing with distant futures in which science has given way to magic and you have creatures things that are not necessarily of mythological variety.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

One definition of soap opera is a "drama series dealing typically with daily events in the lives of the same group of characters."

Stars Wars and Star Trek, and many other science fiction stories are soap operas, they just stretch the meaning of the word daily.

 

[M. Robert Gibson]

Space Opera
As ever, Wikipedia is our friend

Space opera - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The term "space opera" was coined in 1941 by fan writer and author Wilson Tucker as a pejorative term in an article in Le Zombie (a science fiction fanzine). At the time, serial radio dramas in the United States had become popularly known as soap operas because many were sponsored by soap manufacturers. The term "horse opera" had also come into use to describe formulaic Western films. Tucker defined space opera as the science fiction equivalent: A "hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn". Fans and critics have noted that the plots of space operas have sometimes been taken from horse operas and simply translated into an outer space environment, as famously parodied on the back cover of the first issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, when the stories were printed in science-fiction magazines, they were often referred to as "super-science epics".

I think we need to revive the term "super-science epics"

 

[Parson]

I like "super-science epics" or maybe "Science Fiction Epics?" By that I would have in mind several volumes of SF set in the same "universe."

 

[psikeyhackr]

I like "super-science epics" or maybe "Science Fiction Epics?" By that I would have in mind several volumes of SF set in the same "universe."

The Man-Kzin Wars?

Larryniven dot net

 

[Parson]

The Man-Kzin Wars?

Larryniven dot net

Yes, that would be an example, or like Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

 

[Swank]

Yes, that would be an example, or like Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

Dune - 6 books
Culture - 10
All of the I, Robot to Foundation books including the Caves of Steel stuff must be 15+ books.
Peter Hamilton Commonwealth - 8
Robert Reed's Marrow - 5 +shorts