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Hot take: Star Wars is not sci fi. It’s space western at best.
arguably the space part makes it sci fi
The originals were fantasy. I’s not a hot take, it’s fact - Swords, wizards, castles, knights, the heros journey. Some of the other shows and media since departed from that. Mandelorean is a western, solo was a heist movie, and most the shows don’t fit the fantasy tropes that well. None of Star wars, to my knowledge, fits sci fi at all.
The Thrawn book trilogies are probably the closest I’ve found to Star Wars being sci fi. There is a specific focus on real world physics in a way that is very absent from everything else Star Wars especially when they write about space battles. Only things that stay firmly fantasy and require that suspension of disbelief are, of course, the Force and Thrawns preternatural ability to read an enemy’s battle tactics from their species artwork
It very much sci-fi fantasy. It’s the tech level, availability, and the fact that universe used is literally a galaxy where people actually travel to other galaxies (using spaceships with some very fictional abilities). Kamino is in a minor galaxy that is close by and you see Luke and Leia on a ship with a unspecified galaxy out the view port in the background.
Other tech that puts it into sci-fi: controlled plasma blades, neurally connected prosthetics, bacta, droids, weapons with stun and kill, repulsors, reactors for personal ships, energy shields, hyperdrive, industrial cloning.
I’m sure there are other good examples as to why it qualifies as science fiction. If Star Wars isn’t in a sci-fi genre, then Star Trek is a political drama.
so red rising is fantasy and not sci fi?
Dont know what that is, tbh. I lost interest in the series after Disney kept doing their thing. I can’t speak for any of the new stuff from the last few years.
it’s a completely unrelated novel series. set in space and clearly sci fi, but has castles, dueling, war games, and peasants
Red Rising isn’t hard sci-fi, but it is more notably sci-fi as a series after the first novel and the weird little obvious Hunger Games sequence ends.
The combat-oriented Golds are also an obvious ripoff of 40k Space Marines and the author absolutely betrays the overall message in the third book but that’s not related to the question, I just hate that he did it.
There can be peasants and feudal social classes in sci-fi. Sci-fi explores how society will react to future events and technology, but you could absolutely have a, for example, post apocalypse sci-fi novel about knights fighting over fiefdoms with swords in the ruins of Earth.
One of the reasons Star Wars gets criticised for not being sci-fi is that the science just doesn’t matter to the story.
You could have told the exact same story with samurai/warrior monks, horses, and wooden sailing ships, so the science is an aesthetic, not a plot element.
Like, they have a literal slave race of androids, fusion, FTL, everything, and it just doesn’t fucking matter. There isn’t a robot uprising. Everyone’s poor for no discernable reason, despite AI being a thing and the society effectively having unlimited energy, etc etc etc.
Red Rising might have had their weird little Youth Death Tournament but there was a point to the society doing that, to create a militarised group of the next generation of the ruling class.
Why is there poverty in Red Rising? Because they’re eugenics powered space fascists and it’s a control mechanism.
Why is there poverty in Star Wars? Because Lucas apparently never considered it should be anything else.
Oo that’s fancy! Thank you for sharing
It’s funny/weird that Dune is much more “more fantasy than sci-fi” than Star Wars, but somehow it’s still considered one of the greatest sci-fi stories of all times.
Well, Dune at least does a half-assed attempt at explaining how this is a projection of a possible human future. Star Wars didn’t.
That being said, I wouldn’t call Dune “crunchy” sci fi at all. It’s a perfect example of why fantasy gets lumped in with sci fi so much (which, honestly, I hate)
maybe, just maybe, there actually isn’t that big of a difference between sci fi and fantasy
Eh. Speculative fiction is different from magical realist revanchism in a lot of critical ways.
But they both routinely serve as metaphors for the modern era.
Dune is more theological fiction than fantasy or sci-fi.
Mandelorean is a western
It nakedly and obviously cribs from Seven Samurai, The Good The Bad And the Ugly, and Wolf and Cub.
To me, Star Wars is a fairy tale in space.
Star Wars belongs firmly in the “science fantasy” category; it’s a work that draws on both sci-fi and fantasy tropes.
