Yes, Star Wars is science fiction
It’s difficult to take seriously a definition of science fiction that excludes all the most famous science fiction stories like Dune, Star Trek and Star Wars.
You likely had one of two responses to the title of this post
“Wait, there are people who think Star Wars is not scifi?”
OR
“Goddam FANTASY pretending to be science fiction!!!”
For the first group, yes, there is a substantial section of science fiction ‘fandom’ who are DETERMINED that science fiction does not include the most famous science fiction story of all time.
These fans tend to be older — in their 60s and 70s — and experienced science fiction in the 1950s and 60s. And there’s an interesting history lesson in why these folks hold this strange idea.
For most of its first 300 years science fiction was written by scientists, philosophers and intellectuals. People who were trying to understand the post-Christian universe being revealed by science.
From Thomas More and Johannes Kepler, through Voltaire and Mary Shelley, to HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon, great thinkers engaged in myth making, the creation of stories that explained and gave meaning to the new scientific worldview.
These new myths also started to gain tremendous popularity. Novels, movies, tv and later video games would all exploit the mythic narratives imagined by scientists and philosophers as a source of popular storytelling.
One example of this was American magazine publishing of the 30s onwards. The legendary magazine editors Hugo Gernsback and John W Campbell applied “science fiction” as a marketing category for the mythic stories they published.
Campbell also applied a semi-rigorous definition to science fiction, that it should be the extrapolation of and speculation upon only established scientific fact. It’s an interesting idea in itself, but a poor definition for science fiction…
…for the simple reason that most science fiction doesn’t meet the definition, or even come close to meeting it.
The term “science fantasy” was for a time in the late 50s and 60s used to refer to to all the stories that were clearly science fiction, but didn’t meet Campbell’s wonky marketing category.
At various times both Dune and Star Trek have been dismissed as “science fantasy”, and when Star Wars released in ’77 it was dismissed by those same people for the same reasons.
It’s difficult to take seriously a definition of science fiction that excludes all the most famous science fiction stories like Dune, Star Trek and Star Wars.
Science fiction fandom gets caught up in endless definitional arguments, partly because the participants enjoy them, but also because it has lost sight of its origins as modern myth making.
Some histories of science fiction attempt to include every myth going back to Gilgamesh. This is a clear and obvious category error. All science fiction is myth, not all myth is science fiction.
Science fiction is myth making for the modern world, and has created the mythos of the age of science.
Star Wars is one of the greatest mythic narratives of the modern world. The sources George Lucas drew on to create it are a story in themselves. And why Star Wars failed to fulfill it’s full mythic potential is an even more interesting tale.
