Star Wars and genre

I’ve been watching Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord. It’s making me think a lot about storytelling. So far it’s a very interesting tale with a villain at the center of the story, which has me thinking I need to write about blog post about that and Shakespeare and how, no, not every villain thinks they’re the hero of their story. But this is not that post. This blog post is about Star Wars and genre, and how Star Wars has been every genre, except maybe science fiction.

I couch that with “maybe” because I haven’t read all the books. I have seen the movies. I’ve seen most the the shows, I think I’m only missing a few episodes of the cartoons. I played the old tabletop role-playing game. I’ve read only some of the comics. One of the things about learning about something is being cognizant that there’s more out there one doesn’t know about. And there’s a lot of Star Wars novels and comics tie-ins out there, and for all I know one or more of them have managed to write a science fiction story in the Star Wars universe.

This topic first piqued my interest a decade ago. Someone was complaining online about one of the movies not being realistic, and I wondered, have you seen any of the other movies? They are fine films, but they don’t really use realistic physics at any point. Starting with Star Wars: A New Hope, spaceships bank turns, the Death Star’s planet killing ray travels almost instantaneously, etc. Physics and science in general only exist in Star Wars when they need to, and that’s because these movies and tv shows are not science fiction.

There are many types of science fiction. Most often the science in science fiction is engineering. Generally that’s it. The heroes aren’t testing hypotheses, they’re trying to fix wiring or complete a program or diffuse a bomb strapped to a reactor before the timer runs down. Which is fine, though I love the exceptions as well. I’m always mentioning Fringe on my blog, partially I think because they often are testing the wildest of hypotheses… but back to Star Wars. Part of the reason I think it hasn’t been science fiction is that even engineering fiction can’t break actual science, at least not too egregiously.

As a writer who likes to write in many genres, and as a reader who reads in many genres, I love that Star Wars has been so many genres. It has been fantasy in space. It has been westerns and samurai films, two genres with a lot of overlap already. It is almost always an adventure story. Andor, probably my favorite Star Wars story, is an amazing espionage show. Skeleton Crew did a great job with a children’s adventure story, it’s like Treasure Island in a space-like setting. The Skywalkers are a multigenerational family saga. And I know I’ve already mentioned fantasy, but pretty much every time we come back to the Jedi, we’re getting deep into fantasy tropes again. I think the closest I’ve seen Star Wars come to science fiction was with Galen Erso being needed to go back in and finish the engineering of the Death Star, but even that at the end of the day is powered by magic crystals that are used in the Jedi rites.

All this got me thinking: what would it take to make a science fiction story set in Star Wars?

There are of course many ways to approach this. Does one even bother to deal with the problem of how physics has been portrayed in the other stories? One possible solution to this is that Star Wars takes place in a galaxy far far away. Maybe physics are different in that galaxy. Maybe the aether that people once believed exists in space does exist in that galaxy and that explains the ships banking their turns as if there’s an atmosphere. We have made enough observations of nearby galaxies to be pretty certain that the laws of physics are the same in other galaxies… though… Star Wars does also take place “a long long time ago.” Maybe the physics of that galaxy were different but changed. It might be interesting to have a scientist character making observations that the physics of their galaxy were suddenly in flux. What affect would that have on space travel?

Or the easier route would be to ignore it. Focus more tightly on a scientist or group of scientists. These scientists don’t have to worry about galaxy-wide physics. They just need to deal with whatever problem we’ve given them. The nature of that problem would probably be an engineering issue. Maybe they have to design a new type of droid. Maybe they have to reverse engineer some ancient ship. It would probably be best to keep the story as removed as possible from the Jedi, because again, with the Jedi come the fantasy tropes. Maybe the story is set in academy of learning. There are numerous possibilities that start with the “what if” question or with a “maybe”.

All in all, whatever the genre, I’m eager to see what sort of stories will be told in the Star Wars universe.