I'm just about finished with a book published by BenBella with the above title. It discusses whether Star Wars (all of it, the movies, the knock off books, the toys, everything) has been good for science fiction. There are actually a bunch of charges. That was one of them. Others were that it was really fantasy disguised as Science Fiction, another was that it pushed real science fiction from the book shelves and another was that it portrayed women as weak. There were several others but those were the big ones from my stand point.
Now the question: What's your take on Star Wars Good bad or indifferent to the health of the genre?
Now the question: What's your take on Star Wars Good bad or indifferent to the health of the genre?
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Re: Star Wars on Trial
Tue, December 19, 2006 - 2:33 PMMy $0.02:
I think any blockbuster has an effect on whatever genre it falls under...mass marketing has its good and its bad points.
Star Wars introduced a lot of people to science fiction: I know it was the first movie I ever saw, period. Lord of the Rings did that for fantasy, but did it make fans of the genre? That I'm not sure of. Did it boost sales of the book - absolutely. Is that good? Maybe. Star Wars, of course, wasn't a movie made from a book, so did it help the genre? I think it did. I never read the spinoffs or got tied up in the marketing, but the movies certainly affected my reading tastes as they developed.
Was it science fiction or fantasy? Both, I think. Trade the starships for wooden ships and ray guns for arrows, and you'd have fantasy. However, that's pretty much what space opera is, right? As for pushing "real" science fiction from the shelves...considering the passion we seem to have for mass-market culture in the US, if Star Wars hadn't been pushing "real" sf from the shelves, something else would have been, so I don't think Star Wars can be blamed for that. Blame it on the culture that created LucasArts Ltd.
Did it portray women as weak? I thought for that for the time period in which the movies were made, Leah kicked ass ;-) ! And lately, certainly one wouldn't see Padmei as weak. That's just my (yes, I'll admit it) fan-based gut reaction. Maybe there are those who would argue. I haven't read the book, Tim, so I don't know the reasoning behind the "charges" - I'm easily swayed by evidence, if the evidence makes sense.
Overall, I'd say good but kitschy. Kitschy can be fun sometimes, though.
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Re: Star Wars on Trial
Sun, December 24, 2006 - 2:24 PMGiven that I contributed to the book in question, I'd have to say that Star Wars is wonderful, because it gave me the opportunity to get paid for writing I think about Star Wars. -
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Re: Star Wars on Trial
Mon, December 25, 2006 - 9:05 PMYou're Bruce Bethke, the guy that argued for both sides. To be honest I never thought that much about Star Wars. I found the book when I was trapped between planes in the Detroit Airport. What I found most interesting about the book was the discussion about what it did to the market.
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Re: Star Wars on Trial
Thu, March 8, 2007 - 6:57 AMOkay so now my four year old daughter is absolutely nuts about Star Wars. She has gone so far as to inform me that she wants to marry Obi Wan Kenobi. If she were a juror she'd vote that Star Wars was good for Science Fiction. I guess looking at it from a kid's perspective, the visuals are incredibly rich and they don't much care about story flaws.
