They are fantasy (What if people had psychic powers, like telekinesis and clairvoyance?

That, I think, is where confusion arises, because the line between science-things and fantasy-things isn't clearly drawn. Yes, telekinesis is probably a fantasy concept, and certainly it occurs regularly in that genre; but scientists have, at times-- I'm not aware of any current research, but I am aware that from Victorian times through to perhaps the 1960s and beyond there were people seriously working in the area; damn, it's a while since I read up on this and the names aren't coming to mind-- investigated the possibility that humans do have the power to mentally affect the physical world, or to communicate 'telepathically', etc. Things like ESP even have science-y sounding names.

To be honest, I tend to side with the librarians at my local library, who have given up the fight and now shelve sci-fi and fantasy together. As I'm in it for the stories not the details of the questions, I don't mind.

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Here's another way of looking at it, maybe..."science" fiction needs to utilize something about science, and extend it into what-if, as a key component of the story/conflict.

I think we're at the crux of why Harlan Ellison always said he preferred the term speculative fiction (although I think he's resigned to "science" and even Sci-Fi, which he claimed to loathe at this point). And that makes sense to me on a personal level - if there's no what-if component, no matter how well-built the world/milieu, then it's fantasy. Gross generalization for others, I'm sure, but's that's how I perceive a difference between them.

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Transcript of Joss' Serenity intro: [link]

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I just read the last few posts, including Joss' intro, to my son, who has been harranguing me for the last week about how wonderful RotS is, and who is a huge Lucas fan. He's also one of my Firefly dvd toasters. I just want to thank you guys for helping guide the conversation into less-fraught waters. I love this board to unreasonable bitty bits.

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Now that I think about it, I believe that the closest parallel to Firefly in SF literature might be CL Moore's short story "Shambleau."

It's been a long while since I've read it (I have to pull out my copy of "Best of CL Moore" soon for a reread!), but IIRC, it was basically the Wild West on Mars. Northwest Smith comes to a mining town and hooks up with the the resident outsider, not knowing that she's an alien Siren whose purpose in life (I think--this is where the storyline gets a bit fuzzy for me) is to feed off of men's souls while giving them pure bliss. He is eventually rescued by some friends, but he misses her, even though she was destroying him. Very erotic stuff for Astounding Tales in the mid 1930s.

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if there's no what-if component, no matter how well-built the world/milieu, then it's fantasy.

I can grok this at a writing level. The defining attribute of story is the question it's based on, after all. The question Star Wars is based on isn't a sci-fi question like, "What would happen if the government uses chemically-altered human beings to predict violent crimes in order to prevent them, and what if it's possible they could be wrong?" (Minority Report) or, "What if our reality is a giant computer simulation created in order to keep us prisoner for use by machines?" (The Matrix) Instead, the question of Star Wars is, "What if a young man suddenly discovered that he was the son of a powerful warrior and that he alone can carry that man's legacy and perhaps save the world?"

By the question criterion a great number of stories aren't sci-fi but something of a different sort being told in a sci-fi milieu. For me, I think, the science has to be integral to the plot in order for it to be true sci-fi. You could tell the tale of "Star Wars" in a lot of different settings, including western and medieval. Actually, I'd pay money to see that done.

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I think Star Wars is definitely in the science fiction tradition of Planet Stories and Lensmen and ERB and other fantasies set in space. It's basically a way to mash a bunch of pulp genres together into one convenient form. But while you can quibble about the science in such stories, I think that is a much later formation that came along in the hard science fiction 1950s - the Campell era. To use Kathy's example, nobody doubted "Shambleau" was part of the science fiction canon when it came out. It was also understood to be a teriffic erotic horror story.

I think the western genre elements of Firefly are a bit overstated. Mostly Joss was interested in the political era of Reconstruction and how that muddied all the moral choices. Plus he likes genre and likes Westerns. Still, the central premises of Firefly are all science fiction and there's nothing about it's science based milieu which precludes horses and pistols that shoot bullets instead of deathrays.

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I think it's worth pointing out that, especially in the original 3, Lucas relied heavily on Joseph Campbell's work on Mythology. So, more than fantasy or Sci-Fi, it functions, IMO, primarily as (an attempt at) mythology, so, yes, the story can easily be transposed elsewhere, largely because it is a transposition of existing Story(ies). The same, IMO, can be said of the second and third Matrixes, which felt less like extrapolations of the "What if" to me than "And now that we have set the stage, here are the steps hero stories are supposed to go through".

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Lucas relied heavily on Joseph Campbell's work on Mythology.

For the sake of clarity I'll note I was talking about John Campbell, not Joe.

Oh, and this is useful too:

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Isaac Asimov divided the history of modern science fiction, i.e., works written after 1926, into four types of stories:

1926-38--adventure dominant
1938-50--science dominant
1950-65--sociology dominant
1966-present--style dominant

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Hee, Hec. I was working on my post when you posted yours, so I didn't see that.

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