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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More useful stuff from that site. From the Gernsback Continuum:

Contemporaries of Gernsback include:

E.E. "Doc" Smith "Doc" Smith (1890-1965) was the father of the space opera--cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians in space.

Firefly and Star Wars are both squarely in this science fiction tradition, which precedes John Campbell's more narrow and hard-science defined genre. Notably, the phrase "science fiction" was created to describe these space operas originally.

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Isaac Asimov divided the history of modern science fiction

That's actually not a bad set of dividing lines on the evolution of SF in terms of narrative emphasis, though I might quibble about the dates involved. I'm not sure how it works for writers who straddled the dates (or the narrative tropes, for that matter).

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