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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Firefly and Star Wars are both squarely in this science fiction tradition, which precedes John Campbell's more narrow and hard-science defined genre.

Hmm... I've never really considered SW to be Space Op, but now that I think of it, it strikes me that it's a very divided 'verse, with Han, Chewie, the Falcon, the Cantina scene, bounty hunters, and all the stuff I love about the originals firmly on the Space Opera side of the force. The feudalism in space stuff (and oh, how I love that phrase) feels much more sword-and-sorcery romantic quest, and I think that's what pings people as "not SF" about it. (It's also about the only damn thing in the new trilogy, but I could just be bitter -- still -- about the grievous lack of Solo.)

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1966-present--style dominant

Do you know, offhand, what was the "present" he was speaking of? Do we think that we are still in a "style-dominant" mode?

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the grievous lack of Solo

He would have been, like, 12. And it would have been far too much to ask to have had his father (or mother) involved in it. Besides, I doubt Han even knows who his parents are.

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