XKCD: It's more than a comic

Well, the "secret order which specializes in mind tricks and keep the peace in the Galaxy" thing is not unique to Star Wars either. They weren't even the first to invent this.

I watched the movies in numbered order (so from I onwards), and it really changes how you see the series.

For one thing, lightsaber battles suddenly seem a lot more low-key in movie IV.

For another (and this is probably something like heresy), Jar Jar isn't nearly as bad as the hatred suggests if he is the first thing you encounter in the film series. His speech patterns were probably the most offensive thing about him, I think. I found C 3 PO equally exasperating throughout the series as Jar Jar at times. Which is no wonder, as they are BOTH comic relief characters.

THIS

ALL THE THIS

C3PO was the most consistently irritating character throughout the entire series. The happiest moment was when he was blasted to pieces by stormtroopers.

More than Jar Jar Binks?

WAY more. Jar Jar never just sat around complaining shrilly. God I hated 3p0

What about the part when he accidentally got his head put on a battle droid?

"Die, Jedi scum! What am I saying? " XD

c3po was an irritating character. Jar Jar was an irritating concept.

I've seen Star Wars episodes 4 and 5, but I didn't like either one at all. Except for C 3 PO, who I thought was consistently entertaining.

Yeah, I'm not cut out for Sci-fi.

I did watch some episodes of the Clone Wars animated series (I'm a sucker for cartoons anyway). Jar-Jar was surprisingly interesting there (using Confusion Fu, and bordering on Obfuscating Stupidity at times).

"Suited to sci-fi"? I think you have it backwards. Sci-fi may not be suited to you. Which is perfectly fine. I know lots of people, men and women, who just can't get into sci-fi. Some people aren't entertained by crazy speculative ideas.

Not sure if Star Wars is a good litmus test, though. It's more like fantasy/mythology in a sci-fi setting, in that the plot doesn't hinge on speculation about technology and/or the future.

Star Wars is Space Opera, not anything like hard sci-fi. If you want that sort of thing, I can give quite a few better recommendations.

What's the main difference?

Whole books have been written on that. Read the Mohs Scale of sci fi hardness for a very quick overview.

There are space operas that have more sci-fi elements than Star Wars. Foundation comes to my mind, for instance. Though the genre itself relies more heavily on fantasy than sci-fi tropes.

edited 8th Dec '16 7:49:44 AM by petersohn

Or Mass Effect.

Space Opera, very roughly speaking, takes dramatic plots and sticks them into an ostensibly sci-fi setting, making up whatever Technobabble is needed to justify them. It's the underpinning of the Recycled In Space trope.

For example, George Lucas specifically wanted to replicate the look and feel of World War II style fighter dogfights in A New Hope. The Space Fighter concept is very soft sci-fi because of all the physics handwaves involved, so when you see it in film, you know it's Space Opera.

Other symptoms include Space Is an Ocean, Casual Interstellar Travel, Aliens Speaking English, analogues to medieval knights and paladins, magic dressed up as The Force, swordfights In Space, laser battles between fleets of spaceships, and so on. If spaceships are battling each other within visual range, it's Space Opera for sure.

"True" Science Fiction, for its part, will eschew such dramatic conventions for a reliance on realism. Space travel is slow (relatively speaking) and dangerous. Survival tends to be more of a battle against hard physics and biology than against Nazi-esque alien overlords. Lasers travel at the speed of light. FTL Travel may or may not exist, but if it does, it involves wormholes or complex discussion of Alcubierre drives, not ships that just pop into hyperspace and cross thousands of light years in a few minutes. Most planets you find are inhospitable to organic life, never mind human life. If you do meet aliens, you spend a whole bunch of time figuring out their language before you can communicate. If you need to ship humans across interstellar space, most if not all of them spend the time as Human Popsicles.

2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel are very hard on the sci-fi scale. Alien is reasonably hard as far as its depiction of space travel goes, despite being a horror setting; its sequels vary in their insistence on realism. Star Trek is Space Opera, but has a greater or lesser number of nods to hard sci-fi Depending on the Writer. In more recent fare, Interstellar is supposed to be relatively hard, but I haven't seen it. Ender's Game is based on a hard sci-fi novel but softens it a bit to make it easier to film.

edited 8th Dec '16 8:15:40 AM by Fighteer

There are stories that take place across an epic scale like a space opera but stick go the harder science end of the scale, Corey's "The Expanse" being a good example.

Interstellar or 2001 have much less scale than a space opera: they are pretty standard sci-fi with varying degrees of hardness. Others, like Foundation, Dune (or Star Trek, though I haven't seen that one) are space operas, all with greater amount of sci-fi in them than in Star Wars (again, with varying degrees).

On a different note, not everything that involves space travel is a sci-fi (though, interestingly, most of them are). Gravity comes to my mind, for example. Apart from a few anachronisms, every technology used there actually does exist, and the plot starts out from something that is actually routine space travel.

The definjtion of "science fiction" is "some presentation of science is essential to the plot or the setting" which would include Gravity, I think.

I would modify that definition to "science that we don't quite have a handle on presently", personally.

Science Fiction is an extraordinarily broad term; some forms of Fantasy would fall under it as well. The proper term for fiction that is set in a hypothetical future (from the point of view of the author) with a fundamental element being some degree of speculation or prediction about technological change is Speculative Fiction.

Never mind; I had it backwards. Speculative Fiction is the broad term that encompasses almost every kind of What If? story that is set in an alternative version of our current reality — be it past, present-with-changes, or future. Science Fiction is the harder version that broadly means, "Imagine this technology or this scientific idea — now let's make a story around it."

The problem, from a popcultural point of view, is that science fiction became ghettoized a while back to be about stories featuring buxom space babes and ray guns, to the point where it was not taken seriously as a mainstream genre for a long time. Even now, if you say "science fiction" to some would-be movie-goer, it makes their eyes glaze over.

By that definition, Guardians Of The Galaxy is science fiction of the "ray guns and space babes" variety.

edited 8th Dec '16 12:28:41 PM by Fighteer

That is a very broad definition. With that, almost anything can be considered science fiction. Is Columbo sci-fi because it features gadgets that were relatively new at the time? I only consider something a sci-fi if it has something futuristic that does not exist at the time of writing. For example, in The Martian, everything involved is theoretically possible with concurrent technology. It's just not done yet, making it a sci-fi. In Gravity, people are doing in space what they actually do in real life, until something bad happens. But right, it's a borderline example of a sci-fi. As well as Star Wars, but for the opposite reason.

Now I found another example of something that involves space travel as the main theme, but is definitely not a sci-fi. Apollo13. Duh.

edited 8th Dec '16 2:13:35 PM by petersohn

The definition is intentionally broad, because the genre includes so many different kinds of works. However, your criticism is correct- I should have specified "science with a new or speculative element". Gravity is still sci-fi (despite the widespread opinion that it isn't) because the type of space debri chain reaction depicted in the film has never happened, and any fictional representation of it is still speculative. A show like CSI, which also depends on science, isn't sci-fi because the "science" depicted there is presented to the audience as being well-known and understood in the real world.

Of course there are going to be "grey areas" that will defy precise categorization. "Contagion" (a disaster movie about a pandemic in the US) sits right on the line. Is it "speculative" or not? Hard to say. No pandemic on that scale has happened in the US recently, but it has happened in other areas of the world, and they did occur more often in the past. I would say "not sci-fi" but others might disagree. No single definition of any genre is going to be completely clear and concrete. But limiting science fiction to speculations about scientific phenomena as the basis of the plot at least provides a reasonable set of guidelines.

UI Change.

OK maybe I'm missing the joke here, but that one seems a bit mean. I mean, unlike old age, there is something to be done about the sudden UI change: they are decided by designers, and some of their choices are somewhat debatable. Unless the goal of the strip is to make fun of people like me who do complain about UI changes.