Star Wars on Trial

by David Brin

  But surely we can agree that there's a real difference between magic and science, between rules made up for a story and the rules that actually might govern our universe. Here's a thought experiment: Pick some speculative element from a science fiction or fantasy story, and imagine asking the author why that element works the way that it does. Then ask why about the answer, and then why again, like an over-curious nine-year-old. If the trail of "whys" eventually leads to something we know about the real world, shouldn't we call that science fiction? If it leads to a snappy "Just because!" well, wouldn't that make it a fantasy?

  In this way of thinking, the important point is not whether the story is about dragons or rocket ships, but rather the attitude of the story toward those speculative elements. If the story treats those elements as a natural extension of the real world, if the story implies that the string of "whys" would intersect with known reality, then it's science fiction. But if those elements are just some big "what-if" exercise, then that part of the story is fantasy.

  This explains why typical science fiction is set the future, something that might result from present-day reality. Fantasies, on the other hand, are often set in some alternate world with no clear connection to our own. There's no need to explain the location of that alternate world, or how exactly to get there from here. In a fantasy those answers will come down to magic, or at least a "Just because."

  This distinction between science fiction and fantasy is the only one that really draws a meaningful line between two fundamentally different ways of telling a speculative story. And while it's still possible to find examples that blur the distinction between the two, those borderline cases are forced to treat the story inconsistently. For although fantastic premises must be simply accepted, science fiction premises not only can be questioned, but will be questioned by the audience. You can't ask an audience to both take something as a given and also question it, which means that attempts to blur my suggested distinction between fantasy and science fiction will simply lead to bad storytelling.

  And so, with these thoughts in mind, let us turn our attention to Star Wars. Specifically, I will now introduce Exhibit A:

  "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...."

  The very first line in each movie screams out that we're on the fantasy side of the divide. Sure, we sort of know where and when this is taking place with respect to present-day Earth, but there's no connection between anything in this story and known reality. These events are not some future history. They're not even some secret past history. By placing the setting in the distant past, in a faraway galaxy, George Lucas was effectively introducing an alternate fantasy universe. You can't get there from here.

  Lucas puts this text at the beginning of his movies for a reason. Not only to create a sense of epic myth, but also to make sure the audience wouldn't question some of his premises. Indeed, in the commentary on the special edition of the original Star Wars, Lucas himself gives us Exhibit B:

  Since it's based on a very, kind of, old story, and not a high-tech story, it's more of a fantasy film than a science fiction film.

  If Lucas had a better understanding of the difference between fantasy and science fiction I could rest my case right here. (And we also wouldn't have had to suffer through the midichlorian debacle in Episode I, but we'll come back to that subject later.)

  Unfortunately, while Lucas is admitting it's a fantasy, this confession seems to be based on the misimpression that it is technology that makes science fiction. But as Clarke tells us, technology and magic can be indistinguishable-you can use both in a fantasy, so long as they're just "what-ifs" without a well-thought-out connection to known science. Similarly, the issue of whether a story is "old" or not-a retelling of old myths-doesn't necessarily make it fall in one category or the other. Still, Exhibit B is useful, because it tells us a bit about Lucas's motives. He's not striving to make this science fiction, which means he's not striving to connect his premises to reality. This is reinforced elsewhere in the same commentary, when Lucas says:

  And in terms of fantasy films and everything, I can't stand it when you sit around and try to explain why a teleporter works....

  Clearly the technology in these movies does not make them science fiction; they're treated as what-ifs, so they might as well be magic. But the heart and soul of Star Wars, the speculative element that arguably made the movie so incredibly successful, is the idea of the Force. Enter Exhibit C, spoken by Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode IV:

  [The Force is] an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.

  I trust that I don't have to bring in any physicists as expert witnesses to tell you that there is no such thing. This is a fantasy premise, through and through; a what-if that the audience fully accepts because by this point in the movie it's clear that we're watching fantasy, not science fiction. Three different characters in Episode IV, including Han Solo, refer to the force as a "religion." A startlingly effective religion, for sure, but the repetition of that word throughout the movie is no accident. A religion is something that you take on faith, not something that you test with science. The line between faith and science is very similar to the line between fantasy and science fiction, and Lucas is clearly putting faith and the Force on the same side of the line.

  The issue here is not whether the Force is real or not in the movies. Han himself is converted from his original view that "There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny," and few would argue that Luke's success at destroying the Death Star resulted from his skill at bull's-eyeing womp rats. The issue here is that the audience has faith that the Force exists in the Star Wars universe, despite the fact that there is no connection between the Force and anything we know about the real world.

  And what holds it all together is that the audience doesn't want answers, the audience is willing to just accept the premise. Lucas himself goes to considerable effort to make sure this remains the case, by not asking "why" Consider Exhibit D, Lucas's commentary on Episode I:

  Every time these rather larger concepts come into play-how does the galaxy work, what is the Force, all this kind of stuff-you have to be very sort of cryptic and deal in almost fortune-cookie descriptions of things.

  Here, Lucas describes the perfect strategy for creating a fantasy world that the audience will accept. By keeping the explanations fuzzy, he avoids any temptation to make a connection between his premises and the real world. However, the irony of Exhibit D is that this very sentence of commentary overlays the precise part of Episode I where Lucas most deviates from his own successful formulathe part where we learn that the Force is related to something called "midichlorians."

  And here, I must admit, the line between fantasy and science fiction gets a bit blurry. First let's look at the hard evidence in Exhibit E, a quote from Qui-Gon Jinn in Episode I:

  Midichlorians are microscopic life-forms that reside inside all living cells.... We are symbionts with them.... Without the midichlorians life cannot exist and we would have no knowledge of the Force. They continually speak to us, telling us the will of the Force.

  Suddenly the Force is starting to look a lot less like fantasy, and a lot more like science fiction. After all, cells and microscopic lifeforms are real, so by making these statements Lucas is connecting the Force with known science. Lucas confirmed this connection in a later interview, stating that-in his mind, at least-there is a direct parallel between midichlorians and real-world mitochondria.

  It means that between the Force, which is sort of a life force, and reality, the connectors between these two things are what we call midichlorians. They're kind of based on mitochondria, which are a completely different animal, that live inside every single cell and allow it to live, allow it to reproduce, allow life to exist. They also, in their own way, communicate with the Force itself.'

  By tying one aspect of the Force into mitochondria-an aspect of our reality-Lucas has now dipped a toe into science fictio
n territory. Using my own definition of science fiction, I cannot help but concede that the midichlorians are, in fact, a science fiction element. But I will argue that this is the exception that proves the rule: Star Wars is inherently a fantasy, and this new science fiction element simply doesn't fit. First, though, we need to be very clear that this new development does not change the status of the Force itself. The Force, as we can see from Exhibit E, is clearly distinct from midichlorians. One is an "energy field," and the other is a "life-form" that allows humans to interact with the Force. Because there is no description of the mechanism by which these microscopic life-forms can communicate with the Force, this means that the Force is still safely in fantasy territory; it's still a what-if, not a technology. Lucas says this explicitly on the DVD commentary:

  The midichlorians are sort of a side issue, not the spiritual, metaphysical part of the Force....

  Fair enough. But we still have to decide whether the "explanation" of midichlorians is enough to pull all of Star Wars into science fiction territory. If this were the case, then this knowledge of how the Force expresses itself through certain individuals would suddenly enlighten all of the previous movies. We could then go back and see how the original Star Wars trilogy wasn't really fantasy, but could now be reinterpreted as science fiction. Episode I would be the key turning point in all of this, and presumably The Phantom Menace-and in particular the exciting news concerning midichlorians-would be wildly hailed by Star Wars fans as pure genius.

  (Pause for laughter to die down.)

  Yes, this idea seems rather amusing, because as we know just the opposite is true. With the possible exception of jar jar, the midichlorian scenes were some of the most reviled in the entire six-movie epic. In one notable fan-edited version of Episode I, these particular scenes were removed entirely.

  But why? Why did the fans not like learning a little bit about how this universe worked? A surfing expedition through Star Wars Internet sites reveals that the fans care deeply about the various intricacies of the Star Wars universe. Why then would a little exposition cause so much discontent?

  If you turn to the fans themselves for an answer to this question, you will hear a thousand different explanations. Many of the complaints would have to do with new questions that arise as a result of this new information. If innate ability to use the Force is based on microscopic life-forms, couldn't this technological fact be used to enhance Jedi abilities? The biotech in this universe is advanced enough to clone people-why not use it to manipulate the midichlorian count? For that matter, if you're going to clone someone, why not pick someone whose cells can harbor a whole bunch of midichlorians in the first place? And how do these life-forms interact with the Force anyway? For that matter, how do people interact with them? The new questions go on, and on and on.

  Some of these questions may have answers; others clearly do not. But what I think even many of the upset fans do not realize is that what upsets them is not the lack of answers-what upsets them is that they have been led to ask these questions in the first place! By hinting that this is a science fiction story, Lucas switched the audience's mental gears into a trail of "whys" that they had never asked of the original trilogy. For science fiction premises not only can be questioned, but they must be-or else it isn't science fiction. And once the questions start, once the audience has switched over into science fiction mode, no question can remain off-limits. Trying to walk the line between fantasy and science fiction, trying to have some premises be what-ifs and other premises tie into reality, is only going to annoy the audience.

  For example, when we learn in Episode I that Anakin might have been conceived by the midichlorians, we hardly know how to take this piece of information. From a science fiction perspective, this is ludicrous to the extreme; midichlorians are not only a completely different life-form, they apparently play such a critical role that they have presumably been around from the very beginning of life itself. So where did Anakin's Y chromosome come from? This is clearly a case of Lucas throwing out another "Just because," and hoping the audience just accepts it. But the audience can't accept it, because these microscopic life-forms aren't a "fortune-cookie description"; they're a concrete, science fiction premise. By forgoing the fantasy framework in one way, we are no longer able to suspend our disbelief in this other way. You can start to see why the midichlorians dismayed so many fans.

  An analogy that comes to mind is that of the curious American movement in which some fundamentalist Christians are trying to have "intelligent design" (ID) taught as an alternative to evolution in science classes. ID is basically an assertion that evolution alone is not sufficient to explain the complexity of biological life, and some "designer" (a.k.a. God) must have done something, somewhere, somehow. Supporters such as the Discovery Institute claim that ID is a "theory" (using the colloquial sense of the word) that rivals the "scientific theory of evolution," careful not to mention the fact that a "scientific theory" is the highest level a scientific hypothesis can ever attain; only ten to twenty hypotheses have ever been so accepted and so widely applicable as to attain "theory" status. Given that ID does not even put forward a single testable hypothesis, it does not connect with known reality, and, using our earlier definitions, this makes it a fantasy.

  Now, imagine how the ID community would react if the Discovery Institute started to fund actual scientific research on testable hypotheses. Suppose they wanted to see whether human beings are indeed special to the hypothesized "designer." They could fund an effort to study DNA sequences of many different species to determine where and when in the past half-billion years the "designer" had chosen to induce complex mutations, and from this determine which lines of organisms the designer had spent more effort "designing." If humans were indeed special, that should show up in the analysis; if, instead, the "designer" was more interested in pygmy octopi, that might show up as well.

  I think it's pretty obvious that, faced with such an honest attempt to connect their assertions to verifiable reality, most ID supporters would throw a fit. They don't want to question how their "designer" made everything happen any more than I wanted to question the Force. More than that, they would soon realize that to pursue this line of scientific thinking would be to subject God to scientific analysis. And once the trail of "whys" began, applying the wellhoned tools of scientific discovery to topics ordinarily reserved for divine revelation, they wouldn't be able to keep any questions of religious knowledge off-limits to science. Even the Kansas School Board might quickly backtrack, revoking their new definition of "science" and returning to the days to where science only dealt with natural, not supernatural, phenomena.

  The point here is that you can't go halfway, explaining some of your premises with actual science, while saving "Just because" for other fantasy premises. The inconsistency is just too much to bear, even for those who favor teaching intelligent design.

  So the issue of the midichlorians boils down to introducing a science fiction element into a well-established fantasy story. And the response from the fans was clear; this new element simply didn't belong. Lucas heard the complaints, and sure enough, we didn't have to listen to much other midichlorian business in the last two movies. Instead, Lucas went back to his own advice from Exhibit D and returned to the fantasy framework that worked so well in the original movies. Midichlorians is the science fiction exception that proves the rule: Star Wars is a straight fantasy.

  And so, ladies and gentlemen, apart from this minor exception of midichlorians, what we have in the Star Wars films is a detailed alternate universe, with no direct connection to our own except on a mythological level. The message from Exhibit A is uncontested; unlike standard science fiction, these stories take place in the distant past. This is not a tale of the future of humanity-it resonates for mythological reasons, not because of any direct connection to our world.

  The magic in this fantasy tale is called the Force. It is magic because it needs, and has, no explanation; it's just taken as a given. We
re this a science fiction story, the Force would have to have some mechanism that ties in with what we know about the real world. Subatomic particles, dark matter, something. But Lucas wisely chooses not to go this route, and when he does slip up, at least he only does it on what he calls a "side issue," and not the key magical element of the story.

  I hope it's clear that fantasy and science fiction, while both perfectly valid approaches to telling a speculative story, are fundamentally incompatible. You can't both ask "why" and not ask "why" about the same premise, any more than you can try to seek the same piece of knowledge through both divine revelation and the scientific method, any more than you can answer "Just because" and "Because" to the same question. And in nearly every way, Star Wars falls on the fantasy side of the divide.

  And with that, I rest my case. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get down to the clinic for my weekly midichlorian transfusion.

  Ken Wharton is a physics professor at San Jose State University. He is also the author of the science fiction novel Divine Intervention, along with a handful of short stories. For his fiction, Ken has been a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Nebula Award.

  THE COURTROOM

  DAVID BRIN: If Your Honor will allow? I would add a few remarks in support of my esteemed colleague, Dr. Wharton.

  MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER: Oh, come on!

  DROID JUDGE: We've given you a lot of leeway, Mr. Stover. I'll allow this.

  DAVID BRIN: In my opinion, the distinction between science fiction and fantasy has very little to do with technology. As Dr. Wharton points out, Star Wars cares little about science, but a great deal about sword fights. In comparison, Anne McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern series is true SE

  No, this distinction is not about hardware. It is first and foremost about how the author feels about society and the concept of human improvability and change.