Science fiction is a narrative genre in which some scientific concept or development, real or imaginary, human or alien, serves as an essential tool for propelling the story forward. What is more, the science involved need not have anything to do with space; it can be sociology, political science or psychology, for example. Or medicine, why not? Examples of science fiction films proper are 2001 – A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, The Andromeda Strain, Fahrenheit 451, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and many more. Without science, natural or social, none of those films would have a story to tell.

Apart from the clones, there is no other instance of science being used as a story-generating agent anywhere in Star Wars. Even the clones, as we shall see later, serve primarily as a potent poetic image. The story could have taken place on Earth in the distant past, with horses as the only form of transport, and still have the same structure and characters. It could be taking place right here and now, on Earth as it is at the moment, spaceships being really cars that can fly. (They roar. Nothing roars in space: there is no air to carry the sound.)

What of the Death Star destroying entire planets? Is that not essential to the story? Not really. The story is the narrative structure; in this case, the narrative structure demands complete destruction of the heroine’s birthplace and family. In the Middle Ages, for example, that would have been a homestead, and it could have been destroyed by fire before her very eyes. Today, it could be a major city which is to be nuked while she looks on in horror. Han Solo need not have been frozen in supercooled carbon: he could have been displayed in a cage for the delight of Jabba’s shabby court. The meaning and the emotional content would have been the same.

And what of the robots? What of the adorable, absolutely essential C3PO and R2D2, the only characters, apart from Yoda, to appear in all six Star Wars films? The pair was inspired by Matashichi and Tahei, the hapless, endlessly arguing peasants who get caught in the wars and end up helping princess Yuki Akizuki recover her usurped throne in Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress. The structural element here is the low social status of the characters and the tragicomedy therein. The practical reason for having robots as narrative frame is obvious: they do not age or die and can serve the boy Anakin as well as his son Luke thirty years later – and his children after him if the need ever arises.

Matashichi and Tahei have recently reappeared as Vorenus and Pullo in Rome, a superb TV series conceived and produced by John Milius (who first drew Lucas’ attention to Hidden Fortress) and Bruno Heller.

What genre, then, do Star Wars belong to? The obvious answer is heroic fantasy, sometimes referred to as “sword and sorcery”, although the latter could be viewed as the more lurid sub-genre of the former. If one was to call The Lord of the Rings heroic fantasy, Red Sonia and Conan II (but not necessarily Conan the Barbarian!) could be said to be “sword and sorcery” films. Heroic here denotes adherence to the Monomyth formula, while ‘fantasy’ indicates that the parameters shaping the world within which the story unravels must include the element of the miraculous as a given, the way they do in Star Wars. In a word, in any heroic fantasy, sorcery is an existential option and the story propellant.