I get a headache watching Star Wars like sci-fi where everything is manually controlled by the pilot. How did sci-fi get so disconnected from the actual future?
>How did sci-fi get so disconnected from the actual future?
The original Star Wars was made in 1977, and based heavily on World War 2 combat films (much of the space combat and the trench run on the Death Star was lifted - sometimes shot for shot - from a film called "The Dam Busters.") For reasons of continuity and tone, that mechanical aesthetic can't ever change much throughout the franchise, or else it wouldn't "look" like Star Wars.
But the point is that it's exciting, it's visceral, the archetypes of the fighter pilot and joystick and of buttons that do important things make sense to the audience, and as a result those scenes can convey emotion though the use of familiar visual language.
Sci-fi was never "connected" to the future, and it was never (or at least, never explicitly) about attempting to accurately describe or predict the future. Yes, you could have replaced the ships and pilots in Star Wars with remote or AI controlled drones, not colored in the blasters, etc, and it might be more realistic, but no one would enjoy watching it.
People do enjoy dogfights (and spaceships that bank when they turn) and space wizards with laser swords doing flippy shit and punching each other with telekinesis, though.
Maybe they could explain it all away saying that in a previous era autonomous weapons were used and almost exterminated everyone in the whole star wars universe, so all parties including the empire and the rebels agreed to not make use of automatically controlled weapons or space craft.
Or maybe software technology was lost and they are only able to use extremely rudimentary systems...
>Maybe they could explain it all away saying that in a previous era autonomous weapons were used (...)
Except that fully sentient AI is already commonplace in the form of droids, including battle droids.
This is a universe where a small robot that only speaks in clicks and whistles had to physically transport holographic "data tapes" about a moon-sized space station that can travel faster than light. A lot of it doesn't make sense when you think about it, but then it's supposed to be Flash Gordon with the serial numbers filed off.
> Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance, and risk-taking
> A science fantasy is a cross-genre within the umbrella of speculative fiction which simultaneously draws upon and/or combines tropes and elements from both science fiction and fantasy
The core difference between science-fiction and fantasy goes back to the philosophical debates about the nature of the universe in ancient greece, the difference between a mechanistic view of the Universe (which we have come to accept as the foundation of science) and a teleological view of the Universe. Star Wars has a teleologic view of the Universe, it's baked into the DNA of the material. "The Force", the light side, the dark side, being "strong in the force" based on your heritage, and so on. That's the foundation of Star Wars.
Star Wars is not science fiction, it is fantasy or mythology in a science-fictional setting. It is fusion cuisine.
It clearly doesn't meet some definitions of science fiction but would still be almost universally called that. Try (getting in a time machine and) going to a Blockbuster Video and try to convince them that Star Wars doesn't belong in the science fiction section.
> teleological view of the Universe.
Almost all fiction is almost completely teleological. Nothing ever happens by accident in fiction, everything that happens has a human motivational cause. The characters' incredibly improbable and complicated schemes almost never fail by accident as they very likely actually would but always due to confrontation or betrayal. (See also: political narratives.) The human brain just cannot help but pay attention to sex, alliances, confrontation and betrayal.
The Force being with you by birth is a bad theme because it takes away the humanity of the people that have it. They succeed or fail in part not because of their intentions but because of magic stuff they happen to have that you cannot have. It's painful to watch.
> They succeed or fail in part not because of their intentions but because of magic stuff they happen to have that you cannot have. It's painful to watch.
A great deal of success or failure in real life comes down to legacy, genetics and random chance, or "non-magical stuff" other people have that you cannot.
In the book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe writes about some thing similar, the first astronauts in the Mercury program had nothing much to do, and NASA was considering choosing people like trapeze artists, who are used to stress and high acceleration for the role.
> Also, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a great movie about a great example why you do not pilot your ships with computers all the time.
No, it merely illustrates why you want your AI properly bottled up and airgapped that way the flight computer will follow your instructions after you consult with the AI (assuming an AI is ever built...).
Computers can control spacecraft just fine in the present without AI so really there does not seem to be a pressing need for this.
HAL is merely an expression of the 20th century trope of the computer run amok. Same as the IBM system from "Desk Set" and the "War Games" WOPR. It's a product of ignorant naivete of what computers are capable of and what their true weaknesses are. It has no basis in reality. Just a way for writers to personify a machine with flaws to drive the plot forward.
Since 2012 the SpaceX Dragon capsule has been under AI control for rendezvous with the International Space Station for grasping and docking. It uses computer vision to estimate its pose relative to the ISS and steers accordingly.
Source: Andrew Howard of SpaceX, who is in charge of this software and has to endure the stress of each rendezvous. Screwing up could kill the ISS crew.
Isn't the key part of Sci-fi that it contains a society that has in some way advanced beyond our own? Saying it's not sci-fi because the fictional advance is set in our past (but at a development technologically beyond our own) seems quite a strange distinction.
> Saying it's not sci-fi because the fictional advance is set in our past (but at a development technologically beyond our own) seems quite a strange distinction.
I didn't say that at all. It is in the past, and also, it is not science fiction. Star Wars is quite fantasy, offering no explanation in science for the force, hyperspace, lightsabers, etc.
I love Star Wars with all my heart. But it is not about the future and it is not science fiction. It takes place "a long time ago" and it centers around magical, unexplained powers.
Edit:
And,
> Isn't the key part of Sci-fi that it contains a society that has in some way advanced beyond our own?
No, I don't agree with this at all. I would even say that in nearly all science fiction published, the societies have not advanced beyond our own that much - or if they have, they are also demonstrated to be far behind us in other ways. Science fiction is a lot of things, but certainly there is no requirement for it to show a more advanced society than ours.
No. The key part of SF is the "What if...?" question. A Science Fiction story should posit a difference about the setting from our own world and this difference should have consequences. Alternate history stories like "The Man in the High Castle" are Science Fiction. "What if the Nazis won?".
Likewise the key part of Romance genre fiction is the Happy Ending. It doesn't matter whether they sleep together (a lot of Romance aimed at older and Christian readers doesn't have any sex at all), or get married, but there must be a Happy Ending.
