That is why I tend to treat it as a fantasy rather than sci-fi story. It may hold up a mirror to the contemporary world (or at least Lucas's vanity) but it can't do so very blatantly. As for Star Wars, well, it is quite explicitly a story from long ago and far, far away. The image of Star Trek as a sterilized, Western-normative utopia may have spoken at one point to various aspirations and hopes for then-Cold War-era humanity but by and large it's quite disconnected from contemporary trajectories in culture and politics (blame studio meddling if you wish). It throws a bit of hard SF or speculative science (quantum entanglement, etc) in there just often enough that I'm willing to forgive its flimsier bits (the traditional conceits of artificial gravity, the anthropomorphic aliens) and go along for the ride again and again and again.īut the real aspect to Mass Effect which makes me love it even though Star Trek and Star Wars both offer longer histories, larger mythologies and bigger (more inclusive) fandoms, is the subtle critiques it offers on contemporary problems.Īs another professor of mine would later note, eventually these big franchises just end up becoming self-referential. It's somewhere between Clarke and Steakley-that is, somewhere between golden age visionary and mulched up, recycled B-movie pot-boiler. The Stanford torus of the Citadel Presidium, the converted mining facility of Omega. It's also a bit aesthetically retro, something I find best expressed in its city designs. Star Wars will never be able to make that claim.) So even though it has that Star Wars sense of the epic scale and space-age mysticism, it's really more of a Star Trek setting, all naval politics with a hefty helping of marine badassery and other ostentatious displays of one's virility. (It pays to keep in mind that Star Trek, at least as far as Next Generation, knows what a parsec is. It's fluffy with a dash of math, just like Star Trek when it isn't getting its physics and terminology utterly wrong. I wouldn't even know what to qualify Star Wars as-maybe science fantasy? (I'd call it a space opera, Ed.)Īlong this spectrum that Hayles set up for her wide-eyed students, BioWare's Mass Effect franchise definitely lands in sci-fi territory. One of the pearls of wisdom she imparted, of which there were many, was that professional science fiction authors despised the term "sci-fi." 2001 is science fiction. Katherine Hayles, author of a bunch of books you may have heard of and altogether one of the sharpest women I've ever had the honor to know.
As an undergraduate at UCLA I had the privilege of taking a science fiction class with none other than N.
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