The Epic Battle Continues: Is Star Wars or Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld,” Fantasy or Science Fiction?
Navdeep
Posted on November 16, 2011
Last week, two of my School of Visual Art students almost got into a fist fight during class discussion. Alright, that is not entirely true. Nor is it partially true. It was all very civilized and uneventful, although chairs may have been thrown had I left the room and didn’t reign the discussion back to its original purpose: dissecting the narrative structure of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Somehow, during the course of our discussion, we ended up having a bit of a quibble over Star Wars being boxed into the Fantasy or Science Fiction genre. Or possibly both of these genres. We started discussing the basics of story structure from Aristotle’s “Poetics,” and predictable horror films and romantic comedies where plot and characters were clichéd,…
