It’s remarkable how many science-fiction fans hate Star Wars. To those who like their SF grounded in science, Star Wars is reprehensible “skiffy” in the pejorative sense, a flight of fantasy cloaked in science-fiction’s clothes. For most under-40s, Star Wars is where their love of sci-fi began, but for those who remember the genre’s golden age, George Lucas’ blockbuster creation isn’t quite so original.
Edward Elmer Smith, best known as EE “Doc” Smith, was one of the early bestsellers of the pulp science-fiction era. Today it’s easy to take the familiar trappings of sci-fi – space rockets, ray guns, alien empires and more – for granted. But authors such as Smith, Leigh Brackett and Hal Clement, writing serialised fiction for Amazing Stories and other magazines, in large part created the iconography of sci-fi.
Doc Smith’s 1937 novel Galactic Patrol bears some interesting similarities to Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Kimball Kinnision is a Lensman, a warrior with powers of telepathy who polices the galaxy. Stumbling upon secret plans for a military Grand Base, Kinnision is thrust into numerous adventures that climax when he destroys the base by using his Lensman abilities. In an echo of the famous scene where Obi Wan teaches Luke Skywalker the Force, Kinnison even wears an opaque armoured helmet:
“They probably wondered how any man could see out through a helmet built up of inches-thick laminated alloys, with neither window nor port through which to look, but if so, they made no mention of their curiosity.”
The lightsaber, the weapon of a Jedi Knight, is arguably the most potent symbol in the Star Wars legend. But just as Obi Wan neglects to mention to Luke that his father’s blade was the very same that butchered dozens of Padawan children, George Lucas doesn’t namecheck the dozens of laser sword precedents in popular sci-fi novels. But fans on Wikipedia have of course fully catalogued them all, with the most likely inspiration being Issac Asimov’s Lucky Starr series.
But the most famous literary precursor to the Star Wars mythos comes not from a novel, but a non-fiction academic tome. The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell was a cult classic that had been doing the rounds among Hollywood’s creative cliques for some years when George Lucas adopted the archetypal patterns of the “monomyth” as the framework for Luke Skywalker’s mythic adventure.
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The success of Star Wars made Joseph Campbell a celebrity and rejuvenated interest in ancient mythologies that had previously been relegated to the dusty shelves of university classics departments. Today it’s easier to list the books and films that haven’t pillaged Hesiod as a bankable source of blockbuster entertainment. Somewhere in the underworld of Hades, the dead epic poets are surely unionising to claim their royalties.
We are, as a culture, rather hung up on originality. But if the success of Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and a host of other tales that grew from older sources teache us anything, it’s that when it comes to storytelling, there really is a formula for success. The challenge for JJ Abrams in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, released on 17 December, is to balance the desire of ageing fanboys to see the Star Wars formula evolve, with that of the new generation of young imaginations to whom these mythic stories will be entirely new.
