foundation

Nine things that inspired Star Wars

This week I’m taking a break from Miseducation Misadventures to let you in on what runs through my head when I watch Star Wars. Re-watching it as an adult, I notice little things that I can trace back to their source – like the scattered mentions of spice mines and spice freighters in the first movie. Any guesses which SF novel that’s a nod to?

Here are nine sources from which Star Wars drew key ideas. If I’ve missed any interesting ones, chime in down in the comments.

1: Reproductive Biology (2,000 million BCE)

The final battle in 1977’s Star Wars involves a swarm of small starfighters approaching and seeking to penetrate the much larger orb of the Death Star. This looks a hell of a lot like a load of sperm trying to fertilise an egg, with zero-gravity space standing in for the liquid medium through which the little swimmers propel themselves. This was probably not deliberate – the imagery probably bubbled up from the filmmakers’ subconscious. It stands out all the more starkly against this pre-adolescent and mostly sexless galaxy.

2: Metropolis (1927)

And here we have a female version of C-3PO, in an experimental silent film from Weimar Germany.

3: Flash Gordon (Comic and movies, 1930s)

Star Wars took a few cues from Flash Gordon – most obviously the opening text crawl but also the general idea of a series about fun adventures in space.

4: World War Two (1939-1945)

In 1977 when Star Wars came out, World War Two was as recent as the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the first episode of The Simpsons, is to us.

And the movie helps the audience to grasp what is happening in space by using a visual language familiar to them: it has World War Two-era fighter planes in space. The Empire’s star destroyers resemble the warships of the mid-century. The Imperial officers dress like Nazis.

On the other hand, weirdly enough, Star Wars references the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will. The final scene where the rebels have a rally and the human characters all get medals (a weird enough scene in itself) follows part of this notorious film very closely. An odd choice, having the good guys mimic the visuals of a genocidal regime, especially when the bad guys are clearly based on them.

5: Casablanca (1942)

In a colourful jazz bar full of diverse people, in a town full of thieves and refugees, in a desert land where an evil empire is tightening its grip, we meet a cynical smuggler who is secretly an idealist. Will he find it in himself to help the two desperate fugitives who are seeking passage to safety? Of all the cantinas in all the systems in all the galaxy…

6: Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1940s-1950s)

The story and themes of Star Wars and Foundation don’t resemble each other at all. But there are many little things which Asimov seeded in the science fiction genre which pop up in Star Wars:

  • Hyperspace travel
  • Weapons called blasters (much more lethal in Asimov)
  • A galactic empire
  • Space feudalism
  • A city which covers an entire planet (Trantor/Coruscant)
  • The wild outer rim of the galaxy
  • It goes right down to random names: Asimov’s Korellian Republic is echoed in the Corellian shipyards
  • Roguish traders who do the right thing in the end (Foundation has several Han Solos in it, who say things like ‘Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.’)

But for Asimov, empires are fundamentally good, the roguish trader is an advertisement for a doctrine of enlightened self-interest, and mysticism is nothing but a charade. All this is at odds with the anti-authoritarianism and sincerity of Star Wars.

7: Akira Kurosawa (1930s-1980s, especially 1950s)

Japan’s most well-known film director had a huge influence on George Lucas and Star Wars. I haven’t seen The Hidden Fortress (1958) but apparently it involves two peasants who escape from a battle (like C-3P0 and R2D2) and meet a princess; there are sword fights, and in the end a bad warlord changes sides. But I’ve seen a few others, like Throne of Blood, Ran and Seven Samurai. Any of these great samurai films show themselves to be ancestors of Star Wars. There are the sword fights and the robes and Darth Vader’s helmet. In a western ear, names like Obi-Wan Kenobi have a Japanese ring to them, and the Jedi resemble an idealised version of the Samurai.

8: Dune (1965)

Frank Herbert’s Dune is riding high after Denis Villeneuve’s great film adaptation and I’ve written about it a few times before. Like Foundation, it provided a lot of ideas for Star Wars to pick up.

  • Dune is closer than Foundation to the themes of Star Wars. It is a text that was obviously written at the height of the anti-colonial struggles of the 1960s; it is pretty negative about empire; it is deeply sincere about religion and mysticism (even in charade form!).
  • The Jedi look like samurai, but they owe much to Dune‘s Bene Gesserit, an order of women who cultivate superhuman powers.
  • Both texts feature a harsh desert planet (Arrakis/Tatooine)
  • And giant worms,
  • robed nomad raiders,
  • smugglers,
  • and moisture-harvesting technology.
  • As noted above, scattered references to spice in the first Star Wars movie are another nod to Dune.
  • And once again we have space feudalism.

Foundation and Dune are the best examples I can think of, but they are stand-ins for a whole rich genre of mid-century science fiction without which Star Wars would not have existed.

9: The US War in Vietnam (1965-1973)

A few years ago Star Wars creator George Lucas confirmed in this interview that his story was fundamentally anti-colonial, that his heroic rebels were based in part on the Vietcong and that the evil empire was based on the United States – along with other past empires and freedom fighters throughout history.

Vietnam has featured just as heavily in other radically different readings of Star Wars, which is unsurprising as the war ended just a couple of years before the movie came out. I can’t remember who exactly wrote this, but the idea is that Star Wars was an infantilising nostalgic escape for a US public keen to avoid thinking about their country’s military and moral defeat in Vietnam. White people with American accents got to be the guerrilla heroes – though from the costumes to the names and decor, it is one of the strengths of Star Wars that it has never looked or felt ‘western’ (unless you mean spaghetti western, as there’s more than a hint of ersatz Mexico and Sergio Leone in there).

A last word…

The point of this is not to be like ‘Star Wars is a rip-off’ but to remind everyone that it’s just a movie, a cultural text rooted in its time. Today we have the corporate cynics for whom nostalgia is a currency and the toxic fandom for whom nostalgia and innovation are just different kinds of betrayal. The worst excesses of the fandom, I suspect, are boosted and incentivised by social media, and the back-and-forth whining and apologetics are increasingly astroturfed online by accounts which have harvested awesome volumes of engagement in the past from people bickering about fun movies, and who see the next big controversy as a payday. In all of it, Star Wars is reified, taken out of culture and history, put on a pedestal. One would think it feel from the sky. Actually the movie is a brilliant synthesis, and if Lucas had the precious and pious attitude on display in so much of the online commentary, it never would have been made at all.

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What I’m Reading: Foundation by Isaac Asimov

‘Seldon crises are not solved by individuals but by historic forces. Hari Seldon, when he planned our course of future history, did not count on brilliant heroics but on the broad sweep of economics and sociology. So the solutions to the various crises must be achieved by the forces that become available to us at the time.’ 

– Hober Mallow, ‘The Merchant Princes,’ Foundation by Isaac Asimov

A lot of what’s fresh and brilliant in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, written as long ago as World War Two, have since become so common in the genre that they almost escape notice when you encounter them in these pages. 

We have travel by hyperspace (‘hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing’); weapons called blasters; roguish but ultimately moral traders; cities which cover entire planets; galactic empires with a civilised core and a wild outer rim. We even have a planet called ‘Korellia’ which reappears as the shipbuilding world of Corellia in Star Wars. 

A galaxy without women

The first thing that strikes the reader is that the characters are all male. From a Galactic population numbering – what did he say, a quadrillion? A quintillion? – there are almost no women the author believes are interesting enough for us to meet.  

Here follows a list of female characters in Foundation: 

  • A telephone operator (!) 
  • A servant who tries on a gizmo
  • The Commdora of Corellia

And, if we really want to be generous:

  • Hober Mallow’s hypothetical mistress (Maybe I’m pushing it now)
  • Housewives are key to Mallow’s scheme to bring down the Korellian Republic (…That’s pushing it.)

The next thing that strikes you is that this book was apparently written as if Isaac Asimov had a very limited special effects budget. The first part contains compelling descriptions of space travel and the city-planet Trantor, but the rest is almost like a stage play: largely a series of conversations in rooms, mostly between seated men. 

Discussing this with friends, I thought of radio dramas, a popular medium in the 1940s when Asimov was writing. He wasn’t writing with an eye to radio adaptation, as far as I know, but maybe he listened to a lot of them and they influenced his style. The 1970s BBC radio play of the Foundation series proves how well it translates to the medium. 

A galaxy without ‘great men’

The lack of a balanced representation of humanity in the cast of characters is pretty awful. But I like the morality and the philosophy of history this story expresses – that it is not ‘great men’ but great impersonal forces that shape history. True greatness lies in predicting and adapting to the currents of history – not holding back the tide, but riding the wave. Real material relations are more important than ideas and words. Don’t be fooled by pomp and regalia; the empire is losing crucial technical skills. Don’t be intimidated by military thugs and their death machines; those machines must be operated by human beings, who can be influenced in clever ways. 

The ‘greatest’ figures in Foundation history are not strutting macho types. Hardin and Mallow alike embrace a kind of humility and acceptance, as well as cunning and unscrupulousness.

Both Hardin and Mallow embark on too-clever-by-half plans that would, in reality, totally demoralise their own people long before they bear fruit. This is a common failing in fiction: the illusion that conflicts have to be solved by clever tricks in order to be narratively satisfying.

In fairness, the climaxes to ‘The Mayors’ and ‘The Merchant Princes’ are very satisfying. Defeat turns to victory in a matter of moments. These eukatastrophes are seamless and well-plotted. 

Cynicism

They use religion to harness the Four Kingdoms to the chariot of the Foundation. But religion is superseded – by the time of Mallow, it is necessary to realise that trade is the new superweapon of Terminus. And trade itself will one day be superseded, become an obstacle: 

‘So, then,’ said Jael. ‘You’re establishing a plutocracy. You’re making us a land of traders and merchant princes. Then what of the future?’

Mallow lifted his gloomy face, and exclaimed fiercely, ‘What business of mine is the future? No doubt Seldon has foreseen it and prepared against it. There will be other crises in the time to come when money power has become as dead a force as religion is now. Let my successors solve those new problems, as I have solved the one of today.’

The flip side of the novel’s cleverness is the smug attitude that comes through. You read this book and feel like you, Isaac Asimov and Salvor Hardin are the three smartest people in the universe, and all these trillions of people are stupid. It celebrates cynicism and manipulation. Hardin controls the press behind the scenes and takes power in a coup. This is to say nothing of the invented religion and how it brainwashes people. This is not moral, of course, but we are supposed to accept that it’s an example of ‘doing what’s right’ in spite of any silly ‘morality.’

A galaxy without violence?

We are told that ‘violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’ The author’s distaste for violence is rare and refreshing. He’s just not interested in it. The novel is better because of this. But the novel’s philosophy does not renounce violence; it just puts violence in its place, as the enforcer and copper-fastener of things already established by culture, economics and politics. It is not the last refuge of the incompetent; it is a necessary, though subordinate, stage of conquest. 

Consider the following exchange of dialogue: 

Jorane Sutt: You’re a Smyrnian, born in Smyrno, one of the former Four Kingdoms. You’re a Foundation man by education only. By birth, you’re an Outlander and a foreigner. No doubt your grandfather was a baron at the time of the wars with Anacreon and Loris, and no doubt your family estates were taken away when Sef Sermak redistributed the land.

Hober Mallow: No, by Black Space, no! My grandfather was a blood-poor son-of-a-spacer who died heaving coal at starving wages before the Foundation.

This passage tells us a lot: 

  • That the Foundation made war on Anacreon and Loris (two of the Four Kingdoms) some time in between the events of ‘The Mayors’ and ‘The Merchant Princes.’ 
  • That the Foundation has brought about a land revolution in the Four Kingdoms through the dispossession of the nobility. In other words, not just a war but a revolutionary war has taken place between two episodes. To cement in place and enforce the outcome of ‘The Mayors,’ war and revolution were still necessary. 
  • That the resolution of the second Seldon Crisis was not the end of Sermak’s political career (Sermak was the leader of the pro-war party in ‘The Mayors’). In fact, Sermak was heavily involved in the subjugation of the Four Kingdoms, to the extent that the land revolution is attributed to him. The pro-war Actionist Party have their day after all. 
  • People like Hober Mallow come from a background where before the Foundation they were denied any opportunities in life. The coming of the Foundation has been revolutionary, opening new opportunities for them. 

All of this is between the lines. Foundation is short and well-paced, but in places there’s a depth and density to it. These lines remind us that even though the novel leaves violence to one side, the universe in which the novel is set is just as violent as ours. The worst ‘barbarism’ in the novel is that which the Empire carries out on Siwenna – atom-blasting the population in revenge for a rebellion which that population didn’t even support.

This brings us back to the points about how it’s written like a radio play. Of course, it was written for magazines and presumably each instalment had to be kept fairly short. Most of what happens in the novel happens through dialogue, but Asimov puts that dialogue to work. The dialogue is good as drama, but it really shines as worldbuilding. It’s nutritious stuff around which your imagination can sketch in the galaxy outside the four walls of the room where, inevitably, men are talking.