Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
The original "Star Wars" and its sequels are echo chambers of tropes and images from literary science fiction, used in ways that strike a careful balance between affectionate familiarity and outright plagiarism. The first glimpse of Luke Skywalker's desert homeworld, Tatooine, evokes the setting of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel "Dune"; Lucas even throws in a shot of a skeletal desert serpent reminiscent of Herbert's gigantic sandworms. The amazing visuals suggest an eye nourished by the magazine art of Frank R. Paul, John Schoenherr, Kelly Freas and Chesley Bonestell.
Some of the borrowings are as close to theft as anything on the Stephen Ambrose rap sheet. Coruscant, the world-girdling capital city of Lucas' galactic republic, is a direct steal of Trantor, the planet-wide megalopolis in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" novels, which share with "Star Wars" the use of a watered-down version of Roman history to chart the rise and fall of galactic empires. Theed, the ornate city featured in "The Phantom Menace," is a dead ringer for James Gurney's Dinotopia. And the dread Ewoks in "Return of the Jedi" are just cutesier versions of the forest-dwelling aliens in H. Beam Piper's "Fuzzy" stories of the 1960s.
Overshadowing all of them in terms of influence on "Star Wars," however, is E.E. "Doc" Smith, whose mastery of galaxy-spanning space operas made him one of the most popular writers of pre-World War II science fiction. Starting in the 1930s, Smith began writing a series of space adventures set against the backdrop of an eons-long war between a race of benevolent aliens called the Arisians and their enemies, the evil Eddorians. During this proxy war, in which civilizations and races are pawns in an infinitely long chess game, the Arisians use Earth and other planets to breed a race of super police, the "Lensmen."
The central figure in this struggle is Kim Kinnison, the cream of the Arisian breeding program, whose children ultimately deliver the coup de grace against the Eddorians and their multiclawed cat's paw, the Boskonians. To read the novels of the "Lensman" cycle -- beginning with "Triplanetary" (1934) and concluding with "Children of the Lens" (1954) -- is to trip constantly over reminders of the Jedi and their grapples with the conspiratorial Sith.
Like the Jedi, Lensmen enforce order throughout the galaxy with an arsenal of paranormal powers that render them virtually invincible in combat. Where Jedi pay homage to the Force, Lensmen invoke the "Cosmic All." Lucas' Jedi get their Force quotient boosted by microscopic entities called midichlorians; Smith's heroes are turbocharged by "lenses," collections of crystalline, semi-sentient life forms attuned to their personalities. An early draft of "Star Wars" revolved around the search for the "Khiber crystal," which sounds an awful lot like one of Smith's lenses. There are even hints that Lucas has worked a Lensman-style breeding program into his saga, judging from the story of Anakin Skywalker's immaculate conception in "The Phantom Menace."
The scale of the action in the Lensman books is broader than anything in the Lucas universe -- not content with wiping out whole planets, Smith's Lensmen detonate entire solar systems without breaking a sweat -- but the quality of the writing is about the same, which is to say awful. (Everyone has heard the story of how Harrison Ford, during the filming of the original "Star Wars," groused about the dialogue: "You can type this shit, George, but you can't say it." E.E. "Doc" Smith goes him one better -- you can't read it, either.) The series underwent a successful paperback revival in the early 1970s, when Lucas was sweating out the first drafts of "Star Wars." Dale Pollock's biography "Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas" puts the Lensman novels at the top of Lucas' pre-"Star Wars" reading list, though Pollock clearly didn't realize the extent of Smith's influence.
The last and most crucial link to "Star Wars" and literary science fiction is Leigh Brackett, the original scriptwriter for "The Empire Strikes Back," the first sequel, and by any reasonable standard the best of the series. The late Pauline Kael was a tireless champion of journeyman director Irvin Kershner, and many film buffs take her lead in crediting Kershner with the movie's sense of urgency and drama. But this does an injustice to Brackett, whose career uniquely bridged pulp science fiction and Hollywood. Brackett started out writing space operas in the Smith mode. Her first short story was published by Astounding in 1940, and she quickly became known as an expert pulp technician. She was also a capable teacher, upgrading the work of her husband Edmond Hamilton and tutoring the young Ray Bradbury, who credits her with getting him started as a writer.
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