Eye of Cat by Roger Zelazney – Native American science fiction at its finest! Would also make an awesome movie. When I think of all the amazing SF stories I have read that would have made so much better films than Star Wars…
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Yep typical of earthlings to think that this movie is about them. It was set well before humans ever populated the third planet and so has nothing to do with how races developed after that 
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And yet, all the important main characters (except Leia) still ended looking exactly like able bodied, White, cisgender, heterosexual, male bipedal humans… weird how an entire fandom could end up perceiving that the franchise’s focus was all about a certain demographic over everyone else.
*Edited for typos.
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The lack of diverse representation in Star Wars has nothing to do with any flimsy in-universe explanation, and everything to do with the real-world circumstances in which the film was made (and biases of those who made it).
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Native American Science Fiction at its finest? It’s good, but … but …
I will admit to not being the best-read person out there, but I think Rebecca Roanhorse’s Hugo-winning story Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience pretty much is the standard against which to compare.
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Never read it, thanks for the tip! I just really love Zelazny.
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Also, every time I read Delany, I become aware of just how blazingly smart he is. Not in the way of some SF writers who are doing all they can to prove they’re smart, but in how even his throw-aways are better than most of my deepest thoughts.
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You can have plenty of conflict without devolving into white patriarchy.
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Aye, and Gomorrah and Babel-17 were fifty years ahead of their time. Fifty years later they still are. All of his books, even the ones I don’t like, are damned near structurally perfect.
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So, uh, what? Lol, this is ridiculous. By this logic, fanboys would never think Han Solo or Luke Skywalker are heroic, or that their deeds are noteworthy. After all, they’re the MOST COMMON people on screen.
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Do you mean the Star Trek universe?
Because I see all sorts of scarcity in the Star Wars universe.
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That’s what they call a joke.
Roanhorse is quite different from Zelazny, but I like both!
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Weird unit to use, though, since it is tied to Earth’s orbit – it’s the distance at which a star is observed to have a parallax of one second of an arc as observed from the Earth at both ends of its orbit (If I remember correctly). I guess no weirder than the inch, which is tied to something like the length of the King’s thumb or something, but still.
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That’s a pretty standard technique to avoid pointing a finger at a real institution, and get pushback from said institution. That’s why you get literary and film references to “Punxatawny State” and “Enormous University.” Even little independent films like The Gamers that film on an actual university campus intentionally mis-name the school so they don’t get C&D letters from the legal department.
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Chewbacca? Yoda?
Joking aside it is really no surprise that a film produced in the 1970s features white male heterosexuals as the main characters - almost all films of that era were that way. We are barely out of that state 40 years on; as a species we are very slow at fixing our own problems and that is very sad but true.
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Freakish irony that the SW: A New Hope basic plot was cribbed from Kurosawa. It doesn’t happen often to me, but some — to be kind — ‘homages’ make me question the so-called worshipper’s creative skills.
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Supporting character puppets, oh gee, thanks, George.
In the Star Trek franchise humanity had to come perilously close to self destructing in the Eugenics Wars before we figured out how to ‘get some act right,’ and finally got our shit together.
Aside from the clear diverse cultural representation, that’s probably why I preferred ST:TOS to SW as a kid.
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In the documentary “Chaos on the Bridge”, it’s implied that Roddenberry’s identity as the “Great Bird of the Galaxy” had led him to conceive of a utopia so complete that it would destroy conventional forms of dramatic tension.
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