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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 2267835" data-attributes="member: 19675">I'm afraid I'd have to categorize Vance's Dying Earth stories as sci-fi, despite the fantasy feel and the fact that they're the origin of IOUN Stones and the "fire and forget" magic system common to all versions of D&D.  Other aspects of the story are clearly sci-fi (setting the stories hundreds of millions of years into the future of Earth is one)- and the "magic" of the stories could just as easlly be explained by Clark's aphorism about high-tech.That tech is not irrelevant at all.  That storyline plus the interstellar tech level trappings put Star Wars solidly into the subgenre of Sci-fi called space opera.  The impossible odds, the mysticism, etc., would be completely familiar to any audience in the past 500 years but for the fact that its all wrapped up in technology.See also Battlefield Earth, in which virtually powerless humans throw off the shackles of interplanetary, slavery, largely through the interaction of luck and deus ex machina.  In hard sci-fi, those humans would be dust (possibly literally), yet because this is space-opera, success is never in doubt.  The outcome is certain, what is in question is the journey.In space opera, what matters is the story (which is usually some variant on a classical trope).  The heroes must succeed, the villains must fail, and all must do  so spectacularly.  When something would render the desirable outcome impossible, <insert technology here>.  The tech is the magic is the tech.</blockquote>

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