George Lucas

by Brian Jay Jones

Star Wars did even better among the sci-fi crowd — the Science Fiction Writers of America presented it with a special award for the popular attention it brought to the genre — but the science fiction writers were a bit wary of Lucas’s pop culture phenomenon. They wanted to be thought of as working in the more serious tradition of Ted Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov, not George Lucas and his space opera. “Those of us who work in the science fiction field professionally look for something more than Saturday afternoon shoot-em-ups,” said writer Ben Bova derisively. “I had expected more of Lucas.”95 Lucas had little patience with that sort of snootiness. “I think science fiction still has a tendency to make itself so pious and serious,” he shot back, “which is what I tried to knock out.”