Last weekend I watched the new version of Dune, both parts 1 and 2. I read the book when I was a teenager, and I saw the 80s movie, but I didn’t get into the series. I never read any of the other books. I didn’t remember much, just the litany against fear, the stillsuits, and the hand in the box test. I don’t recall being too impressed by the 80s movie, but I rather liked this new one, especially part 2 (mostly the stuff about riding the sandworms).

I did feel like we were getting a circle of influences, though. It’s pretty obvious that George Lucas was heavily influenced by Dune when he created Star Wars. We had that corrupt galactic empire, the desert planet, the quasi-religious mystical order, the bad guy on life support, and the drug called spice. But these movies also seemed to be influenced by Star Wars in some of the imagery, especially the way the empire looked.

I think both Dune and Star Wars also fall into the category of epic fantasy in a science fiction setting. Although both stories take place in futuristic worlds with spaceships and high technology, the plots are more fantasy-oriented. You could move these stories to a more typical fantasy world without changing much about the plots. The stories revolve around things like prophecies, destiny, a chosen one, and that quasi-religious order with mystical powers. In Dune, one of the things that makes “spice” valuable is that it’s what allows faster-than-light navigation, but it mostly seems to be a McGuffin, a reason why people are in conflict on this planet, which opens the door for the prophesied Chosen One to show up. The story isn’t about faster-than-light navigation, it’s about the prophesies, visions, and a reluctant Chosen One coming into his power, which is more a fantasy story than a science fiction story.

It’s similar in Star Wars. The original movie is about a farmboy learning about his heritage and finding he has a supernatural power, then going to rescue a princess and using his power to defeat the bad guys — a classic fantasy plot. There’s never really much science fiction in Star Wars, and their attempts at doing science, like finding a scientific explanation for why some people are extra powerful in the Force, didn’t work. Even the entries in the saga that are less fantasy (the plot doesn’t depend on the Force) aren’t science fiction. Rogue One and Andor are more spy thriller in a science fiction setting, so would be space opera.

If you’re looking at it on a spectrum with fantasy at one end and science fiction at the other, you’d have something like Star Wars close to the fantasy end, then Dune pretty close to it. We move into space opera when it’s more about the society, the adventure, or the characters than about the science, but there aren’t any mystical or magical elements. That’s where things like Star Trek would fall. There’s no supernatural stuff or mysticism, like in space fantasy, but the actual science stuff is often pretty sketchy. You could move a lot of their core stories to a different setting and they might still work — make it about explorers on earth during the age of exploration. Then there’s science fiction that’s really about the science and technology where you can’t remove the science from the story and still have the plot work. These would be stories about exploring other worlds where they really have to deal with alien life forms and environments, not just humans with odd cultures or funny noses. Or stories about how the use of robots changes human society.

At least, that’s my classification method. I thought I liked science fiction when I became a Star Wars fan, and I do like some of it, but after years in a science fiction book group, I realized that what I like is more space-set fantasy and space opera. Hard science fiction mostly bores me, though I do like books that get into how an alien environment might work, especially if I like the characters.

Some people even distinguish between hard and soft fantasy, with hard fantasy having a more codified magical system with clear rules — magic as science — and soft fantasy being more about the mystical, with magical things just happening and no one’s entirely sure how it works. With soft fantasy, the magic is more part of the setting (like the futuristic world being the setting for space fantasy) while in hard fantasy the magic is a crucial element of the plot. I’m not entirely certain I buy that, but then I haven’t read a lot of the stuff that people call “hard” fantasy. For me it all comes down to whether I like the characters and enjoy spending time in that world. I don’t care about knowing the various rules of magic, other than that I do feel like some limitations are necessary to make the story interesting.

As for Dune, it may be time for a reread. I’m basing this assessment mostly on the recent movies since I don’t remember much about the book. I liked the book but didn’t get too into it. Maybe it’ll hit differently if I’m thinking of it as fantasy. And I’m sure I’ll have a different perspective on the book now than I did at sixteen.