I was talking about how actually alien the aliens in various SF universes were.
And I described Timothy Zahn as making his aliens moderately alien, but "not wanting to give us the full Motie".
I'm maybe more pleased with myself over this than I ought to be.
When Obi-Wan Kenobi wants to disable the tractor beam, he goes to find the tractor beam settings, which are a physical part of the Death Star (conveniently located above an abyss with no hand-rail) not a panel in some dialog box.
When Jyn has to realign the antenna to transmit the plans, the controls for doing so are a physical part of the tower (conveniently located on a windswept gantry jutting out into space) and are specific to that task alone.
Star Trek may have its tricorders and iPads, but Star Wars doesn’t even have text messages! If you want to send a message, you record a hologram of yourself and give it to a droid to deliver to the recipient.
Humanity has a hundred thousand years experience with carefully constructed special purpose tools, while general purpose software has only become a thing in our lifetimes; we still don’t know how to integrate it with our mythmaking, and perhaps we never will.
The weird thing is the Force enables instantaneous long-distance communication (at least in the case of “great disturbances”) but no one’s thought to turn the Jedi into a telegraph network
(like the incestuous “gifted child” psychics of Anne McCaffrey’s “Talent” series)
The chain goes Ability < Tactics < Strategy < Logistics < Politics and it’s a waste to deploy them as small unit forces (tactics) when they could be infrastructural backbone (logistics)
Timothy Zahn thought of that.
This is because Timothy Zahn is apparently the only Star Wars author who actually thinks about what he writes.
