Via Unboundworlds.com:

The original Star Wars films were already out of theaters and several years old by the time I was born, but my father’s VHS box set of the trilogy was there for my whole childhood. I grew up with it, and Star Wars was probably the first space opera I was exposed to.

I’ve never been especially conscious of Star Wars influencing my SF work, but of course it has. Some obvious things people notice would be the prominent roles that an empire and an empress play in my books, and there’s even contrivance in my Evagardian universe to have elite people, not unlike Jedi, with futuristic swords. Homages to Star Wars were never the intention, but the parallels are too strong to deny. (Don’t worry, there aren’t any lightsaber battles in the Admiral books.)

Seeing Star Wars at a very young age is probably the reason I don’t have much reverence for it. I saw the original trilogy before I saw other space movies, so rather than seeing Star Wars leap above the crowd, what I saw growing up was that most stuff just didn’t seem to be quite as good as Star Wars. Star Wars had imprinted on me as the bar for what SF was supposed to be. In my little seven year old brain, it was ‘normal’ SF; I didn’t have the perspective to know it was extraordinary.

So I was ten or eleven when “The Phantom Menace” came out, and that’s probably why it didn’t offend me. In fact, I’m pretty sure I liked it. So I definitely don’t have that hardcore, expanded universe, pretend-Jar-Jar-never-existed, Han Shot First (though he did) type of fan mindset, but as I get older there are a lot of things I’m growing to appreciate about the franchise.Star Wars had imprinted on me as the bar for what SF was supposed to be.

Star Wars is, even with the new stuff in the past couple years, in many ways retro and old-fashioned. Part of that is trying to play into nostalgia, but there’s also the detail that the franchise draw is so strong that Star Wars doesn’t have to rely on gimmicks or trying to be edgy to get people interested. It can get away with being family friendly and upbeat. There are a lot of movie and TV tropes in vogue right now that don’t bode well for new Star Wars content, but I just hope Disney doesn’t lose sight of the focus on fun and adventure that made the originals great.

In fact, that good-time mentality is probably what I’ve taken away most from Star Wars. The franchise has never been remotely interested in scientific accuracy, or any level of believability at all. It’s the softest SF on the menu. The focus is completely on characters and imagination. Though I like to think that my SF is, at least in few key ways, sort of grounded, I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to historical/scientific/any kind of accuracy, I have a certain disregard for the rules, which I stand by.

And I can’t help but wonder if Star Wars is where I learned it.