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Originally Posted by Hawkshaw_245  Using your logic, as I understand it, then why bother making Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, or any other SF series? |
For some of the episodes in those series, there was no point at all :-)
Have you ever come across the term "skiffy"? It refers to a science fiction story in which you can swap everything with, say, a western, and the story itself doesn't change. The term "space opera" was originslly coined to describe that type of story (happily, the meaning of "space opera" has changed considerably).
This shouldn't prevent you from writing sf that is analogous to some other genre or an historical event... but you still need that central science-fictional conceit. For example, perhaps the type of FTL used in your novel causes ships to arrive chronologically some hours before their departure. Causality is not affected because they are hugely separated. But that concept gives you something to play with, and allows you set up a situation in your novel that could only happen in the universe of your novel. If you changed the spaceships to destroyers, the area of space to the Pacific, and the ETs to Japanese... it wouldn't work. They didn't have time travel in WWII (well, unless you believe in the Philadelphia Experiment :-)).