Quote Originally Posted by Anonymouswizard View Post
I mean how else would you stop laser blasts from hitting your head?
Yeah, helmets and personal shields are so much less practical.


Regarding the discussion about sci-fi and the supernatural, I have to say that I feel it's a bit of a double standard to be fine with unexplained and unquantified magic when it's called a technology (e.g. hyperdrive) but not fine with unexplained and unquantified magic when it's essentially a difference between the rules of physics as we know them and the rules of physics as they exist in the setting (e.g. telekinesis). Beyond that, if sci-fi is an exploration of how something affects society, then I have to ask, is a discussion of how telekinesis obeys/evades Newton's Laws or how you can measure somebody's ultimate magical potential with a blood test or whatever really a better way of exploring how the magic affected society than having a monk talk about his faith in the context of the magic?

Oh, and regarding the "the Force is unquantifiable" thing, that's a bit debatable. We know from the movies that there's a blood test whose results correlate with Force sensitivity, and there's also old EU material which has remote detectors for Force use and Force ability as well as Force-based or Force-created or Force-conjured lightsabers, hyperdrives, etc. which were later essentially reverse-engineered, replicated, and eventually replaced by the technological lightsabers, hyperdrives, etc. familiar from the movies and most other Star Wars material.