I hope you don’t mind a break from politics — though don’t be surprised if the break is over before this column is.

Two cultural events of great historical consequence have occurred within a few days of each other. Last Friday, UPN’s Enterprise ended its four-year run with a (lackluster) finale that also signified the first time since the mid-1980s that there won’t be first-run episodes coming out of some kind of Star Trek.

Second, today (May 19) features the opening of the sixth and apparently last film in the Star Wars saga: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Early reviews suggest that the film is significant better than the other two prequels (I think Phantom Menace got a bad rap, by the way) and by all accounts will rack up one of the biggest box-office performances of all time.

What are we to make of this coincidence? Well, assuming it really is a coincidence (the Force and all that), I think that it shows just how deeply modern science fiction has penetrated the popular culture since it debuted about 100 years ago. Speaking of that, it is impossible to understand the context of both Star Trek and Star Wars without first realizing that they owe a great deal to the pulp-magazine writers of the first half of the 20th century.

Anyone who knows me — and especially those who’ve been in my office or house — knows that I’m a big fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the American pulp writer and novelist who created some of the most popular fictional characters in history. Besides Tarzan, the best-known is John Carter, Warlord of Mars (the first film of an expected John Carter series, directed by the same guy who did Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, is due out next year).

For those in the know, Star Wars is full of implicit and explicit references to Burroughs’ John Carter (as well as to Doc Smith’s Lensmen series and some others). Many of the odd-sounding names are adapted from the Martian novels. The opposing forces in the new film, for example, are the Jedi (adapted from jeds and jeddaks, the ruling class of Mars) and the Sith (which on Mars denotes an evil, though not particularly agile, species of insect).

There are many other such borrowings, but for the sake of space let me introduce my second theme: politics (see, I warned ya!). Burroughs let his mostly conservative/libertarian political views creep into much of his fiction, whether it was Tarzan fighting Soviet agents in the jungles of Africa (Joseph Stalin personally ordered out assassins to kill Lord Greystoke, who stood in the way of communist revolution) or Carson Napier organizing an attack on a Nazi-like regime destroying the freedom of a continent on Venus.

Similarly, both of the dominant sci-fi epics of our generation, Star Trek and Star Wars, have important political lessons embedded in them. I’ve written about this before, as a sequel to an old piece about the politics of comic books, but I thought I’d reprint my analysis with some small updates and revisions.

Broadly speaking, you see, Star Trek is left-wing and Star Wars is right-wing:

• In the future world of Star Trek, money and capitalism are treated in a negative light. At several points in both the television series and the films, an addled Gene Roddenberry tried to insert in the story that money itself had been disinvented, but this ludicrous premise didn’t even work in fiction and was discarded. Instead, those engaged in free enterprise are portrayed as evil, ruthless, and physically revolting — the stooping, big-eared, and sniveling Ferengi race of The Next Generation being a kind of psychological projection of how Roddenberry and other Star Trek creators see the world of business.

In Star Wars, on the other hand, two of the main heroes — Han Solo and Lando Calrissian — are present or former smugglers and businessmen. In The Empire Strikes Back, Lando is employed as the administrator of a mining colony that thrives by being outside the taxing and regulatory authority of the evil Empire. Later, in The Phantom Menace, an attempt by the Trade Federation to tax and monopolize interplanetary commerce turns out to be part of a nefarious conspiracy to overthrow the Galactic Republic.

Interestingly, despite their intentions, the Star Trek creative team can’t keep up the anti-capitalist bias on a consistent basis. Several of the most entertaining and interesting scripts have involved the hated Ferengi. Later stories in The Next Generation feature commercial bidding for wormhole rights and technological advances. And in the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, some of the best jokes come at the expense of the Enterprise crew as they plop down, cluelessly, in the middle of late-20th century California and try to interact with average folks in daily commerce.

• In Star Trek, storylines and characters make a fetish out of diversity, dwelling on differences and sometimes questioning whether a universal morality can truly be asserted across racial lines. In Star Wars, which is a fictional world of mind-boggling diversity, alien species work together and fight together with little self-conscious sermonizing or pontificating. It’s obvious, at least visually, that the freedom-seeking rebellion against the Empire is a multicultural one. But the rebels aren’t seeking to defeat the Emperor simply because he won’t hire enough Toydarian storm troopers, or because he prefers officers with proper English accents, or because he is a skinhead with a (black) hood. They want to defeat him because he is an evil tyrant, period.

• In Star Trek, the Federation appears to exercise significant power and control over interplanetary issues and commerce. Its governmental agencies are usually seen as benign. In Star Wars, everyone in the earlier time period (comprising The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and the new Revenge of the Sith) complains that the Galactic Republic is sinking into a morass of bureaucracy and corruption. The risk that these problems will give rise to a tyrannical dictator is explicitly discussed, and reminds one of a number of cogent explanations for the rise of centralized, oppressive government in various real-world countries over the past two centuries.

• In Star Trek, law enforcement is armed with phasers. Officers stun people, then lock them up, then subject them to intensive psychiatry until they are “cured” of their criminal impulses. In Star Wars, law enforcement under the Galactic Republic appears to be the job of Jedi Knights — who try to avoid violence but, if pressed, will cut you in half with a light saber.

• In Star Trek, evil characters are frequently considered to be the product of a poor environment, a bad childhood, misunderstanding, or miscommunication. It turns out that Captain Kirk and the other original cast members just didn’t understand the Klingons, for example, or the Romulans. The Gorn, a lizard-like race that does a Pearl Harbor on the Federation and kills many innocent people, are later excused from culpability because they say that they saw peaceful Federation colonists as “invaders” in their territory. Killer clouds of space gas or giant space amebas threatening the lives of billions turn out to be lost children or mindless things just trying to survive. Even the Borg, a great source of villainy from The Next Generation, are humanized in subsequent stories.

In Star Wars, evil characters have been seduced by the Dark Side of the Force. They have given into temptation, and are held accountable for their actions. The Star Wars movies are really morality tales, and have a strong religious component in spite of themselves. No one argues that Sith Lords might have turned out differently if they had just been enrolled in a quality preschool program.

• In Star Trek, Starfleet has apparently by the time of The Next Generation decided to post “counselors” on their starships to tend to the psychological needs of their crews, and generally to muck up the works with weepy sentimentality. In Star Wars, you go to a Jedi Master for advice and counsel — and if you get any, he makes you work hard for it. He has mental powers, just like Counselor Troi does in Star Trek, but uses them when needed to protect the weak and enforce justice rather than just to “understand” you.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like both Star Trek and Star Wars. In fact, I know way too much Trek trivia and own more Star Trek novels that I care to admit (some of them are excellent, others just escapism). But just to be clear: Star Trek is liberal, Star Wars is conservative.

By the way, for those who don’t recall it, I’ve also identified the crypto-politics in works of fantasy such as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings in a past column. Feel free to perform your own sci-fi-chonalysis. And remember, as a sage master once said: “Do, or don’t do. There is no try.”

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.