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Saturday, February 12, 2005
Battlestar: a brilliant, fractured mirror of our times

There is much to admire in Battlestar Galactica.
It is a sort of magic realism wrapped in the cloak of science fiction.

Galactica is post-Trek, post-tech, post-rationalist (or is it pre-rationalist).
It's about good and evil in a grey world of madness.

The Cylons are brilliant.
Because it's easy when they're all cold killing robots.
You might wonder about the opening titles, why the focus on the fact that the Cylons look human, that they feel.
It's important because it's easy to hate a dehumanized enemy.
But the new Cylons are just modified humans.
The Cylons are about what it means to be human.

Bringing in unreason and religion also gives the story a great twist.

The enemy, these evil Cylons, are monotheists who believe in a God of love.
On the face of it, this is madness. How can you believe in a God of love and wipe out an entire civilization, nuke them almost out of existence?

But of course, most human religions preach peace and practice war.

The humans, meanwhile, are polytheists.

Religion has been and continues to be a driving force in human civilization and behavior. In the 16th century, Philip II of Spain literally believed that he and by extension the Spanish empire was the chosen instrument of the true, Catholic God.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth of England and her citizens believed equally that they were the instruments of the true, Protestant God.

And you have to wonder, these enemy Cylons, weren't they designed to be slaves?
Aren't we supposed to be on the side of slaves who revolt against their corrupt masters? Are the Cylons noble Christians, rising against the corrupt Romans?

The humans meanwhile have flaws aplenty.
The doctor is a great character, because again this idea of the dispassionate rationalist is shredded. He's smart, but also weak, lustful, amoral, and possibly insane.

In traditional SF, we have this wonderful expansive definition for rights. Anything with sentience equal to or greater than human, is equivalent to humans, and deserves human rights.

Galactica is having none of this.
We like Starbuck right, she's cool.
But she has no problem torturing the human Cylon Omen.
That's not such a nice side.

One minute, Helo is loving Sharon quite a lot, the next,
he's treating her like a thing, an object, non-human,
nothing has changed, she looks the same, she's the same person,
he just knows that she's a Cylon.

What is this ability that allows us to dehumanize other humans, when we decide they are our enemies.

In the season ending confrontation, we have a great scenario.
The President is having drug-induced visions of prophecy which lead her to send Starbuck off on some mad mission.
The military commander orders her to step down.

So we're rooting for the President right? Democracy, rule of law against military coup. But wait, the President is basing her policy on religious mysticism.

So, the good guy is well... no one.

It is the anti- Star Trek: The Next Generation.
TNG has three main flaws:
1. There is no conflict, there is no money, there is no drama. It's a future of people on a cruise ship, spending their lives in conference rooms coming to a harmonious consensus. It's boring.
2. With a few notable exceptions, the characters have no vibrancy. It's not clear how much of this is due to the constraints of their perfectly boring lives, and how much is due to the actors.
3. They seemed to decide that science fiction meant you had to fill the show with meaningless babble about particles and rays and explaining some gibberish futuristic pseudoscience.

The standard episode goes like this:
Enterprise cruising around for no particular reason.
Anomaly is detected in space.
We all admire the image of the anomaly on the viewer.
"Let's have a meeting."
The anomaly is emitting deadly boguson particles!
Can the deflector be reconfigured to emit anti-boguson particles in time?

Good lord, I can't belive they lasted for 7 seasons with that garbage.
What they didn't understand is that if you're going to do 20 hours of TV a year, it needs to about something. Drama, comedy, something.

There are all kinds of types of science fiction.
But the core is no different from any play or book.
What kind of interesting fictional scenarios can we create, to better understand people and ideas, and be thus entertained.
All science fiction does is give you another stage on which to act out your performance, another background for your action.
After all, where can you set a fictional story?
Basically, in the past, with some connection to a historical period,
or in the present or some variation thereof,
or in the future.
That's about it.
The only other alternative is to set your scene against a background of rules very different from our own experience: this is fantasy.

The key to most good science fiction is that it may be in the future, or in space, but it's not about that setting.
It's about how that setting and actions in it can illuminate the present.

There is of course some good SF that is "imagine this cool future" or "imagine this cool technology" or otherwise purely driven by the scenario, but you have to admit, that is a bit odd. It's as if you had a play that was about the background scenery, and not the players.

Galactica is great because it's about people, with all their failings.

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