Me, Writing

I started this little blogilla way, way back with the intention of posting snippets of drafts of my exceedingly rare and lovingly cask-aged fiction.  Along the way I learned that this is entirely verboten per the verlagen, since posting things online constitutes “publication” in a not merely technical way.  Apparently this is true even if no one ever reads your blog. 

Caring about this rule is a sign that I am serious, you see.

Anyway, sometime next I will outline a few of the projects I have going, which is to say, both of them.

Battlestar Galactica (The New Show)

Most storytelling starts with the characters:  Who are these people, and why should I care?  For better or worse, though, SF usually has to start with world-building.  Sometimes the most important questions are the world questions:  How is this place different, and how is life different in it?

The two-parter miniseries that kicks off the new Battlestar Galactica is unusual SF because it's dressed in only a thin veneer of difference.  The BG world has no connection to Earth but feels very much like it:  people wear suits and ties or jeans and t-shirts, they sleep in beds with sheets and pillows, they read printed books, they frame pictures on the wall.  Their architecture could be any large American or Canadian city.  At the same time, this is a star-faring culture spread across several planets.  High technology is present here but nearly invisible until we find ourselves aboard a spaceship.  The overall feel is that their civilization is basically ours but with the somehow-not-very-radical addition of jump drives and sentient killer robots.

All this familiarity makes the slight touches of otherness more notable.  There are suggestive details here and there:  their printer paper is hexagonal, their booze is bright green, and their clothing is just slightly unusual enough to give pause.  (I’m estimating here, but I have the impression that they mostly wear 1990s cuts of 1970s fabrics.)  Some of the most interesting SF touches are actually retro ones:  Galactica is an older ship that lacks wireless networking and even cordless phones; the Vipers that survive the Cylon assault are vintage models, space fighters with analog instruments out of the Vietnam War.  All in all, however, these people’s attitudes are ours.

They are, however, polytheistic.  The names of their pantheon are those we know from ancient Greece:  Artemis, Apollo, Hera.  What worship and liturgy I’ve seen bears no resemblance to anything Homer would have known, but of course it doesn’t have to.  Anyway, I suspect that we’re supposed to take all this familiarity not as verisimilitude but as a kind of analogy. 

But the simple fact of religion being here at all is amazing because mainstream SF has rarely dealt with religion in any serious way.  This is not to say that the show is about religion, or at least not yet.  So far I’ve watched the first ten episodes, and while religion has been established as a background condition of human life in this world, no one seems exceptionally wrapped up in it.  (The leading clergywoman we’ve seen has a kindly Desmond Tutu quality about her, but there is certainly no sense that the temples actually run things.)  It seems more the case that these people worship at Christmas and Easter (mutatis whatever), and of course also at the many funerals we’ve been shown.

Most interesting of all is the relationship between religion and the Cylons.  Unlike the humans so far, the Cylons are devotedly pious and theological.  Religion seems to fill their worldview and inspire their violence.  They love to talk about their faith.  They are also determined monotheists, insisting that there is but one God, and that they are His children, and that He is Love.

Battlestar Galactica (TOS)

The Geek vs. Cool dichotomy was already well-established by fourth grade.  In that 1978 you could love Star Wars or you could love KISS, but it was not culturally acceptable to love both.  I think, at the time, I had the sense that liking Gene Simmons was akin to rooting for Darth Vader, which was of course exactly the point.

The original Battlestar Galactica premiered in September of that year.  All of us nerds were primed for it:  the commercials had been running all summer, there was already a comic book adaptation, and we were all, although no one would admit it, a little tired of seeing Star Wars for the eleventh or fifteenth or twentieth time.  (Twenty-two, actually.)  In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that they were able to produce and mount a ready-for-TV knock-off of Star Wars’ unimaginable success in little more than a year.  Who says the world moved more slowly back then?

The night BG premiered, it was interrupted and delayed by TV news coverage of the actually very important Camp David Accords.  There’s still a part of my brain that believes that science-fiction television might in some way someday be responsible for peace in the Middle East. 

When the show finally showed, we all loved it:  Cylons were creepy, Galactica was mighty, and Vipers were zippy and cool.  Nevertheless, this was 1970’s television, and there was no way it could measure up to Industrial Light and Magic even when both were still stuck using models with wires and drawing lasers by hand.  While BG may have been something of an achievement by TV standards, there was still a severe clunkiness about it.  Cylons were obviously off-brand Stormtroopers, and Vipers never really had the elegance and style of X-Wings.  (It’s worth noting that Air Force pilots at the time adopted “Viper” as the unofficial nickname of the F-16, a mid-budget jet fighter that never really compared to its F-15 big brother.)  The show was formulaic.  Its characters were flat.  It had a robot dog that would have embarrassed Sid and Marty Krofft.

Most of all, BG lacked the full-fledged vision of a Gene Roddenberry, who genuinely believed that SF would bring peace to the Middle East, and that this was in fact its role.  BG fell into most of the traps of TV crime and adventure shows, seldom allowing anything like a theme or character arc to jump the boundary between episodes.  While the extended plot of the search for Earth was something new in SF TV, the gnawing desperation of fading humanity’s grim situation never seemed to affect the characters themselves.  And when they did at last find Earth—well, the less said about that, the better.

Nevertheless, there it was, and there it went.  BG was cancelled after one season.  While no one really missed it, it had marked out its position in geek history.  If nothing else, it served as a counterpoint and a placeholder while we waited for The Empire Strikes Back.  I doubt that anyone expected that Battlestar Galactica would be revised and reborn as a new world of television a full quarter of a century later.

But now, look.  Here we are, and it’s something altogether different from what the nerds in 1978 thought possible.

Blogging Battlestar Galactica

Because I need to do something with this blog, and because I believe writing helps to keep the Black Dog at bay, I’m going to start a series on the latest (wow, last-decade) incarnation of Battlestar Galactica.  Here it comes.

Despite a life of loving Science Fiction, I’ve never stayed current with SF TV.  I missed most of the 90’s and all of the 00’s, including Babylon 5, Buffy, Firefly, and the entirety of BG’s run as a new show in 2004-2008.  (I did track down new Trek, though not exhaustively.)   I haven’t had cable since leaving home, and it wasn’t convenient to catch up via the early internet, so I let the whole thing go.

I knew at the time that BG was thought good, and I knew Starbuck was now a lady and that Cylons looked hot and worshipped God, but that was really it.

Now, Hallelujah.  I have Netflix, and BG is streamable.  The world breathes anew.  I’ve just recently started watching the show, and I’m going to capture impressions and criticisms here.  While I’ve encountered a few spoilers before now, I don’t think they’re tremendous.  I’ve begun from the beginning, and there are, what, 75 episodes ahead of me?  It looks like fun.