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.