Science Fiction and the Age of Sail

What threatens to make realistic SF impossible is that space is big.  The gulf between things is so vast that there's no way to wrap our frames of reference around it.  Traveling to another star isn't like traveling to another country or another continent; no continent is far enough away for that comparison to make sense.  What does "travel" even mean if it takes a lifetime to move a couple of short steps away from where you started?

The basic problem, if you haven't been thinking about the issue, is this:  modern physics can't conceive of any speed faster than that of light, and it's impossible for matter approaching the speed of light to continue to behave as matter should.  This is important for science fiction because your characters are very likely to be made of matter.

And remember the unimaginable vastness of space?  It gets even tougher when you realize that light still takes decades or centuries to reach even the closest foreign stars.

But that's why they call it science fiction:  when reality is broken, you make up science to fix it.  Authors have tried this many different ways, but it usually comes down to the same sort of technological hand-waving.  The usual solution is warp drive, jump drive, hyperdrive, or any of a dozen other names for Faster-Than-Light technology that requires not only undreamt-of machinery but also the assumption that our understanding of physics is extremely and conveniently wrong.  This is necessary.  Take the FTL out of science fiction and you don't get far.

Most of the time, an SF story simply insists on FTL and leaves it at that.  Star Trek's warp drive is the classic example:  we have awesome engines that get us where we're going as quickly as the plot requires.  Occasionally we run out of Dilithium Crystals, or Scotty tells us he can't give us any more power, or Tribbles get into the engine room, but otherwise the mechanism and its implications are invisible.  Warp speed means never having to think about scale.  Space is no bigger than California.

Battlestar Galactica's jump drive works pretty much the same way, although some effort is made at consistent limitations.  Apparently it takes some time for a ship to calculate a leap, and the show's premise requires coordinating a whole fleet of ships (some of them rustbuckets) jumping individually to the same spot.  Tension in the favorite first-season episode "33" is built around the need to keep one jump ahead of the pursuing Cylons.  In BG's early episodes, at least, FTL travel looks like something that makes passengers nervous, as if no one ever really gets used to whatever it does to you.

The most interesting treatments of FTL imagine it as something other than just fast travel.  The interstellar society of Frank Herbert's Dune is made possible through the power of the spice melange, which allows Spacing Guild navigators to psychically "fold space."  This would be just another jump drive if the political economics of spice and the mental powers it facilitates weren't central to the plot and to the protagonist's own story.

Norman Spinrad's under-appreciated The Void Captain's Tale does something similar, except with orgasms.

Some time ago I wrote a science fiction novel set two hundred years in the future.  I wanted to avoid space opera--it wasn't that kind of story--and I wanted to keep things as realistic as I could.  At the same time, I needed another planet for the action.  I settled on a scenario in which humanity has made its first, halting steps among the stars, but things are going slowly.  The novel's action takes place on mankind's first (and already failed) extrasolar colony.

I kept the math simple.  The colony world orbits a star twenty light years from Earth, and I arbitrarily decided that my future technology could move a spaceship at half the speed of light.  This means that a one-way trip requires forty years of travel, something conceivable if the people making the journey are put into suspended animation and awakened when they reach their destination.  Communication is also limited by distance:  even light-speed messages from the colony take twenty years to reach back to Earth, and then you wait twenty more for the reply to your original message, now half a lifetime out-of-date.

What this gives you is a universe where space colonization is feasible but where the colonists are very much on their own.  This kind of science fiction is sometimes compared to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century "Age of Sail," when travel was difficult, dangerous, infrequent, and often one-way, but still possible.  Interstellar distances push these difficulties to the limit of what human beings might be willing to undertake, but perhaps not beyond them.

I tried to make use of the distance in other ways.  All the time required for travel allowed for the development of a secret history unknown to the travelers before their arrival, and the distance, isolation, and sense of loss were thematically useful from the beginning.  Most of all, it gave me a story that focused on what the characters had to do and decide rather than on the magic their machines were capable of.   And anyway, warp drive would have solved my novel in three or four pages, and where's the fun in that?

I'm rewriting this novel now in the hope of making it more what I want it to be:  out with the tiresome expositions, in with a little more action, over there with some characters taking up too much of the floor.  But I won't be changing the timeline or the technology.  That's the part of the story that has always made just the right amount of sense.

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EDIT: A few days after this post, Slate.com produced a neat animated graph on SF travel times.

BatGal: First Season Impressions

I’d forgotten that the new Galactica appeared in 2003, and that its premise and themes stake out a kind of post-9/11 science fiction.  Early episodes traffic in echoes:  burning towers, a suicide bomber, walls of photographs, and a morally ambiguous scene in which a fully humanoid Cylon is waterboarded while he insists on his capacity to feel pain.

Fortunately, the show pulls back from taking the comparisons too far.  This isn’t a historical parable, exactly, and the parallels are too weak to sustain one.  (Al Qaeda is a twist on David, not Goliath.)  What’s most interesting in the comparison is how fully, so far, the show seems to be complicating and humanizing its religiously motivated terrorist villains who aren’t even human.

By the end of season one, we still don’t know exactly what makes the Cylons tick, but we know it isn’t something as simple as pure evil.  It’s perhaps not even pure ideology.  Plotwise it’s still a mystery, and the season ends precisely where the premier began:  on Caprica, and somewhere else, with a beautiful Number Six Cylon gazing in wonder on the beauty and promise of an unseen infant.  There has been a certain amount of meandering in the series so far, but in the final minutes the entire season suddenly (in fact very suddenly) pulls taught.  Events at the finish abruptly demolish the patterns into which everything seemed at risk of falling.

But, wow, these people spend a lot of time having the hots for each other.  Perhaps that comes with having a species to reinvigorate, but in story terms it’s a bit much.  Between all the M/F couples coupling in bunks, airlocks, fantasy bedrooms, and the rainy forests of occupied planets, the show is pretty aggressively hormonal.  I guess it’s worth noting that about half of these people are Cylons, so maybe it’s something else.  Robosexual?  The appliances we were warned about?  (Honestly, I was kind of hoping that Starbuck would be gay, if only because “Kickass Lesbian Fighter Pilot” is an archetype just waiting to be realized.  Come on, SF.  You can do this.)

It’s at this level that the soap opera threatens to overwhelm space opera.  At times BG plays fast and loose with character development, building it mostly through personality conflict.  The under-motivated tantrums and improbably constant insubordination seem more high school than high frontier.  Not all of these people act like adults.  I enjoy Gaius Baltar, and the complexity of his relationship with his own Number Six is something very original in SF TV, but I could do with a bit less of his comic relief.  Colonel Tigh’s wife, meanwhile, obviously belongs on the Love Boat, not the Galactica.

Nearly everyone on the show is very blandly beautiful, with the dramatic exception of the Commander, who is gravitas craggily personified.  There seems to be a whole career visible in the wrinkles of Adama’s eyes and the seams and pocks of his cheeks.  Among all the special effects, the planetary vistas, the expensive sets, and the lesser and lovelier actors populating the fleet and what’s left of humanity, Edward James Olmos’s face is the most visually interesting thing the show has going.

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.