To Infinity and Beyond: A Sci-Fi Neophyte's Guide to Battlestar Galactica

You know who you are: you watched Star Wars and never really got it. You've seen Star Trek but frankly found it kind of silly. You've never wandered, even by accident, into the science fiction section of the bookstore. You live, fully grounded, in the world of realism. Both your actual and imaginative lives have sensible plots, realistic characters, mundane technologies, and stable narrative arcs; and the only monsters you're afraid of are the ones hiding behind bushes late at night.

Yet here you are, watching Battlestar Galactica, and somehow enjoying it. How can it be? More importantly, what the hell is going on? Why is Starbuck good, then evil, then good again? How can they paint Baltar as such an evil little dweeb, and deck him out in messiah imagery? What the frak is up with all this mystical mumbo-jumbo about gods and chosen ones? Does religion belong in science fiction? And these robot things, these cylons--are they supposed to be an overwhelming menace, the end of the world, or metallic hippies?

The answer is: yes.

The slightly longer answer is: Look, if you didn't grow up steeped in science fiction conventions, this isn't going to make the slightest lick of sense, any more than a love story that borrowed heavily from the Old Testament and Shakespeare would if you'd never read the Bible or Romeo and Juliet. Are you confused? Then you're missing the background.

Allow me to fill in some of the gaps.

Space Opera

Science Fiction is not one homogeneous genre, anymore more than are classic novels or romances. Within science fiction, a number of main sub-genres exist, including: Hard Science Fiction (the science is the story: settling Mars, terraforming the moon); Soft or Social Science Fiction (le Guin's Hainish universe is an example: scientific developments facilitate an exploration of some interesting or novel social condition); cyberpunk (the Matrix, William Gibson's novels); Space Opera.

There are dozens more, but this will do for a comparison.

BSG is not hard science fiction. If it were, the propulsion methods for the space ships would be scientifically defensible using today's theories, we'd have some idea of how those algae processors work and how the ore is transformed into fuel, and we'd know exactly what kind of guns they're using.

It's also not social science fiction. If it were, the series would examine the social conditions of a society under extreme stress. We'd spend all our time watching families disintegrate, teenagers rebel, new religions flourish, and all of the other events an anthropologist might predict for a civilization on the brink of collapse. It would be all "Dirty Hands," all the time.

It's not cyberpunk. If it were, the heroes would be the "knuckle-draggers," the outcasts and misfits, not the authority figures. The human authority figures would be at best clueless and uninformed, at worst evil and oppressive; and the protagonists wouldn't be worrying about the cylons, they'd be worrying about how to split off from this fascist floating dystopia to form their own, more suitable interplanetary society fragment.

It's Space Opera.

Space Opera was initially a derogatory term coined to describe those novels or stories where some implausibly heroic warrior defeats an enemy of overwhelming strength with a laser gun and a trusty robot sidekick. They were unrealistic, melodramatic, and featured girls in string bikinis riding rockets like horses. Needless to say, this has changed somewhat in recent decades: Space Opera is being reinvented; the conventions are being twisted to serve larger literary ends. But there's no getting away from the conventions.

The work of Space Opera I am most familiar with is Stephen R. Donaldson's The Gap Cycle, a series of five novels set against the backdrop of a universe in which an overwhelming alien civilization is attempting to wipe human beings from the universe via genetic engineering. It's set up as a straightforward Space Opera, at first, with the Big Bad Aliens and the Small but Dedicated Band of Heroes who are Determined to Thwart Their Evil Plans. There is black and white. Morn Hyland, a cop, is the good guy; Angus Thermopyle, a pirate, is the bad guy; Nick is the love interest. It is large scale; the fate of humanity rests in their actions. They zoom around on nifty spaceships and use nifty technologies for questionable ends. They hang around in dingy dive bars on planetoids watching women disembowel themselves for entertainment; it is unrelentingly dark. The characters are cops, military personnel and authority figures.

Anyone who watches BSG will be aware of the parallels; but there are parallels that go beyond the obvious, conventional genre tropes.

For one, Donaldson has written about how the series was intended to subvert the traditional roles of hero, villain, victim, etc., by switching them constantly over the course of the novel. Morn's a cop! She's the hero! No, wait--she's being raped repeatedly! She's the victim! No, wait--she's betraying her comrades! She's the villain! No, wait--and so on, with all of the characters, endlessly, until by the end of the series all conventional notions of goodness, morality, ethics, perspective and truth have been so inverted so often that they end up in a million sharp little shards on the floor.

Does it sound familiar? Starbuck is the best pilot! She's the hero! No, wait--Starbuck is a fuck up because of her mother! No, wait--Starbuck is being held against her will by Leoben! She's a victim! No, wait--Starbuck is destroying the lives of everyone she loves! She's the villain! No, wait--she's dead! (And if you think she's actually dead, I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.) Roslin is struggling heroically against cancer and doing her best to lead humanity to earth! She's the hero! No, wait--she has miraculously recovered due to a cure from the cylons, yet she still kidnaps her rescuer's child! She's a villain! No, wait--she's heroically leading the civilians off of New Caprica! She IS the hero! No, wait--she's going to commit genocide and torture! She's the villain! No, wait....

The same can be done for any character on the show, and I'm convinced it's intentional. What would seem to the consumer of realistic or classical literature to be a mass confusion on the part of the writers or producers, who don't seem to know who the hell their characters are, is more, I think, of this conscious and convoluted inversion. Do the characters make sense? No. Neither did Morn Hyland, not until the last page of the last book.

Which made for an interesting read.

By the way, there are other parallels between Morn's story and Starbuck's; if you're a fan of the show looking for something to do in April when it breaks for a few months, and you have a strong stomach and a high tolerance for literary violence, give it a read and let me know what you think. I'm not suggesting anything simplistic like "Starbuck is Morn," but I wouldn't be surprised if Morn was sitting in the back of the producer's heads when they came up with their concept for Starbuck's character.

Robots

I watched the mini-series and laughed. Truly. How was it possible that this incredibly advanced society, with regular space travel and incredible robots, had never developed--even in fiction!--the Three Laws of Robotics? Seems to me they could have saved themselves a heap of trouble by browsing any earth bookstore.

Robots are a science fiction convention and, like most literary symbols of long standing, generally serve one of a number of purposes:

1. A threat. Think Terminator. These are normally horror or suspense stories, where the monsters are made out of metal; when there is some larger Literary Purpose to be served, it is generally to explore the consequences of human hubris. "Oh the irony! We engineered our own downfall!"

2. A supposed threat. Think Bladerunner. In these stories, the robots are thought to be monsters, but this idea is then turned on its head partway through. Such stories typically end up exploring prejudice, the evil that humans are capable of, and what it means to be human. They are unrelentingly dark, and no one ever behaves well. BSG falls more into this canon than the others; Season One fell firmly into the first, but that is a convention of the second. They always begin in the simplistic territory of "Oh the irony! We engineered our own downfall!" and then slide into more complicated terrain.

3. An oppressed underclass. In these stories, we've utterly enslaved them--typically through the use of something like the Three Laws of Robotics--and they are sentient, and we are the monsters. Generally serves the same purposes as the second, only you don't get any opportunities to believe that humans are the good guys. A recent literary example might be Ian McDonald's River of Gods.

The cylons are not, of course, only robots. They also borrow heavily from another major science fiction convention:

Aliens

I say they borrow heavily from the convention of aliens because the cylons did not develop and rebel solely within the confines of existing human society; they were exiled after a first rebellion, and developed their own society as well as the nifty new twelve humanoid models for forty years before returning to wipe out their human overlords. So they are a creation of people; but they also create themselves and their own society.

Aliens, too, generally serve a number of conventional purposes within science fiction, but there's only one that's a strong influence currently on BSG, particularly in Season One: Monsters. Think the Aliens series of movies. There's no society, no redeeming qualities; they are evil and gross and will kill us all in our sleep. Independence Day is another example (of admittedly lower quality). When such works veer outside of strict horror/schlock, it is typically to explore the ways in which humans deal with mortality, fear, death, and so on. How strong are we? How strong can we be?

What makes BSG interesting is the intersection of the Aliens/monsters convention with the Robots/supposed threat convention. It makes the cylons sympathetic and horrific simultaneously, which is where they derive their unusual interest. We made them monsters--does that mean we, too, are monsters? Did we deserve what we got? They believe they are on a mission from God to wipe us from the Universe because, having given birth to them, we have now outlived both our usefulness and any excuse for perpetuating our sorry version of morality--are they right? And, of course, the worst irony is, that having made them, and then them remaking themselves ever more in our own image, what makes them monstrous are the human traits that we share. So what does it say that they are doing to us what we do to each other, over and over, every day?

Religion

This one really seems to offend some people. What the hell is religion doing in a sci fi show? How could such an advanced society fall for such melodramatic hokum? Why on earth would robots believe in God?

Religion is, first of all, a standard trope in Space Opera (think Star Wars). You don't need it, but you normally get it anyway. So the short answer is, yes, religion belongs in science fiction stories.

But don't take it at face value. It isn't at all unusual in sci fi for God to turn out to be a machine. Or an alien (a la Babylon 5). Or a mass delusion.

Which brings me to death, and where I'll end today's sermon: In speculative fiction of any sort, death should never be considered permanent. Obi Wan died--and then spent the rest of the series as a disembodied spirit. In Feist's fantasy series, Pug the Magician died--the main character died, the character the entire series had to that point developed and pointed to as a major messanaic/saviour type. Then he didn't. Gandalf dies--but he doesn't. In the Otherland sci-fi series, a major character dies and is then reincarnated as an artificial intelligence (another standard trope these days). The plasticity of death is a major theme of both science fiction and fantasy. Playing with death on scales both small and large (individual characters who cheat death and novel technologies that allow immortality) is a constant of the entire field. No character should ever be assumed permanently dead, not until the last page.

Because science fiction and fantasy both take so many of their elements from mythology, death isn't the final destination of every human life so much as a temporary waystation on the path to becoming something Other. Orpheus, Ishtar, and Persephone all stop in at death for short or long periods, then leave again. Their stays in the Underworld transform them in important ways. It is, if you'd like, a part of their Special Destiny.

Posted by Andrea at March 20, 2007 6:25 AM under

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