Like a lot of folks who were kids in the Star Wars era, I’ve got a major soft spot for science fiction. It’s the idiot savant of genres. So much of it is bad that it’s hard to hold one’s head high and proclaim love for it, but when it’s good, there is nothing finer. I think of it as the literature of possibility. That’s why it’s so much more conceptually interesting than the navel-gazing that is reality-based fiction. Not that there’s anything wrong with more standard literature– I adore Virginia Woolf’s writing, and John Banville’s, and James Joyce’s, etc., etc. More, in fact, than that of any SF writer except Stanislaw Lem.
All of this to say that, at long last–it’s years overdue–I’ve embarked on watching the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. Its world feels viscerally real, its characters complex. It’s remarkable human drama, well-played and very un-science-fiction in its contours. It’s everything that SF ought to be but seldom has been. I couldn’t be more thrilled.
It’s hard to believe that the ’70s series (which I then adored), surely one of the cheesiest pieces of work to ever see daylight, could be re-imagined as the embodiment of everything that genre deserves to be. The only bummer is that it’s going to end, what with its finite number of episodes, and then what? Back to the unicorn hunt that is the search for good SF, I guess.
