Doves And Hawks

Sci-fi author Orson Scott Card recently wrote an article in the L.A. Times about Star Trek going off the air for the first time since 1988. I think he was a little harsh on a series that promoted ethical values in an entertaining way and featured the first interracial kiss on network TV. (As if Kirk gave a hoot what colour his conquests were!) But Card also touches on elements of what I consider to be good science fiction and why I find the genre so compelling. It takes more than shiny things going boom to flick my switch...

When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, it's clear she was concerned about modern medicine and whether it had any limitations. She updated the Greek myth of Prometheus, who angered Zeus by creating life out of clay figures. Anyone familiar with the Terry Schiavo case knows that the issue of "playing god" is still relevant today. So Frankenstein can be considered the first science fiction story because essentially Shelley asked "what if X were scientifically possible?" A better name for the genre might be Speculative Fiction.

By their very nature, sci-fi stories can be pessimistic. The author is bothered by the direction that our own society is taking and fires a warning shot. Much of Philip K. Dick's work focuses on human characters trying to survive in societies that are removed from our own only by an invention or discovery of some kind. What if the police could arrest you before you committed a crime, as in Minority Report? What does that do to the concepts of guilt and free will?

Allegory is one of the easiest ways to criticise something "under the radar". The reader knows that the author is writing with contemporary social concerns but the targets of his criticism are not aware of this arrangement. Looking over, they see only a silly futuristic or historical story. What possible threat to the current hegemony could Shakespeare's Richard III present, for example?



Which brings me to the new version of Battlestar Galactica. Outside of childhood, I was never a fan of the old show. It was Star Wars made for TV, and "space opera" says nothing to me about my life. There was a lot of hokey mumbo jumbo about life on Earth starting "out there" too, inspired by Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods (a popular book of the 1970s).

New Galactica is good and different. For one, the military isn't in charge. Leadership is shared with the civilian sector and it wasn't long at all before these two incompatible approaches clashed in a big way on the show.

There was a huge and unprecendented attack on home soil. Only 50,000 people survived. Watch them get scared and panic at times. Watch the population continue to turn up for work, to ensure that civilisation as they know it survives long after the attack. How many of their civil liberties will they give up in this time of war in exchange for greater security? Tell me again how science fiction has nothing to do with the real world!

There are a million more reasons why I'm a fan of new Galactica and half of them are that Katee Sackhoff is in it. (She's in my top ten too.) Apologies for the Science Fiction 101 to those of you in the choir. To the heathen at the gates, I hope you have a better idea why we sing.