GalactiStar Battleica: What happens when science fiction gets it right.

It's been a light blog week for me, and for good reason - my bro and his fam just moved to the Bay Area! Shell and I are excited to have immediate family near us again, and we've spent most of the week with the bro, the sis-in-law, and the niece/goddaughter. Very good times.

Very good, partly because I just got to watch the 2nd to last episode of Battlestar Galactica with my brother at their new place. I just got home, and I spent a good amount of the drive thinking about the show.

In case you're wondering, Battlestar Galactica (or BSG) was a live action sci-fi series that ran in the 70's on prime time broadcast TV (I believe on NBC). It depicted a war between humans and a robotic race they created - Cylons, and the human survivors of the conflict reside on the legendary battlestar cruiser named Galactica.

From what I could tell, people either loved or hated it. I also know that Faceman from The A-Team, Dirk Benedict, played Starbuck in the original BSG.

Flash forward to a month or so ago. Thanks in part to a bizarre-funny Super Bowl ad with Alec Baldwin hawking Hulu.com, I found myself on Hulu, realizing that the latest episode of the NEW BSG series was one of the last until the show was done. My unfamiliarity with this prompted the mangled title of this blog entry, FYI.

Somehow, I nearly let the entire run of possibly the greatest sci-fi television series pass me by. You see, they reimagined BSG five years ago for the Sci-Fi Channel...darker, more daring, less cheesy, and with serious acting chops. Oh, and Starbuck was now a chick instead of a dude, a female president was played by that "Stands with a Fist" lady from Dances With Wolves, and some old awesome dude was Admiral Badass...or actually, William Adama.

In the last few weeks, I've been captivated by this show. It has taken the genre responsible for crap such as "Battlefield Earth," "Species," and the 1980 "Flash Gordon" movie, and has taken it seriously. Yes, there are humans and robots. Yes, it is the near future. Yes, they use swear words that aren't really swear words in our modern-day vernacular.

And yet, humanity is fighting for its very life, with less than 40,000 survivors, in a fleet of ships, headlined by the Galactica - legendary but old enough to be a far better museum than a flagship. Somehow, hunted by many of the Cylon race they created, Adama and the survivors are looking for home...a long-lost place almost forgotten in their religious lore. The planet Earth.

My books share some similarities with BSG - two races, one human, and one robot, find themselves at odds; whether on ships in space or hidden on Earth, humanity finds itself fighting to prevent its own annihilation; a core group of characters struggle against personal conflicts while trying to make decisions to protect their own people; free will is explored amongst the robotic races, and how loyal they must be to humanity, and to their own...the list goes on.

But above anything else, I love when a story from any genre rises above the spectacle of its strengths (sci-fi and technology, fantasy and vampires, romance and...Fabio), and tells a captivating tale that unifies people for the sake of inspiration and entertainment.

I think I realized tonight that although I don't point to many literary inpirations for The Forever Saga, Battlestar Galactica is certainly a major influence from a different medium - TV. It is compelling to me to see that human life - whether surrounded by streets or starships - can still grasp to humane and honorable ideals even in the face of its own extinction, is powerful to me. I am surely taking notes, even as I wait for the two-hour series finale of BSG to air next Friday. I'm extremely new to the journey, but in that short time I've become to engrossed in its tale, I might as well have been aboard Galactica for a great many years.


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