Critically - spat TV series Battlestar Galactica broke one of the key rules of hard skill fiction : It was n’t really about science . alternatively it was hard social fiction , a naturalistic look at the futurity of human culture .
It ’s easy to overlook this canonical fact about the series because most of the natural process require place in outer space , and involve a universe of ship - tie humans in constant and measly state of war with a frighteningly innovative mintage of biotech creatures called Cylons . But BSG was not about space and automaton . It was about what set of consideration could disembarrass humans of their cravings for state of war , power structure , and slaves . And it was a thought experiment about what would happen if you taste to boot the human race from a tiny remnant of the universe .
Looked at from this perspective , it ’s obvious why so many critics talked about how BSG had an charm that stretched beyond the confines of science fiction fandom . It was a drama about the building mental block of human society : authorities , defense , menage , domicile , science , and religion . Yes , science was in there , but it was n’t the focus . This also goes a recollective room toward explain why BSG ’s spinoff series , Caprica , will take place solely planetside , in a very Earthlike city , during the decades leading up to the ruinous event of BSG . This is a series that require questions about the future of our societal kinship , and you do n’t postulate spaceships to serve those .
I ’m not saying BSG did a unsound caper with the spaceships and robots . The show had some amazing space fight and cool ideas about biological golem . But its representations of future tech were in the service of an overarching preoccupancy with societal development .
So what exactly does BSG predict about the time to come of human civilisation ? In some agency it just extrapolates from our world today , which was made a little too obvious by the show ’s close where we see proto - Cylons in the dancing soma of Sony bot . Humans never do overwhelm their desire for handmaid who will do all their wearisome , serious and physically taxing labour . Even as scientific innovations evolve , engender self - cognizant bionic man and faster - than - light travel , human culture remain tangle in an ancient feedback loop of master vs. striver .
But the roles of passkey and slave have changed a great stack from what we see today on Earth . Though there are still class segmentation ( we know that some settlement planet have few resources than the wealthy Caprica ) , homo and woman have achieved what seems to be total par . We see this in footling ways – adult female deal the same barracks with men in the military – but also in big 1 . char like battler cowcatcher Starbuck , the distaff cylons , and President Roslin are leader . There was a brilliant scene in the TV movie Razor where a rescue mission is incorporate of a arm expert , a fender , and a tactical expert who all just happen to be female . woman are merely everywhere in this universe , in positions of power and bravery as well as positions of debasement and treachery . * *
With women and men standing side - by - side as touch , however , somebody else has to bear the burdens that woman did traditionally . Someone else has to be the intemperately - working but non - voting members of society , the group who cleans up after the people with power but never says a Holy Scripture . And that would be the Cylons . So future man has clean up its turn when it come to sexuality – and to a certain extent race – but it has not suffer its ride to enslave .
Interestingly the most memorable and important Cylons in the series are all women , and they are all obsessed with what amount to futuristic procreative rights . They want to be able-bodied to have baby when and how they need , just the mode 20th century women’s liberationist did . But the Cylons are hardly like downtrodden human adult female of yore , pressing their nose against glassful ceilings and bemoaning the womanly mystique . They have nuclear warhead , and they use them .
So if you consider BSG an exercise of hard social fiction , then the cultural McGuffin that sets its narrative lump rolling is this : What if an historically downtrodden group dead , in one multiplication , became smarter and strong than their oppressor ? What every single womanhood became overbold than the smartest manly physicist , and stronger than the strongest male raper ? What then ?
There ’s a demarcation line to my comparison between Cylons and women here , because of class BSG is n’t about a bunch of humanity cover in tin cans from wild women . Instead the show poses a more universal question , about what might materialise if a group of hard worker suddenly evolved much quicker than their masters .
And the answer is the entirety of this goggle box series , which is at times utterly brilliant in answering this query . Not only would those striver demolish their passe-partout ’ earthly concern , but they would also coerce those masters to rethink what it means to be human . Those humans would have to come face - to - case with what it means to structure a bon ton around master copy and slave , and if they were very , very prosperous they ’d finally figure out some room to create a intercrossed culture where nobody enslaves anyone because the very musical theme is appal .
As BSG come to its conclusion a little over a hebdomad ago , humanity has in fact progress to a point very like this . Humans and cylons are living together as families , make a novel civilization among proto - humans 150,000 days ago on Earth . They have no slaves , and they have throw the last vestiges of a centralized government . They are about to create a society so different from our own that it is scarcely conceivable .
regrettably , they make one crucial mistake : The human - cylon intercrossed people also shed their technologies , their cities , and their store of the deterrent example they learn from the slaves who germinate . And so the hoi polloi of our present day , who are slow move beyond the geological era of human bondage , are once again trying to produce a new breed of robot hard worker .
Still we are leave with the Leslie Townes Hope that world wo n’t make the same mistakes this time around . We have n’t build up sentient robots yet , and we have n’t yet enslave beings whose consciousness is comparable to our own . We have n’t yet denied our equals the voting ; we have n’t trained our high-pitched - technical school progeny that their only roles in our eye are those of gunfodder , ditchdigger , and woman of the street . And this is where it ’s useful to think about the persona of science fable in the human futurity .
People who create hard science fiction hope that their work will inspire new innovation and scientific discoveries . And those who create toilsome social fiction go for their work will take to discovery in the cultural kingdom . Perhaps BSG can serve as a memory , lose long ago , about what happens to a companionship that clings to the role of master and hard worker .
If any invention arises from BSG , perhaps it will be a high society that understands not just what is untimely with being a slave – because we all know that , in our bones – but a lodge that understands what is wrong with being a master .
- One could make this argument to a less extent about people of people of color on BSG as well . The show ’s gamey ranks are filled by people who are all shades of brown , often biracial , as if at this point in the futurity there has been so much intermarriage that traditional racial category are barely in cosmos ( though notably there are still plenty of unmixed white ) . alas , the showrunners failed to cast a racially - diverse radical as the show ’s heart characters , so it ’s hard to win over us as viewers that this is a time to come where power is truly multicultural .
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