Science Fiction Film and Television

Although the rebooted series has received much critical attention, significantly less has been written on other BSG texts. This issue seeks to redress that imbalance.

We are interested in articles that consider topics such as

* The original Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979) and Galactica 1980 (1980) series in their historical context;

* The role of the new series? webisodes and other such ancillary texts in contemporary media practice;

* The spinoff series *Caprica* (2009?2010) and its role in re-imagining the BSG world

Articles of 6,000?9,000 words should be formatted using MLA style and according to the submission guidelines available on our website. Submissions should be made via our online system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com:80/lup-sfftv.

Any question should be directed to the editors, Mark Bould (mark.bould@gmail.com) and Sherryl Vint (sherryl.vint@gmail.com).

The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2011.

Science Fiction Film and Television is a biannual, peer-reviewed journal published by Liverpool University Press. Edited by Mark Bould (UWE) and Sherryl Vint (Brock University), with an international board of advisory editors, it encourages dialogue among the scholarly and intellectual communities of film studies, sf studies and television studies.

We invite submissions on all areas of sf film and television, from Hollywood productions to Korean or Turkish sf film, from Sci-Fi Channel productions to the origins of SF TV in Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers or The Quatermass Experiment. We encourage papers which consider neglected texts, propose innovative ways of looking at canonical texts, or explore the tensions and synergies that emerge from the interaction of genre and medium.

We publish articles (6000-8000 words), book and DVD reviews (1000-2000 words) and review essays (up to 5000 words), as well as archive entries (up to 5000 words) on theorists (which introduce the work of key and emergent figures in sf studies, television studies or film studies) and texts (which describe and analyse little-known or unduly neglected films or television series).

Science Fiction Film and Television is hosted online by Metapress and is accessible at http://liverpool.metapress.com/content/121631/. Online access is free to existing subscribers.

There is an interesting intersection between religion and science fiction at times, and a notable example of this comes with the 1970s television series Battlestar Galactica and Mormonism. The show was presented in a new incarnation as a series on SyFy from 2004-2009 which was very well received by fans, and which was very different than the 1970s version. While reading through Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy (Open Court, 2008), among a number of interesting chapters and topics one in particular stood out, a piece by Ivan Wolfe titled “Why Your Mormon Neighbor Knows More about This Show Than You Do.” On Battlestar Galactica Wiki we find additional information about Mr. Wolfe:

He has also published and presented the following academic papers on Battlestar Galactica: “The Lost Tribes of Mormon Science Fiction Literature: Battlestar Galactica in Books and Comics.” (in the AML Annual 2002. Provo, Utah: Association for Mormon Letters, 2002) and “Epistemology and Ontology in Batttlestar Galactica and Mormon Theology.” (presented at the 2007 Southwest/Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association 28th Annual Conference, The Hyatt Regency Conference Hotel, Albuquerque, NM; February 14-17, 2007).

Wolfe is well versed in the relationship between Battlestar Galactica and Mormonism, and we discuss this topic, and the general issue of science fiction and Mormonism, in the following interview.

TheoFantastique: Ivan, thank you for coming to discuss this topic. I’d like to begin with your personal story. How did you come to develop an interest and work in science fiction, and Battlestar Galactica (BSG) in particular?

Ivan Wolfe: Well, I’m a practicing Mormon. I was raised Mormon, and when I was a kid watching BSG in syndication, I noticed that a lot of the terminology (Council of the Twelve, marriage for all the eternities, among other aspects) on the show sounded a lot like what I was hearing in church on Sunday. Of course, as a kid it took me three times through the Chronicles of Narnia to understand that Aslan = Christ, so I didn’t get the resonances right away with BSG. However, once I did realize what was going on, it seemed interesting, but not necessarily something worth studying or writing about.

However, when I went to college at BYU (Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah – the LDS Church owned institution of higher education), I got involved with the science fiction community there. I decided to write an essay on BSG and Mormon thought for a class, but in doing the research, I found what had been written wasn’t very good. A few disparaging comments from Orson Scott Card, and only one major academic article that was full of errors (some minor issues like Baltar misspelled as Boltar, but also several major factual errors about the series itself).

This was before the new series was even announced. I believe at the time, Richard Hatch hadn’t even filmed his “Second Coming” trailer. There were a few comics that were out, and I made an effort to collect all of them, as well as the book series co-authored by Hatch. I presented an essay at the AML (Association for Mormon Letters) about the topic, and figured that was about it. A few years later, the new series came out and was a big hit. I was skeptical at first, but the first two seasons were good enough that I stuck with the whole series, despite my disappointment with the final season.

Now, based on my conference presentations and published essays, I’m probably the greatest living expert on Mormonism and Battlestar Galactica.

TheoFantastique: Perhaps we can move from the general to the specific as we discuss this topic. I remember being surprised a few years ago when I discovered at Adherents.com that a disproportionally large number of Latter-day Saints are science fiction writers, compared to other religious populations. Why is this? It’s interesting to me to see the affinities between some religious traditions and certain genres of literature and film. For example, pagans seem to have a connection to fantasy and horror, and it seems as if there is a strong connection between Mormonism and science fiction. Would you have any feel for why there is this strong connection? What is it about the Mormon faith that helps it come together so nicely with science fiction?

Ivan Wolfe: There are several reasons. Two that come to mind immediately are the novel Added Upon and Marion K. Smith. Added Upon was the first “Mormon Novel” in that it was the first work of fiction written by a Mormon for other Mormons to deal directly with Mormon issues. It’s an odd little book, full of theological speculation, down to earth events, and spiritual warfare. But one section of it is clearly utopian and even discusses advanced technology. It’s partly science fiction, and I think the looking forward to a utopian future on the Earth with Christ in charge gives Mormons a world view amenable to future speculation.

Marion K. “Doc” Smith was a professor of English at BYU (he has since passed on), and he nearly single handedly helped nurture and protect the science fiction community at the largest church owned university. He taught the science fiction writing and literature classes, and was the faculty advisor for everything sf related on campus, from the club Quark to the semi-professional magazine The Leading Edge to the annual academic symposium “Life, The Universe, and Everything.” A lot of nationally published LDS sf authors came out of his classes.

TheoFantastique: Who are some of the more prominent LDS science fiction writers that readers may not be aware of?

Ivan Wolfe: Tracy Hickman, co-author of the Dragonlance series and author of a few other science fiction and fantasy novels. M. Shayne Bell, Lee Allred, Eric James Stone – all are great authors. Mike Allred is a comic book creator (most famous for Madman) who is also adapting The Book of Mormon (the actual book, not the musical) in graphic novel format. Brandon Sanderson is more fantasy than science fiction, but outside of Orson Scott Card, he’s the most prominent LDS author on the market right now.

TheoFantastique: Moving to your contribution to the book Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy, many know of the Mormon influence in the series of the 1970s, but not whether or how it might find itself in the more recent television series. What types of elements or influences from Mormon cosmology do you see in the series in its various incarnations?

Ivan Wolfe: The original series is clearly built upon several LDS principles. The ideas of eternal progression (the ultimate destiny of humanity is to become gods themselves), marriage for eternity, the existence of Satan (Count Iblis in the original series), and Kobol/Kolob as an originating place all come from Mormon beliefs. Even the Egyptian motifs of the costumes in the original series likely come from the LDS belief that Abraham taught the Egyptians astronomy and that some Egyptian mummies acquired by founder Joseph Smith were accompanied by sacred writings (see “The Book of Abraham” in the LDS scripture The Pearl of Great Price).

The more recent series keeps a few of the terms, but has a completely different cosmology. Instead of eternal progression (as God is, man may become), it’s built on the idea of doing the same thing over and over again (all this has happened before and will happen again). There are echoes, but no real LDS substance. The various comic books and novels are similar. Richard Hatch’s co-authored novels go into a very different direction, replacing a lot of the Mormon ideas with totally new ones, while still keeping some of the same terms.

One of my biggest disappointments is that there was no Iblis figure in the new BSG, unless one decides that GOG (the “God of Galactica” – though it doesn’t like being called “God” – referenced in the series finale’s final moments) is the Iblis figure. That interpretation might actually improve the ending, though it would make it a lot more depressing.

TheoFantastique: Do you see science fiction as a continuing place for Mormon writers, television producers, and perhaps film producers, to continue to incorporate and express aspects of their beliefs?

Ivan Wolfe: Well, yes – but, that applies to pretty much anyone. Catholic, Democrat, Agnostic, Socialist-Anarchist – whatever the belief system, people will use science fiction (and other genres) to express their beliefs. I’ve read lots of hard right wing military science fiction and many far left utopian novels – and lots in between. My favorite science fiction novel is A Canticle for Leibowitz (though I did not care for the sequel) and my favorite author is Gene Wolfe (no relation). Gene Wolfe is Catholic, and Canticle is a very Catholic novel.

I expect Mormons will continue to create science fiction for as long as there are Mormons.

TheoFantastique: Ivan, thank you again for discussing this topic here.

Ivan Wolfe: Thank you! For those interested, I will also have an essay in the upcoming Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy from Open Court. It isn’t about anything specifically Mormon or religious, but it deals with the terms “canon” and “apocrypha”, and so I discuss religion briefly in the essay.

Related posts:

“Cylons in America: Interview with Editors of New Book on Battlestar Galactica”

“Caprica: Television, Tech, and the Sacred”

“James McGrath on Religion in Science Fiction”

“Douglas Cowan Interview Part 1: Forthcoming Book ‘Sacred Space’”

“Douglas Cowan Interview Part 2: Sci-Fi, Transcendence, and ‘Sacred Space’”

Religion Dispatches assembled a group of scholars who shared their thoughts on Caprica as part of their ongoing reflection on the series. The first installment is titled “Capricology: Television, Tech, and the Sacred.” Below are comments from one of the participants, Henry Jenkins. He writes in part:

Battlestar Galactica feels much more like a science fiction series than this one — if only because it follows the space opera conventions so fully — even as it drew so much inspiration from our own culture. Caprica by contrast creates a world which looks and feels very much like our present society. Did any one notice the battered Microwave Oven in the Adama kitchen which looks, if anything, out of date even today? They have stripped away the science fiction trappings as much as possible to give this story greater immediacy. The producers have talked about appealing to folks who don’t normally like SF. But what that does is make the few explicitly science fiction elements stand out that much more — the recurring focus on new media (from the virtual world to the digital paper), AI/Robotics, and alternative religious/cultural institutions.

It is striking that the series in many ways is treating polytheism as the norm in the culture while depicting monotheism as the radical other. It’s a safe bet that more monotheists are watching the series than polytheists. So, there is a certain kind of estrangement which must take place when the film consistently links monotheism with radical practices and even terrorism. In the past, we’ve seen the Cylons consistently depicted as monotheistic, but the series worked over time to break down the walls between man and machine, suggesting common identities, experiences, emotions, beliefs, and desires between them, because they are so implicated in each other’s histories.

Caprica promises to provide not only good drama through science fiction, but also continued food for cultural, social, and religious thought as well. The first episode can be viewed here.

TheoFantastique: Thank you both for your willingness to discuss the fascinating book you co-edited on the current Battlestar Galactica series. To begin, what was the genesis of the idea for you to compile this collection of essays and to edit this volume?

C. W. Marshall: I think that the main drive was the recognition that at the time there was nothing out there yet. The series was getting a lot of press, and there was a growing fan base with fan publications, but there was nothing that was attempting to assess critically the many themes that the series was raising. But there was a selfish reason, too: we were having great conversations after watching each episode, and we wanted to see what others were saying about the series.

Tiffany Potter: It was clear almost from the start that Ronald Moore and the writers of BSG were trying to engage and interrogate American culture on a critical level; what we wanted to do was to bring together a scholarly community to facilitate the fullest possible investigation of those questions.

TheoFantastique: To provide some background for readers can sketch some of the contours of the current series and its connection to the 1970s version? And how has the current series been revisioned?

C. W. Marshall: The basic plot is the same as the original series: a rag-tag fugitive fleet flee the enemy Cylons after their twelve planets have been destroyed in a sneak attack. Character names repeat, the ships are similar, but the new series introduces two significant developments. First, the Cylons are no longer the robotic forces of a reptilian enemy. Instead, they are a human product that has turned against us, and rebelled. Secondly, some Cylons appear human, and so can pass amongst us unrecognized. These two changes fuel most of the “revisioning.” I think it is helpful to see these changes as reflecting the political climate in which each series was produced: the cold-war us-vs.-them scenario of the original series, in which the enemy is relentless, unfathomable, and completely other, gives way to a post-9/11 enemy who is hard to identify, who looks like us and possibly dwells among us.

Tiffany Potter: One intriguing thing about the old series/new series revisioning is the apparently ambivalent relationship that the producers and even actors seem to have with the old series. The most common adjective used about the old series is “cheesy,” and I think that there’s a certain defensiveness about the show’s origins (not just a little ironic in a show that is in many ways an origins narrative). No one reads the current series in those terms, but we note in the book several examples of what seem undeniable allusions to or revisionings of specific episodes or plots from the original series. The most glaring is perhaps the “Starbuck stranded on a planet” plot in the season one episode “You Can’t Go Home Again.” There are what appear to be direct references and borrowings from the Galactica 1980 episode “The Return of Starbuck,” but Carla Robinson, the writer of the new episode, not only denies knowing the original one, but denies even knowing there was a series called Galactica 1980. I’m not sure what the shame would be in a well-crafted homage to a less well-crafted original, but there’s certainly a pattern of discomfort that’s worth noting if you’re discussing the process of revisioning.

TheoFantastique: In your Introduction to the book you describe Battlestar Galactica as inhabiting different aspects of science fiction as it presents its dystopic fiction of the future. Can you touch on how the series incorporates these different aspects?

C. W. Marshall: One of the virtues of science fiction is that it allows an unfiltered examination of contemporary society. Because a story is set in a distant future, or “a galaxy far, far away,” the creators are at liberty to be very pointed about social or political issues that exist in their own time. It separates the audience from their default assumptions about a subject, and can invite new, imaginative responses. Paradoxically, the distant setting allows for a more direct examination of real issues.

Tiffany Potter: No current American television programming can dare comment on socially contentious issues like abortion, genocide, or the possibility of a divinely-inspired president attempting to steal an election because she or he believes it necessary to God’s will. By recontextualizing the narrative into a site where the essential assumption is that content doesn’t matter (which I’d argue is generally the case with science fiction), the genre can say the unsayable in a way that no other current media can do (and that includes the 24-hour news networks and other ostensibly critical modes of large cultural discourse).

TheoFantastique: You also discuss one of the changes in the current series in the development of the Cylons, the “robots” or androids, into “artificially created synthetic beings with living tissue and cells” that are virtually indistinguishable from human beings. How has this development paralleled discussions of posthumanism and how has it impacted the way in which issues are addressed through the storytelling?

C. W. Marshall: Ultimately, I don’t think the series is particularly interested in posthumanism: it isn’t concerned with what our next stage may be. Instead, it uses the concept of the Cylons in a fictional world to examine what qualities define humanity in the real one. It’s a thought experiment. When there is no external, objective way to mark the Cylons as different than us, the labeling begins to seem rather arbitrary. Being Cylon is to be other, which in the series means that one isn’t guaranteed what should be universal human rights and freedoms (this plays into the discussions on torture, for example). The humans in the series won’t practice capital punishment even for their worst offenders (as when Gaius Baltar is put on trial at the end of season three), but tossing a Cylon out an airlock, or even advocating genocide against the Cylons, is viewed by sympathetic characters as morally unproblematic. It’s a real gap in our Western moral compass that the series’ writers have identified and are playing with. Further, the current season is showing the Cylons working hard to become even more indistinguishable from humans (programming mechanisms to enable free will, removing mechanisms that prolong their lives and allow their consciousness to continue independent of their bodies). These efforts to reduce the differences between the humans and the Cylons challenge any attempt to define meaningful difference.

TheoFantastique: One of the reasons the series has been popular, not only among average viewers, but also among academics, is its frequent treatment of various social, cultural, and religious issues. Can you discuss how the series has addressed our post-9/11 context as it touches on terrorism, torture and prisoner rights?

Tiffany Potter: Two essays in the book address those issues specifically, so the first thing I have to do is acknowledge that my thinking on BSG in these areas has been tremendously influenced by Brian Ott and Erika Johnson-Lewis on post-9/11 and torture respectively. BSG’s take on these topics is most important, I think, in its absolute recognition of the requirement of dehumanization for acts of war and mass violence. The surviving humans need to create a language of difference and nearly literal alien-ation of the Cylons in order to do two things: to define the actions the Cylons have taken (monstrous and inhuman); and to confirm that human beings, by virtue of their humanity, are incapable of such a genocidal action (though of course the show makes clear that we are not).

Though the associative metaphors of terrorists and insurgents are intentionally, brilliantly muddled by season three, the humans never surrender their demand for difference from the “toasters” and “skin jobs.” If they’re going to throw Cylons out airlocks without trial (and by extension if Americans are going to throw people into Guantanamo Bay cells without trial or the public presentation of evidence that has defined justice for Western history), then those thrown away cannot be like the ostensible us: they have to be rendered not-us, not-deserving-of-human-rights through systems of language, of laws, and of governance. It’s not just that the president says so; it’s that the community agrees and naturalizes that construction of difference. And that’s a hugely startling assertion for a presumptively frivolous medium like television to make.

C.W. Marshall: Yes. The series is able to manipulate the default expectations most in the audience will have after 9/11. For example, for two seasons we are invited to map the experience of the humans in the show onto middle America: the Cylons are terrorists, attacking our homeland, threatening our security, and so forth. There is then a startling reversal at the start of season three, when suddenly the humans are seen as a nation occupied by a technologically superior military, insurgents fighting their oppressors. We care about the human characters and have identified with them for two years, but it’s really quite bold to ask the American audience to identify with the plight of Iraq in this way.

TheoFantastique: The original series found religious influences in Mormonism, and the new series is not without a religious dimension as well. Can you talk about the religious or spiritual aspects of the current series, especially the interesting dynamic represented in the monotheism of the Cylons and the polytheism of the humans?

C. W. Marshall: For me this is one of the most exciting aspects of the series. While the new series has not pursued the Mormon angle to the same degree, it is very interested in examining a number of theological and religious questions. At a sociological level, we are shown how religion impacts the lives of a number of characters in the fleet. Some pray, some avoid going to services, some believe in active prophecy, and some prefer to take religion as an extended metaphor. It is a realistic representation of the diversity of North American religious experience, which is pretty uncharacteristic for a television world. At times, the commentary is specific to the America of George W. Bush: at one point, the president is seen praying with her cabinet.

Theologically, the series presents a culture, the Cylons, which bases its actions on an extremist monotheism. One true God, to replace the diverse polytheism of the humans. Problematically, we are told “God is love,” but we also see the Cylons using their monotheism to justify their attack on the humans. The series authors have been very careful to blur the lines of how we are to interpret this religious extremism: is it the radical Islam America claims to be fighting, or is it the fundamentalist Christianity that is particularly associated with the American heartland?

The current season is developing both of these dimensions. We see that the human polytheism has had a place for mystery cults (reference has been made to worshippers of Mithras alongside the twelve Olympians), and we see a growing place for the cult of (Cylon) monotheism. In some ways, the picture is evoking the religious world of the first-century Mediterranean.

TheoFantastique: Can you sketch the overall layout and some of the other topics addressed in this book?

Tiffany Potter: We’ve organized Cylons in America according to three different threads of inquiry. In part one our (brilliant) contributors address the way that BSG represents American life through the distorted and sometimes didactic mode of science fiction. They address exactly the issues of post-9/11 questions of identity, violence, and torture in a world suddenly defined by a terrorist Other. This section also addresses how a community responds to this sort of immediate change in terms of military and scientific responses (and the way a culture comes to view its military and its scientists), and also in terms of individual responses like the continuing need for competition, play, and desire.

The second section addresses the series’ big question: what does it mean to be human, and how does the Cylon/human interface illuminate that? The contributors’ essays discuss religion, determinations of personhood, racialized difference and its potential future in ideas of hybridity. This all sounds very critically astute—and it is—and perhaps out of the range of many readers—but it’s not. It’s about what marks Sharon as concurrently human and Cylon, and how conventions of horror genres help us to understand what’s so attractive and terrifying about Six, and how the series plays with those end-of-the-world-movie clichés like all of humanity banding together regardless of race and creed to fight a non-human enemy, and how that suddenly gets more complicated when that enemy can’t be instantly visually identified by physical markers (like the shorthands we use in our usual ideas of race).

The final section looks at the series as television. Essays in this section link the show’s often contradictory politics with contemporary media’s obsessive need for supposed “balanced reporting,” and also look at allusions to other science fiction and cultural texts, from films and music to fan fiction and internet responses to the regendering of Starbuck. We tried to select essays that would talk about BSG not just as if it were a text, but also as a cultural experience at the start of the millenium.

TheoFantastique: How would you summarize your experience in reflecting on these issues and how it informed your editing of this volume?

C. W. Marshall: I think the process made us better viewers of television. Each viewer has particular interests, but by expanding the dialogue in this way we become exposed to a range of critical issues and approaches we might not have considered on our own. The series is a larger and deeper object of study than we originally expected. Like theatre, television is a collaborative medium, where a range of individuals bring their talents to the creative process. As such, it invites a wide range of academic approaches; we are authorized to look for deeper meanings and resonances.

Tiffany Potter: For me the experience of editing the volume made clear how much really astute thinking is going on about elements of our culture that many people regard as disposable and temporary. For better or worse, television is our culture’s
single most pervasive social device: it functions in the way that literature and theatre have done for hundreds of years in that it provides a widely-consumed and thus normative reflection that isn’t really a reflection. It’s aspirational in showing what we perhaps wish we were (morally, socially, economically, or as America’s Next Top Idol Fifth Grader), and what we wish we had (“My Name is Earl” aside, most of television is about highly affluent, often professional people with a lot of expensive things). But I think television is also linked to long traditions of didacticism—satirical or otherwise—in that good television brings into our homes the very things we try to avoid seeing: the dangers and benefits of treachery, corruption, and violence, and what they mean to us as human beings. Children’s television directs by positive modeling, but television like BSG, The Sopranos, and The Wire challenge us to *think* about the world, and that’s never disposable.

TheoFantastique: Thank you again for carving out some time to discuss the book, and for your great contribution to the academic study of popular culture.

And as if this interesting series of influences were not enough, Battlestar Galactica also touches on a host of issues related to social and cultural circumstances in 21st century life. This is the focus of a recent book that I have just become aware of the through the Popular Culture Association’s Yahoo! group titled Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, edited by Tiffany Potter and C. W. Marshall (Continuum International Publishing, 2007). As the back cover of the book describes:

“The award-winning and compulsively watchable Battlestar Galactica, ‘re-imagined’ by creator Ronald D. Moore for the twenty-first century, combines many familiar features of science fiction with direct commentary on life in post-9/11 America. At its best. BSG achieves a level of political and social commentary that has not been achieved anywhere else on modern television.

“Cylons in America presents an edgy, stimulating and sometimes witty collection of critical studies of BSG, examining the series’ place within popular culture and its engagement with contemporary American society. The book is divided into three sections: the first explores how BSG creates a microcosm of our current world; the second considers the Cylons as a mirror of humanity; and the third raises central questions about science fiction as a genre, about the nature of episodic television, and the role of media in popular culture. For anyone wishing to explore the many worlds of Battlestar Galactica, Cylons in America provides the perfect point of departure.”

I’ve just added this book to my Amazon.com wish list as it promises to provide a fascinating exploration into a popular television program, and the ability of science fiction as a genre for self and social exploration.