Why Battlestar’s Naturalistic Sci-Fi is the Easy Way Out

by NDK Creative Artist

A few months back, Joel sent me an “Interesting essay on this page about writing sci-fi.”

We’re both fans of “Battlestar Galactica” and this critique doesn’t change that one iota.

This article is developed from our conversation in Skype. I agree with Joel that it is an interesting essay. However, I do not agree with Ron Moore’s take on technology.

I think that his particular outlook on ordinance lets the series down. The USA has a 747 jet fitted with a gigantic laser in the nose. That plane is flying the skies of earth today. It’s a beam weapon; an energy weapon. It kills missiles in flight, it is not a seagull toaster.

I think Ron simply has a lack of imagination in the area of technology, engineering and science. To be specific: a lack of Technical Imagination.

In his article and in the series itself, he is talking about a civilization that has left Earth a long time ago, gone into space, colonized many planets and somehow remained stagnant in terms of science and engineering. And that is the only thing that really lets the series down.

In trying to “be real” or as he calls it “natural” he has introduced an unreality.

He’s doing this from a purely dramatic, storyteller perspective and in some respects is portraying this as a superior perspective (quite typical of this sort of storyteller–those who are all about character, rather than integrated storytelling–about which, more at another time) and that’s fine, except that he really lacks a Technical Imagination and should have brought in a consultant to fulfill that role.

For example, if you take Faster Than Light (FTL) travel to be possible which can convert a massive ship displacing thousands of tons of metal and machinery and electronics and also human biological mechanisms (bodies) and fling them through space, then it follows that one could feasibly figure out a way to make a military application on a somewhat smaller scale out of that technology. One may also discover other parallel technologies that permit weapons development that is vastly superior to projectile weapons.

In essence FTL is about converting matter into energy that can travel in excess of light speed and then firing that energy through space to a predetermined destination so that it gets there faster than light.

So I find the “naturalistic” idea a bit weak. Doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the series.

It seems to me Ron Moore is not much interested in the machinery and just wants to tell a story in space, with space ships. I would argue the point that he is lazy when it comes to doing the science necessary to create a completely plausible science fiction drama, and studios are not always known for providing a significant development budget if they can possibly avoid it. So I suspect that spending the time and money to employ consultants and engineers to come up with plausible future weapons is mainly a budget-driven concern.

A great storyteller will balance character, and milieu in a way that services the story and the genre.

I think he has created a dramatic story, and then sold everyone an argument that allows him to cover up his lack of Technical Imagination.

I’d even go so far as to say that while he’s admirably advanced the original extremely hokey BSG series, where the characters were barely even one-dimensional, that he has yet managed to preserve the element of unreality that contributed to the technical hokum that also characterized the original series.

Great that he picked up on the “no noise in space” bit, and determined not to use that as a “reality” in BSG 1.3; but he hasn’t made it a fully fledged BSG 2.0 by actually addressing the science. With this essay Moore’s tried to take the science out of it. Instead of balancing the science correctly, he’s overemphasized character and story to compensate for his lack of Technical Scientific Imagination, and mayhap, the lack of a budget allocated for it. He explains this all away very creatively. That’s just more bumf, I think.

There’s such an element of scathe to the tone of the essay that this really tends to point up that it is an attempt to criticize some pretty popular series, and miss some other crucial points that tend to indicate, to me, that the essay’s author has a bit of an unbalanced view of things and is so utterly convinced of his superiority as a storyteller, and that I think is not something for him to wax lyrical about. In other words, he sells it too hard.

Other than the above, I do agree with what he’s done and why. I just think he’s taken an extreme, rather than a balanced position.

Despite this, I still love the show.

Where do we go now?

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