The Future Is Now: Battlestar Galactica, Serenity and Science Fiction’s Allegorical Indictment of the New World (Dis)Order

Sorry — this is much simpler than that title makes it sound.

While science fiction and fantasy novels seem to be in a never-ending Golden Age (my favorite recent reads come from Neal Stephenson, Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman and Octavia Butler), science fiction and fantasy film and TV have been, at best, hit or miss.

But just when you thought the post-Buffy/Angel horizon looked empty, two ships of different sizes but with similar complexity of characters and ideas have come in.

The best news I heard this week was that the Sci Fi Channel has renewed Battlestar Galactica for another season. The second half of their second season begins in January. (See Maureen Ryan’s many posts chronicling her love affair with the series).

And the best scifi movie I’ve seen in a long, long time was Serenity, Joss Whedon’s resurrection of his too-brilliant-to-handle one-season wonder on Fox: Firefly (which Sci Fi Channel has just started rerunning in its intended order).

For me, the most enlightening science fiction revels in its unique allegorical possibilities. It uses the future (or sometimes, as in the case of all the authors I’ve mentioned above, the re-imagined past) to hold up a cracked mirror to our present-day conflicts and crises. It doesn’t just use the the alternative world as a warning of what might become. It puts the most intractable issues of our day in a different, deceptively distant, setting.

In this spirit, I see Battlestar Galactica and Serenity as present-day political documents. They investigate the misuses of power in a time when national borders have become increasingly irrelevant, old alliances have shifted and the only mode of resistance is to exist on the edges of the system, throwing periodic wrenches into the machinery of power.

Sound familar? Unlike the narrative of the War on Terrorism sanctioned by the Bush administration, though, both of these stories are not afraid to revel in the messiness of the new world. They recognize that the new enemies are more than simply cowards and fanatics; they have their own plan and a purpose (consider the Cylons in Battlestar). And they are also not afraid to admit that these enemies — far from being the force of "darkness" against our "light" — are, in many senses, our own creation (consider the Reevers in Serenity).

Oh, and by the way, the people who inhabit this new world struggle everyday with balancing their personal morality and relationships alongside their national/international obligations.

And many of those people are women — physically and emotionally strong women with loads of agency.

So revel in this moment. The bleak, harrowing future never looked brighter.