I've never liked the aphoristic form, never warmed to twee, manga-style illustrations and have always been suspicious of Utopias — in my experience, the latter tend to be either fascist or ridiculously simplistic in nature — or both.

Well-bound and printed on good paper, but with covers that feel a little too much like mediocre comic book covers, before even opening either book I was already contemplating a quick email to the author, thanking her for the review copies and informing her that I would not actually review the books. Criticizing Battlestar Galactica or doing my small bit to prick the inflated reputation of the likes of Gregory Maguire is one thing. Slamming a self-published writer of little standing in the world of lit-rah-toor is something very different and not a game I intend to play without good reason.

But still, the author went to the trouble of sending me review copies; the least I could do was to ignore the covers and give the words a chance.

And I'm glad I did; Hogarth has written a diptych quite unlike any I have read before.

The Aphorisms of Kherishdar By M.C.A. Hogarth M. Hogarth, 2008, 57 pages, US$20.00

The Admonishments of Kherishdar By M.C.A. Hogarth M. Hogarth, 2008, 57 pages, US$20.00

Set at some indefinite point in our future, Kherishdar has made contact with aunera — or "aliens", which is to say, with human beings — and the books are an attempt to explain the ways of the people of Kherishdar, the Ai-Naidar, to us, or presumably, to our future selves. One or two human beings play very small parts in some of the chapters, but Hogarth stays true to her intentions and does not offer the reader an easy "in" with a human character exploring an alien culture. Rather, we are and remain the aliens, and so must make what we will of the Aphorisms and Admonishments presented to us.

Ironically, science fiction readers more and more seem to me to (mostly) be creatures of habit, preferring the false sense of the new in endless trilogies and eternal television novelizations (has anyone done a count of Doctor Who or Star Trek novels?). Even ostensibly alien civilizations are seldom more than an extreme version of one particular human tendency or another. And it's the rare piece of SF indeed that eschews a view-point character with which the reader is supposed to identify.

Hogarth does none of the above. There are no good guys nor bad guys, no world-shaking conflict; no war, revolution or invasion. Indeed, neither volume has even an obvious over-riding plot (though the careful reader will see that there is a narrative thread stitching together each volume's 25 stories), merely a narrator who seems no more than Fifth Business, recounting the tales of others who have crossed their paths.

Kherishdar is a society — let's face it, a Utopia, of sorts — that at first glance seems rigidly and even reactionarily hierarchical. Ruled by an Emperor, overseen by Nobles, protected by Guardians, at first glance Kherishdar seems as anachronistic as that presented in Herbert's Dune series, and it seems clear that Hogarth is at least familiar with Plato's Republic even if she is not attempting to directly update it.

Having long since dismissed Herbert's futuristic feudalism as silly and despised Plato's very readable yet fundamentally dishonest apologia for totalitarianism, it came as no surprise to me that I was not convinced by Hogarth's portrait of a similar society as something that not only works as a structure, but as a structure that also works for the individuals within it.

But "not convinced" is not the same as having my suspension of disbelief tossed out the window.

Hogarth's world is one whose "people" all (or almost all) take their responsibilities very seriously indeed. It is a society in which Lords are genuinely responsible for those below them on the social pecking order as well as to those above them.

The narrator of The Aphorisms is a calligrapher, roughly in the middle range of the social hierarchy, whose job extends far beyond that of his equivalent in our world — a commercial artist, perhaps, living off of commissions. At least in the 25 tales presented to us, he sees his calling as one that entails providing his patrons not only with what they want in terms of his craft, but also with what they need in terms of their personal well-being.

Similarly in The Admonishments, the narrator Kor is "Shame" or "Correction", a position without a genuine parallel in any society with which I am familiar. Kor's duty is to heal criminals, those who have in some way failed in their duties — whether to family, friend or to someone above or below them in Kherishdar's hierarchy.

At first glance, the position seems closer to that of a torturer under the medieval Catholic Church, but once again Hogarth's stories make clear that correction — providing what the "criminal" needs — is at the heart of the process. And, as more than one of the tales makes clear, what someone needs may not be what custom or law prescribes.

I said somewhere above that Hogarth hasn't managed to convince me that this alien society, or the aliens within it, might actually exist. My western, individualist prejudices want to argue that Hogarth presents us with an impossibly incorruptible oligarchy, but the point is that I want to argue and not simply dismiss her "secondary creation" as either silly or fascistic. In short, I want to know more about her creation, because whether or not I would ultimately deem her society "good" or "bad", it is definitely different — and so well-worth the time of any SF reader interested in something other than adolescent wish-fulfilment fantasies, or indeed, of any reader interested in thinking about how our world works (and doesn't) and how we might learn to do things differently.

Many of the stories are available for free on Hogarth's website, so you can easily sample them for yourself. If you enjoy them, $20 bucks per book is not at all out of line. Despite my reaction to the covers, some of the interior illustrations (see above for an example) are lovely and the books themselves are well-produced and should last you a good long while.

[	Tags	|	obama, politics, torture, us politics, war on terror	]
[	mood	|	cynical	]

• The Bush-like fantasy of "victory" in Iraq;


• the Johnson-like escalations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, both efforts doomed to ultimate failure, but which will, in the interim create literally millions of civilian casualties, further destroy the economies and whatever progressive civil societies struggling there and — create even more terrorists and poppy-farmers; and


• possibly worst of all (at least for the civil society of the United States itself), Obama's back-tracking on his promises to end torture, secret prisons and the rest of the fascist brutalization of the Bush II administration.

It has fallen to President Obama to deal with the policies and practices of torture inaugurated by the Bush administration. He started boldly, ordering an end to the abuses, announcing the closing in one year of the detention camp at Guantánamo and releasing the Bush-era Justice Department memos authorizing torture. Subsequently, he seemed to grow cautious. He discouraged formation of an independent commission to investigate the torture and reversed a previous position in favor of releasing Pentagon photos of abuses and instead opposed release [...] He surprisingly embraced a number of Bush policies, including military commissions for trying detainees, the use of the State Secrets privilege to protect information in court and the indefinite use of preventive detention [...] Yet among these reversals and improvisations, one very general preference has remained steady. Throughout, Obama has expressed a desire to concentrate on the "future" rather than the "past." As he put it a while back, he is bent on "getting things right in the future, as opposed [to] looking at what we got wrong in the past." Or as he said in the National Archives speech, "We need to focus on the future" while resisting those "with a strong desire to focus on the past."[...]

When the full history of the Bush administration is finally told, one event may prove iconic: the torture of the Al Qaeda operative Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who recently died, allegedly by his own hand, in a prison in Libya, where he was sent by the United States. Libi was captured in Pakistan in late 2001. At first, he was interrogated by the FBI, and he provided useful information on the inner workings of Al Qaeda. But more was wanted from him. The Bush administration, hellbent on justifying its forthcoming invasion of Iraq, was ransacking the intelligence bureaucracy to find or produce two things that, it turns out, did not exist: weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq and cooperation between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein. Pressure to find evidence of both intensified in 2002.[...]

As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, has stated, the "harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002...was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and Al Qaeda." And according to the recent Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of detainees, a former Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, has confirmed the charge. "A large part of the time," he told Army investigators, "we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful.... The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link...there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." The CIA took custody of Libi and began to expose him to abuse. Next, it "rendered" him to Egypt, where he was subjected to, among other torments, severe beatings and confinement in a tiny cage for more than eighty hours. He then produced the desired false statements linking Al Qaeda with the Iraqi government.[...]

This purpose of the Bush-era torture is inscribed in its origins. In the Korean War, the Chinese invented torture techniques whose aim was to force American prisoners of war to make false confessions of participation in war crimes for use in propaganda. Since false confessions, not information, were the desired product, a heavy emphasis was placed on sensory deprivation and other techniques for producing mental breakdown.[...]

Even as the torturer shatters the world of his victim, he assaults the foundation of his own world, although he does not know it. Indeed, his blindness is a consequence of the torture, even a condition for it. The torturer and his victim are close to each other. There is physical contact. Yet in every other respect they are as distant as it is possible for one person to be from another. In the moral and affective vacuum that has been generated, sympathy, empathy, pity, understanding--every form of fellow-feeling--have been reduced to absolute zero. That is why torture is always, in Scarry's words, an "undoing of civilization," and, probably more reliably than anything, it foretells the descent of a civilization into barbarism. The power of the state that tortures may be increasingly fictional, but the degradation of its civilization is real.[...]

Living as we do mostly and more or less in the present, when female soldiers are coming home from Afghanistan in body bags, women are routinely running for public office and blasting off into space as astronauts, it is easy to lose sight of just how much and how quickly things have changed in North America over the past 40 or so years.

I'll likely never forget that day on a subway platform, when my friend Steve excitedly pointed to the oncoming train and shouted, "Look! A woman subway driver! A woman subway driver!"

It might be hard for most of you reading this to understand the excitement, but this was 1980 or 1981 and no one in that group of half a dozen teenagers had ever seen a woman driving a subway before. We were of a social class that saw that strange sight as a sign of good things to come, but in 1980 (or 1981) it was a strange sight nevertheless.

Budding feminists we may have been, but I don't think that we fully realized the importance of that pioneering woman subway driver. We definitely didn't think of the arbitrary hurdles she must almost certainly have had to leap in order to take her place in a "man's world".

At least, not until we went on to read The Women's Room.

Marilyn French in 1987.

That compulsion arises from the fact that, despite my fading memories, I can honestly and confidently say that Marilyn French's novel was one of the most influential books I had read to that point in my then brief life and one that remains for me — despite the loss of detailed memory over the years — a touchstone, a landmark in the development of my ability to "imagine the other", in this case the lives of North American women and the vital necessity of the feminist movements of which The Women's Room was a vital part. (Not many novels manage to sell 20 million copies.)

As best I can remember, The Women's Room followed the didactic path that began with (if not before) Uncle Tom's Cabin and now very familiar through books by the likes of Alice Walker's The Colour Purple (which I also haven't read for a very long time; forgive me if I get details wrong).

Call them social tragedies. Such novels follow a more or less inevitable destruction of the individual by society, by social expectations and by legal strictures.

Published in 1977, I suspect my poor memory of the novel itself — as opposed to my memory of its impact upon me — indicates The Women's Room was more a powerful artifact of its time rather than a work of immortal literature — but who knows? Maybe it's just one of those books I don't remember very well. There are a lot of those, after all.

In any case, in the early 1980s it was a novel that deeply moved me and even more deeply enraged me. French clearly illustrated the genuine evils that arise in societies that treat people as members of a group or class, rather than as individual human beings, societies in which only the most heroic women were able to take their place as subjects of their own lives, rather than objects of the men with whom they shared those lives.

The Women's Room was at once an articulate cry of rage and demand for justice, for fairness, for the fundamental right of all women — 'till then, eternally denied — to control the course of their own lives.

For me, French's novel was a seminal (if you'll pardon that o! so archaic term; the battle is not over yet) work which showed the reality behind the theory of feminism, which made concrete for me just why so many women were so angry. I suspect that, for my generation, it had an effect similar to the one Martin Luther King's "I had a dream" speech had on the previous generation's understanding of the world and "the other".

According to the obituary published in the Charlotte Observer, "Her aim, she said, was 'to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world.'"

I doubt she died believing the job was done, but I hope she was able to appreciate the massive changes that have happened in the 30-some years since her book was published and that she knew her work had been a significant part of those changes.

Certainly, it had a lasting impact on me.

Boyle is, shall we say, not conventionally attractive, small-town, unemployed and — horrors! — at 47, of an age when our culture expects women to gracefully disappear from view.

Of course, the video has been spreading through the blogosphere and beyond like wildfire, because it turned out that Boyle can, in fact, really sing.

Now, to tell you the truth, I have been pretty good at avoiding "reality" teevee shows; a brief sampling early on convinced me they were exactly what I had expected them to be, freak shows more often than not, and I've never had much interest in such sort of degrading entertainment, thank you very much.

Anyway, the Boyle video was emailed to me, and a couple of you posted about it, and so I too have seen it (and yes, she can sing). I was appalled by the sexist, classist, ageist and — yes — lookist presumptions of both the audience and the judges and, with just everybody else, cheered Boyle's success at turning a theatre full of freak-show gawkers into fans.

But of all the commentary on this phenomenon, ranging from innocent pleasure in an ugly duckling's success to critical analyses of why it was such a "surprise" to so many to find out that an unattractive, middle-aged woman can actually sing well, the Globe and Mail's excellent television critic John Doyle hammered what should be the final nail into the coffin of this particular "reality" television stunt, nailing both why such programs are so popular and why we should be suspicious about the allegedly surprised judges.

The Boyle phenomenon has been a great, heartwarming experience for tens of millions of people. They feel vindicated every time they see the video. They empathize and connect with Boyle; they do a mental tut-tut when the judges roll their eyes and the audience sniggers at the middle-aged, plain woman. They are conning themselves that in the same situation they wouldn't react exactly as the judges and the audience did before Boyle began singing in that stunning voice.

See, the Boyle phenomenon is well and good, but the problem with it is that it reveals our collective hypocrisy about reality TV, beauty and talent.

If American Idol and its many imitations actually featured a lot of people who looked like Boyle, then hardly anybody would watch.

What we want is young, pretty people to gaze at. We think we root for the underdog, but we don't really. We are a superficial, catty and vapid culture. We aren't interested in authenticity. We mainly watch TV shows featuring people we'd like to date, touch and have sex with.

Doyle goes on to say,

The attention given to Boyle is the exception that proves the rule — we are relentlessly superficial. This isn't the fault of television. It's a collective weakness, and we get the popular culture we deserve.

In the Boyle case, though, the true irony is that it's possible we have been expertly manipulated. There is something far too slick and staged about the clip of Boyle on Britain's Got Talent. Simon Cowell is one the great Svengalis of popular music. The idea that Cowell was completely taken aback by Boyle's voice is simply too far-fetched.

Far-fetched indeed. The full article is available here and I heartily commend it to your attention.

(Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online.)

DANDRUFF The ANSWER is usually vinegar. To some problems there are solutions.

What we call dandruff is often the result of a PH imbalance on the skin, which shampoo exacerbates. Wash your hair with a simple non-detergent shampoo, soap, olive oil, beer, almost anything. Rinse. Then close your eyes and pour on some vinegar. The extremely cheap but natural sort — apple cider, for example — is probably best. The smell will stimulate interesting conversations in changing-room showers and your explanation will win you friends. Wait thirty to sixty seconds. Rinse it off. The smell will go away. So will your dandruff.

All dermatologists, pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies know this simple secret. They don't tell you because they make money by converting dandruff into a complex medical and social problem. By most professional standards this would amount to legally defined incompetence or mis-representation.

Dandruff shampoos that promise to keep your shoulders and even your head clear are harsh detergents and may promote baldness, which ought to constitute malpractice.

— John Raulston Saul, The Doubter's Companion

Not my back, praise be.

I was 29 or 30 years old when I quite suddenly developed a skin condition which was subsequently diagnosed as psoriasis. Unlike the man in the accompanying photo, my case wasn't horribly disfiguring, but it was a definite drag. In particular, it showed up on my knees and elbows, spots on my head and a few smaller ones on my face. At it's worst, my skin would be raw and bloody, though strangely it didn't hurt or even itch much.

Anyway, after it didn't go away for a couple of weeks I found myself talking with a dermatologist, who advised me psoriasis is an auto-immune disease about which little was known. He suggested a couple of medications and said we would then see whether or not they worked.

Since then, I've probably tried a good half-dozen creams and ointments, most of them including hydrocortisone, a substance that frankly makes me nervous.

All of them seemed to provide some release from the worst outbreaks, none of them actually got rid of the flaking skin or oozing sores.

So, having read the entry from Saul's rather excellent book (see my soon-to-be-updated reading list for more), it occurred to me that, Saul being no one's fool and dandruff and psoriasis both being somewhat mysterious skin conditions, that I might as well give vinegar a try.

That was a bit more than three weeks ago, since which time I haven't touched my prescription medications. And since which, the huge and ugly patch on my left knee has shrunk to the point where there are two smaller patches, rather than one big one; that on my right knee has almost disappeared; and my elbows are looking vastly better than they have for years.

So, so far, more than so good; I'll keep you posted — and will try to get my camera working so I can post a before/after photo before my skin has (knock wood) been cleaned up completely.

Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online.

Am I convinced that this is the cure for psoriasis? Of course not; one test-subject, over the three weeks does not nearly make for a decent, double-blind study. At the same time, none of the medications I've tried have worked as well as — so far — is the cheap, apple-cider vinegar I happened to have on hand. Well enough, that a good friend of mine, who suffers from a sometimes quite awful case of eczema is going to try it on a couple of patches of his own embattle skin.

So far, more than so good; I'll keep you posted — and will try to get my camera working so I can post a before/after photo before my skin has (knock wood) been cleaned up completely.

Yes, I have full-time internet access again, and yes, I owe you Gentle Readers a personal update, but that will have to wait just a little longer. Meanwhile, the second of this year's Doctor Who specials has aired and, yes, I feel compelled to comment upon it. There may be spoilers ahead.)

But I get ahead of myself.

"Planet of the Dead" is unlikely to make anybody weep, or even sniffle. During his four-episode swan-song, Davies seems to be quite properly giving us "only" stand-alone episodes (though with hints of the Doctor's "death" to come), old-fashioned Doctor Who adventures and on that level "Planet of the Dead" was a very good episode indeed. After all, with a cat-suited jewel-thief, UNIT, an alien world, rather original, Earth-threatening monsters and a scientist in love, what's not to like?

Riding the #200 London double-decker bus while investigating some sort of wormhole, The Doctor finds himself suddenly transported — along with the bus and all half-dozen of its passengers — to a desert planet with three suns (not one of which see, presumably for budgetary reasons), a dangerous mystery (the fate of the Earth hangs, yet again, in the balance!) and a remarkably well-prepared aristocrat, the Lady Christina de Souza, who plays this episodes companion.

I won't bore (or spoil) you with details. The episode is fast-paced, funny and exciting enough — were I still ten, I would probably have found it thrilling.

Which brings me back to the beginning, and just what a happy gift that second series was. Basically, the emotional depths of the Rose cycle spoiled me, left me expecting the exceptional, rather than appreciating it for the near-miracle combination of children's adventure and heart-breaking romance it was.

All that said, I'm glad Davies is taking his leave; an eternal series like Doctor Who, like the title character himself, needs periodic injections of new blood.

On an entirely different note, one of you (yes, I mean you, beable!) said you enjoyed the episode, "except for what seemed to be a spectacular RaceFail..." I'm still waiting for the follow-up since (and at risk of once again making a fool of myself, I don't see it.

(Cross-posted from my blog.)

Giving oneself over to an episodic drama, produced over years, is always a gamble on the part of the reader or viewer. Unlike a novel or a feature film, the reader or viewer must take a leap of faith and trust that the creator or creators, essentially know what they are doing, that — even if they are open to making changes as things move along, organically evolving as they are surprised by their own creation — they at least have the ultimate end-point, the climax, always in view.

During its first two seasons, Battlestar Galactica showed every sign of being that rarity on commercial television, a show that was meant to be seen as an organic whole, with a begining, a middle and an end, rather than a series of adventures intended to go on (and on — see the eternal recurrence of Star Trek</i>, for example) so long as it has enough viewers for advertisers to continue financing production.

The program was smart, funny and often brutal; it dealt with serious issues without recourse to easy (or sometimes any answers offered to the viewer as the "right" one. The show's characters — even the noblest — were realistically flawed and very far from the virtually ideal usually served up in television and filmed attempts at science fiction.

To say that I quickly became a fan is an understatement. In truth, Battlestar Galactica was, in my opinion, the best show on television, asking its audience to think as well as to feel. (Since then, I've encountered such programs as Deadwood and The Wire, the former sadly cancelled before it's time, but the latter allowed to go on until it was truly completed.)

To tell you the truth, I lost my faith that Ronald D. Moore knew where they were going with Battlestar Galactica at some point about mid-way through the third season, when the series began running what were basically "stand-alone" episodes typical of network dramas that did little or nothing to further the progress of the series' main story: I read reports at the time suggesting this was due to network interference, to bean-counters messing with the creators in hopes of expanding the show's audience, but the Friday's final episode leaves me doubting that it was not, in fact, Moore who was responsible for the series' decline. Neverthless, right up until the final episode, I had home, if not faith, that he might surprise me, despite the apparent impossibility in pulling the program's myriad sub-plots and thematic threads into a well-realized whole.

Though I was sceptical about Moore's ability to pull it off, I didn't expect a dénoument that I can only characterize as, well, a cheat.

(Note: the following necessarily contains spoilers. Since I can't even recommend watching the episode, I don't think it matters, but stop reading now if you want to pass judgement yourself and have not yet seen the episode.)

In a nutshell, Battlestar Gallactica posits a society destroyed by its own creations, the Cylons. Cylons are robots who gained sentience and rebelled against their position as slaves; following a half-century of peace, the Cylons returned, destroying the Twelve Colonies with nuclear weapons, and leaving only 50,000 survivors out of the twelve planets. The series follows those survivors, who are both trying to escape from the Cylons, bent on finishing their extermination of the human race, and to find refuge on possibly mythical planet called "Earth".

Despite the fantastic, science fictional trappings, Battlestar Galactica managed to provide pointed, non-didactic commentary on current events, such as the invasion of Iraq, the use of torture and the complexities of democratic politics with a sophistication sometimes matching the best of serious fiction. Even better it made concrete such abstractions as compromise and second-thought (as well as power-mongering and corruption) in its presentation of politics.

At its best, the program explored ideas, posing questions rather than offering Answers.

Even more, Battlestar Galactice provided some of the most complex characterizations I've seen on American television. Despite the military trappings and the dramatic structure, there wasn't a major character on the program who didn't make major mistakes. There were no easy answers, even for essentially "good" men and women; at its best, the program was "about" the creative tensions between conflicting understandings of right and wrong, about the difficulties inherent in balancing power with morality, of choosing the "right" course of action in times of crisis.

But having now seen the final episode, the climax, I can only feel betrayed. It seems clear now that Moore either did not after all actually know where the story was going to end up or, perhaps worse, that they did.

For decades, books and articles on the writing of science fiction have included a list of ideas that have been done to death (if you'll forgive me the cliche), of cliches to avoid.

Much of the time, the very first cliched idea to avoid is the "Adam and Eve" story, in which a couple or perhaps a larger group of survivors of some calamity crash-land on a pristine planet, only for it to be revealed that — gosh! — they were our ancestors!

Proof that Battlestar Galactica succumbed to a failure of creative imagination is that its ending was the above-noted cliche.

And how did the fleet manage to find Earth in the end? Through multiple acts of deus ex machina, that's how.

Our protagonists' arrival on Earth, perhaps 50,000 years ago, is "explained" by angels. Yes, literally angels, representing a kind of midieval Divine Providence.

I won't bore you with the details; if you're a fan of the show you probably already know them and, if not, this review is unlikely to convince you to invest a close to a hundred hours of your time in order to find them out.

Suffice it to say the finale reveals that our "heroes" have been endlessly manipulated by divine intervention, as if the mental and imaginative lives of Moore are one with Homer's. The gods are hidden, but live among us, nudging us here and there, in hopes that someday we can escape the wheel of eternal recurrence.

The endlessly venal and self-serving Balthar, along with Caprica Six are revealed as some (unexplained) sort of divinities. Kara Thrace, once one of the most unusual and strong famale characters ever portrayed on American television, herself turns out to be some kind of angel — literally, it is more than implied; she in fact very literally disappears into thin air — presumably taken bodily back to heaven — following the completion of her "mission" (leading the survivors to Earth).

Galactica has always included a paranormal or religious element, a mystery that we were implicitly promised would be explained. What we were given however, makes a vaguelly-mystical hash of explanation, let alone of logic.

I suppose one can intuit an over-riding rationale for the events presented in the final episode (and, by extension, in the series as a whole) but this reviewer, at least, has his doubts. The dénoument reeks of a failure of imagination, if not necessarily of courage.

Battlestar Galactica is a series which has included some of the best television writing I've seen come out of North America, but if one accepts the conceit that it is to be taken as a single work, as a single dramatic narrative, it must be judged an almost tragic failure.

If a success, it is the success of an essentially pagan vision, in which the Gods are with us always, inscrutable, mysterious, incomprehensible and apparently arbitrary but acting with a Purpose we are not given to understand.

Despite its technological trappings, in the end, Battlestar Galacticta turned out to a fantasy after all and, like most fantasies, it is essentially reactionary in philosophy, denying the existence of individual volition, of free will, in favour of mysterious Destiny, where reality is beyond even the hope of human understanding and where — despite the often-supperb characterizations throughout the series — the individual human being is important only when he or she is a tool of that mysterious Destiny.

What a let-down. What a tragic waste of a lot of sometimes brilliant work.