I enjoy the freedom that Speculative Fiction gives me, as a writer, to illuminate the ordinary in extraordinary ways. One of the most appealing things about paranormal romances is their ability to showcase the darker places love can be found, and while fantasy seems inherently more romantic than science fiction, I think futuristic–even apocolyptic–landscapes can teach us things about love.

This is on my mind because last night was the series finale of the SyFy Channel’s “Battlestar Galactica.” It was a series that gave fans much to complain about, and I won’t list my numerous complaints here, but I was struck by the way the show evolved. It started out with a lot of eye-candy and over-the-top sexual heat between the young and hard-bodied characters. But in the end, the show was anchored by the riveting love stories of two much older couples.

Credit surely must go to the lovely Mary McDonnell for managing to look beautiful even while going bald, and especially to Edward James Olmos for his ability to inject a modicum of sex appeal into a pock-marked old man. But the love story between his grizzled, pragmatic Admiral Adama and the idealistic but dying Madam President Laura Roslin was compelling just on the merits of how it was written. These were two people facing terrible situations who came to have no illusions about the fragility of life, and managed to act with independence and with total trust in one another. He understood that she would handle her medical decisions her own way; she understood that if it came to it, he would go down with his ship.

Remarkably, the other profound love story in the show was between a mutilated executive officer and his boozy wife. Neither of them were sexually faithful nor outwardly respectful to one another (maybe eternity means never having to say you’re sorry), but somehow it made sense that theirs was a love story spanning thousands of years, and that they had always been this way.

Even though these couples were old enough to be my parents–perhaps even my grandparents–I was moved by their connection, and it strikes me that I would like to see more of these kinds of stories in the romance genre–perhaps as secondary characters if necessary, but maybe in speculative fiction there is room for them to be center stage.

Tags: BSG, science fiction, speculative fiction, SyFy

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 3:00 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.