Author Archives: Kevin Singer

Power Prompts, Episode 1

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Here’s a new exercise: power prompts. These are timed exercises that center around a specific writing theme. This one was about Character Perspective, which is what a specific character is seeing in the story. This contrasts with Point of View, which is how is the story being narrated. [NOTE: There are three POVs: first person (I), second person (You) and third person (He, She). But this prompt was solely about Character Perspective.]

And the prompt itself: in five minutes sketch three distinct characters. Then, in thirty minutes insert them in a city cafe on a rainy afternoon where they witness stabbing.

Here are my results:

The Characters:
Callie, 35, with her toddler in a stroller, she’s stressed about her job, very type A personality. Her toddler is acting up while she’s on the phone with her sister who’s upset over her fiance’s suspected infidelity. Callie doesn’t have the energy to deal with her sister but she’s trying her best.

Justin, 21, is falling behind in his classes. He’s thinking about dropping out of college – money’s tight, but he doesn’t have any plan b besides wanting to go surfing in Hawaii, and he doesn’t know how he’d tell his father, who’d kill him. His father always makes him super nervous. Even thinking about that conversation makes him sweat.

Marissa, 17, she’s run away from home. She’s sleeping on the couch of a friend of her cousin’s. Her mom’s drinking has gotten out of hand and she can’t be around her anymore. She has $700 in savings and she’s trying to think about what kind of job she can do. She definitely can’t go back with her mother, and she refuses to get stuck in the foster system. She’s not afraid, just determined to get her life started out right, on her terms.

And the Scene:

Marissa wished she had an umbrella. It wasn’t one of the things she even thought to shove in her backpack. Not like she woke up yesterday thinking, yeah, mom’s gonna be on her worst bender ever, so you better pack all the things you’ll need for life on your own. It was after the half empty Jameson bottle went flying across the room and nearly hitting her head that she decided to bolt.

Lucky for her she found a couch to crash on. One week, they told her. One week was more than enough time. As long as the dickhead behind the counter would stop making the millionth flat white and give her the time of day to hand her an application. She could do barista. She could do anything. Anything to stay out of mom’s and anything to stay out of foster care. Six months she’d be eighteen. Nothing could touch her then. But she needed A JOB.

“Listen, all I need is an application,” she told him.

“Okay, give me a minute,” he said, looking through her, looking over her. She pulled up a stool and sat herself right at the counter. She would make him see her, make him give her the time she needed. Five minutes past. The line kept growing, flowing. Then it stopped as a woman pushing a baby stroller, a kid bucking and squirming inside it, cell phone propped against her ear, complaining about her cappucino, about it being too cold or too milky or something, and that baby fussing and whining.

Marissa swore to herself she’d never have kids. Well, at least not until she was old, like 30 or something. Bored and eyeing that barista dude, who was way over his head, sweat stains spreading along his underarms, she went over how much cash she had left. About 700 bucks. Wait, I bought pizza last night, she thought. She deducted that princely sum, and that was when she heard the scream.

It sounded like a goat. She pivoted her head, slow motion, and there, at a table by the door, was a lady dressed in an tan raincoat and Uggs. Her hair was all stringy and wet and her makeup was a mess. The lady reared up and that’s when Marissa saw the knife. It was a steak knife, the kind you get in fancy restaurants. The lady stood tall, then she slammed the knife into the table. Marissa heard a squelch and a scream, a real scream. Then the squirt of blood. That’s when Marissa decided she’d be better off working in a CVS.

God Justin hated this job. Never in his life did he dream of making fancy coffees for people who could barely even look him in the eye. Hey, but it paid the bills. Barely. College wasn’t cheap, and as he made some wall street finance bro his double mocha macchiato, triple red eye and passed it over to the guy who stood glaring and drumming his fat fingers, that’s when it came to him. He’d quit college. It wasn’t a choice. It was a knowing.

But then one of his panic attacks threatened to bite him in the ass. Dad will absolutely murder me, he thought. Nobody had a father as terrifying as Justin’s. That he was sure of. But this knowing. He had no choice now. That’s the way his mind worked. He tried to reason with himself, talk himself out of it, and he got so lost in this that he forgot about the waiting cappucino. He looked up at the angry girl, the one who’d been pestering him for an application, and he could feel her judging him for being such a shitty barista. He took a breath and shook it off and gave the lady her cappucino, and not two minutes later she was back at the counter, insisting it was too something.

But he wasn’t listening. Tanya was back. Tanya came in sometimes, and it was never good. She looked a mess, more a mess than usual, and she was bothering some old guy sitting near the door just drinking his coffee like any normal person. That’s when he saw the switchblade in Tanya’s hand. He ran around the counter and watched her raise that switchblade in the air. He bounded over a stroller with a crying kid and nearly tumbled to the ground. But before he could reach Tanya, she’d slammed it onto the table.

Justin couldn’t ever remember hearing a person scream so loud.

The last thing Callie needed right now was another of Alicia’s messes. Her sister had the worst taste in men, and Callie long ago vowed to stop giving relationship advice to someone who’d never take it. But here Alicia was again, crying on the other end of her cell about her cheating fiancee. Callie yes’ed and sure’d her, hoping Alicia would take the hint and hang up. She didn’t.

All Callie wanted was a damn cappucino and a few minutes of silence. This was supposed to be her day off, exploring the city with her two-year-old Susannah. But the rain wasn’t letting up and Susannah was fussy beyond belief and then of course there was that presentation she had to wrap up later tonight and now Alicia. She rocked the stroller and listen to her sister bitch while spitting out her order, only to get her cappucino from the vacant surfer dude barista and sip it and find out that it was already lukewarm. Plus, too much foam.

“No, no, no, this will not do,” she told him. Alicia snapped at her. “Don’t tell me how to live my life.”

“No, not you. The coffee,” she said. But Alicia kept on being Alicia, all woe is me. Callie tried to hush Susannah who refused to sit still in her stroller and tell that dopey barista what exactly he did wrong, convinced he was most likely high, when she heard someone yelling, a woman, and then all of a sudden the barista was out from behind the counter pushing past her and nearly falling over Susannah in her stroller. Callie lunged forward instinctively and raced after him to give him a piece of her mind, when she saw the woman, not homeless but definitely something, and the knife, so big, like a goddamn machete. The woman had one hand planted on the table and she raised that knife high and then slammed it into her own hand.

Between the crazy woman screaming, the barista frantically patting at the blood, and Susannah launching into a royal tantrum, Callie decided the best course of action was to head straight back home and crack open a bottle of Cabernet. The last thing she did before scooting past the bloody, writhing woman was hang up on Alicia.

Anatomy of a Story: One More Darrell

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Someone once said books beget books. I can’t find out who. I thought it was Virginia Woolf, and since I read and really liked Mrs. Dalloway, I’ll go with her.

In my case, short stories beget short stories, or more specifically, a throwaway line in a story included in an anthology on time travel was the seed for my short story, One More Darrell, which was published in the anthology Summer of Sci-Fi & Fantasy: Volume Three.

I tried to find the exact line and the story it appeared in but I had no luck. It was something about a pill that let you experience a moment in someone else’s life. That struck a chord in me, so I got to work writing.

A brief flashback: I wrote this story during the height of the Covid lockdowns. I’d spent a lot of time on my own in my house drinking too much and lost in the online world. So just like most of the world. That whole experience left me with a profound sense of disconnect. Again like most of the world. And I began to reflect how we as humans tend to lose ourselves in other people’s stories, everything from fiction to theater to movies and TV, porn and video games, even social media to an extent where we become not so much ourselves but a curated persona.

And I also thought of the story in terms of one of the seven deadly sins: envy. It’s a seductive trait. That person over there has a better life than you do in some way. Imagining what they feel like with that benefit, with that gift, with that luck or skill or talent or blessing, can feel great. But it also cuts you off from your own life.

This is the framework I approached in writing One More Darrell. It’s about a near future where you can take a pill that lets you relive a perfect day or hour of someone else’s life. The pills are named. Some are more popular than others. Our poor narrator can barely manage the stress of his life without popping one pill or another, and his fave by far is Darrell. But his world begins to fall apart when he learns that Darrell is going to be discontinued.

This was one of the easier stories for me to write. It came to me pretty quickly, it was fun to write, and it connected with something in my life. Win, win, win. Not all stories are like that. Most are a hell of a lot of work. Hard, hard work.

And to all the so-called writers out there who don’t read fiction, you’re missing out on a universe of inspiration. Go pick up a book and read it. You never know what story will come out of it.

Battlestar Galactica Rewatch Part 4: Hits and Misses

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(Here’s the latest in my sporadically spaced BSG Rewatch. Click the links for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

Two decades is good for perspective. We have a moment to breathe, to take in a new view (literally; the world around us changes), and we can look back at something with fresh eyes.

So with all these cliches in mind, after rewatching all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica straight through, what worked, and what didn’t?

I’ll start with what worked.

Cylons
The best part of the reboot was the enemy. Heroes are (usually) necessary for any story. We need someone to identify with, a man or woman to root for, to escape into. But, what really makes a story shine is the enemy. We love to hate them, and we sometimes secretly love them as well. A good enemy can be our outlet for all those parts of ourselves we disown. We might not want to literally be Hannibal Lecter, but there’s a small part of us that revels in the villain’s total disregard for good society.

Or maybe this is just me.

Either way, the thing I love most about Battlestar Galactica is the cylons, not so much the chrome toasters but the humanlike twelve. Take Caprica Six. She’s stunning and hot and cruel (she snapped a baby’s neck!) but also riveting. Or Leoben. He’s probably my favorite of the cylon models. Spiritual. Unhinged. Fanatical. Mystical. He was obsessed with Starbuck. He fucked with her mind on New Caprica. No, I wasn’t rooting for him, but I always wanted to know more about him.

Just think about the sheer audacity of the cylons. Their resentment drove them to massacre billions of humans. And they weren’t satisfied with driving them off their home planets. They insisted on hunting down every last one of the 40,000 or so surviving humans. That’s hardcore.

But the writers had the foresight to mix it up. The cylons could have easily become two dimensional. Same old same old. Instead, partway through the series run they changed things. One faction of the cylons splintered. Rather than destroying the humans, they wanted to coexist with them (more on that later). Some villains remained villains, and some became allies. In my opinion, this was one of the best parts of the series.

A Complex Society
Another strength of Battlestar Galactica was the way the writers portrayed a rich and complex society among the ragtag group of survivors. We could have gotten a series about military warfare vs robots. Instead we got a rich tapestry on a human civilization that was struggling to reassert itself in extreme conditions. We got religious fervor. We got dissent. Treachery. Terrorism. Political wrangling.

One episode that stands out for me happened way in the first season. A pregnant woman wants to get an abortion. But her religious community is against it. Laura Roslin, the civilian president, is forced to deal with this. Her dilemma: she’s pro-choice, but she sees the cold facts that there are only roughly 40,000 humans left. Every life is needed. So she goes against her own personal beliefs and outlaws abortion. I thought it was a surprising, daring and wholly logical storyline. Not your typical sci-fi or space opera fare.

Plot Twists
We know the basics of Battlestar Galactica: a ragtag group of humans travels the universe fleeing an overwhelming foe in search of a mythical lost group of humans. Pretty straightforward. But a plot so linear can easily turn stagnant. Luckily the writers mixed it up a little. One standout plot curveball came in the form of a woman named Admiral Helena Cain.

Cain was commander of the Battlestar Pegasus, another Battlestar presumed lost. Only it wasn’t. For months the Pegasus traveled and fought not knowing that the Galactica had also survived. And there were a couple of twists with Cain’s introduction. First, she outranked Adama. Second, her group of survivors had taken a more militaristic turn. She was a harsh and a brutal leader, damn near a dictator, and her group of humans gave us a view of how the Galactica could have turned out under different leadership.

Cain didn’t last long, but she definitely made the show more interesting.

Another twist was the introduction of the Final Five. According to series lore, there were twelve human models of cylons. During the course of the series we got to see six models: One (Cavil), Two (Leoben), Three (D’Anna), Four (Simon), Five (Aaron), Six (Caprica), Eight (Sharon). That left six unaccounted for. You can scratch one off that list, a model named Daniel, a sensitive model who John contaminated out of jealousy (I really wish the series had found a way to resurrect him—definitely a lost opportunity).

So that left five models who were likely living among the survivors. And among the cylons, only Cavil knew their identity.

When this revelation came, it heightened the tension, not just among the characters, but also the viewers. It became a guessing game—who’s the cylon? What will they do?

As it turned out, the Final Five were an integral part of the Battlestar Galactica story. They were both the catalyst for all the events of the story, and also the resolution. Yes, I have my criticisms, but all in all it was a great twist.

The Use of Mythology
Battlestar Galactica, both the original series and the reboot, is steeped in Greek mythology (Apollo, etc). The colonists pray to the gods (versus the one true god of the cylons). I think in the original series it was to tie the colonists to ancient earth civilization. In the reboot, I suppose it was used to have them seed earth culture (since the reboot takes place 150,000 years in our past).

This mythology permeates their lives. Take Laura Roslin. She’s presented as a humanist atheist type, yet she believes in the prophecy of the Sacred Scrolls of Pythia with all her heart. It drives her actions. It undergirds her clawing for power. She uses this mythology to justify her fight to remain in control of the civilian government, to the point where she almost steals an election.

But Battlestar Galactica developed its own mythology aside from the Greek one. Take, for instance, Kobol. Or the lost Earth colony. This unique mythology formed a continuity within the series. We were continually reminded that all this had happened before, and it would all happen again, and when we finally get to what they called Earth, we see this repetition in action: the events we witnessed in the series are just one small part of a larger story that has repeated again and again. This use of internal mythology resonated. I felt it and I imagined these other stories. That’s what I call effective use of mythology.

The End
As a writer I know it can be incredibly difficult to stick the landing. The television landscape is littered with series that had controversial or unsatisfying endings (Seinfeld, Lost, The Sopranos). While I’m sure some people would disagree, I think Battlestar Galactica gave us a solid ending. We could have gotten lost in space. We could have gone on forever and ever. Instead, the writers brought us home. They gave us final resolutions for all the characters that felt earned and deserved. Would I have loved sequels? Of course. But sometimes it’s good to leave on a high note. (We did get a prequel, and let’s just say sometimes it’s better to leave well enough alone.)

Next up: I dig into the not-so-good.

Anatomy of a story: Splinter

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When thinking about writing this piece you’re reading at this very moment I struggled to find the correct word to use to describe a specific type of incident. Every word I could come up with felt wrong, and for a writer, that’s one of the most frustrating feelings.

So I gave up searching for that perfect word and kept on working the concept for this piece in my mind and then I sat down to write it, which is actually similar to the writing process for my recently published short story, Splinter, a tale of brothers Nate and Hud and their tangled dependency.

Here’s where I got stuck. November/December 2023 was interesting for me. I had three events happen to me in quick succession, three intense events. Each one on its own was something to handle. The three piled up led me to write Splinter as an outlet for what I’d experienced.

Now, what to call them. My first go-to was Trauma. But that word is so overused in our current society, it’s become a cliché. If everything can be traumatic then nothing is really traumatic. Incident? Police procedural Events? Bloodless. Nothing seems to fit.

So I’ll switch over to the three things (ugh I hate that word) that led me to write Splinter. I’ll skim over the first two, for personal reasons. One involved a family member over Thanksgiving that painfully plucked at old childhood strings. The second involved a night that included shrooms and whiskey and a friend going through some serious shit, probably among the strangest nights I’ve experienced, which is saying a hell of a lot if you know me.

The third was a garden variety street attack I experienced, where I was slammed to the ground by some asshole. I landed on the concrete on my back, upper left side. He was long gone when I got up. I felt fine. I think I even laughed. The next day and for a couple weeks later I had a sharp pain in my back. I told myself that violence is just a part of being a man in this world, of being a human. In other words, cope and denial.

Mostly I can handle pretty much anything that’s thrown my way, at least that’s what I tell myself. But this triplet pile-on began to claw at me. My dissociative skills were having trouble managing them, so I turned to my what’s been my salvation: writing.

The concept of Splinter is an ancient one. It has its roots in the Genesis story of Cain and Abel: two opposite brothers who (can or) cannot coexist. The challenge I gave to myself was as follows. First, incorporate all three “events” to some degree. Second, thread the needle between realism and speculative fiction. Third, take a panoramic view of the lives of Nate and Hud.

None of this was easy.

First lets get to the technical challenge. Rather than focus on a single event, I chose to lengthen the story out and follow the brothers over several years. I jumped back and forth through time. I interspersed Nate’s “splintering” with his recounting events in the past with a part of the story set in real time. Not easy. What I did was develop different styles for each of the three sections in order to make it easy for the reader to know where they were at any given moment. This took tons and tons of work. Any writer who says that writing is easy is either not good at it, a liar, or incredibly blessed.

Regarding the speculative element, I absolutely love writing spec fiction: light horror, contemporary fantasy, sci-fi, anything with an element of unreality in it. I love how there are fewer limits on your imagination. I love the playful aspect to it. Could I add a speculative element to this story without cheapening it? I chose a very subtle approach (some might call it cheating). I embedded some speculative options, sort of a choose-your-own-adventure take on this story, letting the reader decide for themselves. I’d say it worked: this is the quickest turnaround I’ve had from writing a story to getting it published.

What about the emotional aspect? My primary goal was to work through those three events I’d experienced. How did I do that?

By being as honest as I could bear.

No story is successful unless you get to its heart, and in order to do that you have to cut through flesh and bone and bleed. You have to go to the most painful points. You have to leave blood on the page. That’s what I set out to do here. Most of Splinter is fiction, but some of Splinter is fictionalized, if not factually then emotionally. No, I do not have a drug-addicted brother, but I could transpose sets of feelings that are true. No, I did not witness (or have) a breakdown at my father’s funeral but I could connect feelings of abandonment.

And to me, that’s what successful fiction is: embedding your words with feelings that are true, even if the events are not.

A couple years ago I read the collected fiction of Flannery O’Connor, all of it, her short stories and her two novellas, from start to finish. She’s a master, and what she taught me is that you have to bleed on the page. You have to go to those places you don’t want to go. You can incorporate and reconfigure your own biography in your fiction.

Readers can tell when there’s something real on the page, and after all, isn’t that what we all want from the stories we read and listen to and watch– to feel something real?

Photo © Joel Remland, edited by Amy Dupcak. All rights reserved.

Trope or Choke: Episode 12

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The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines:

Setting: An operating room

Genre: Amish romance + Medical mystery

Trope: Decoding ancient texts

Characters: Acrophobic five-year-old math genius + Martian

POV: 2nd/future

The result:

Oddity

You’ll record these moments in your mind. You’ll transcribe them. For her. For posterity.

The boy will sit with his ankles crossed and dangling, refusing to look your way. “We’re 72,000 feet from the surface,” he’ll say. “If I plummet through that window it will take me 8.7 minutes to crash. My body will splatter in a diameter of 1.28 miles.”

With all the current strife, this laboratory on the peak of Olympus Mons is the safest place on Mars. Sometimes you forget he’s only five: frail and pale with wild hair. “I see. You’re afraid of heights. How about you turn your back to the window?”

He’ll comply and as he begins to swing his legs you bring forth the rune. He runs his fingers over it. “It’s not a forgery,” he’ll say. “These carvings resemble those on the Xanthe cave tablets.”

“Yes, Abigail found those stones.”

“Tell me about her again.”

You’ll sigh and stare out the window. You can almost see all the way to Drava Valles from here. You and Abigail were children when you met, seventh generation Amish colonists. You knew instantly you were fated to be together. You courted and pledged yourselves to each other, and when you both turned seventeen, you married. That first kiss was an electric shock. You can still feel it reverberate. “She was the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. And the most beautiful.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” the boy says, suddenly sounding too wise for his years.

“Isn’t every romance story?” You’ll glance over at the operating table. Empty. How much blood has pooled on this floor? You can’t think about that now. “Her life’s work was solving the mystery of the Xanthe tablet. And now with this rune we’ve discovered…there has to be a connection.”

“And you think it’s me?” the boy will ask.

Innocently. Too innocently. The first child genius was born nine months after the tablet was unearthed. This boy is the seventh. “Ever since we’ve found this proof that we’re not alone, there’s been so much turmoil. We have to know what they say.”

He’ll squint at the tablet, then the rune. “These markings form a code.”

“Can you decipher it?”

“Close enough, yes. It says, After one thousand years the soil makes them ours.”

A shiver will crawl down your spine. “We’ve been on Mars for nearly a millennia.”

“There’s more,” he’ll say. “Two in the blood will become three.”

“What blood?” you’ll ask.

He’ll look at you so mournfully that you’ll forget about his unnatural intellect and see him just as a child. The skin of his arm is so white, and in his silence you’ll find the answer. You won’t ask his

permission to draw his blood. He won’t resist. Under the microscope you’ll magnify until you hit his DNA. And then you’ll see it: not two strands entwined but three.

You’ll stare at this impossible Martian child, all the time wishing Abigail was here to witness this glory.

Battlestar Galactica Rewatch Part 3: Major Themes

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(For Part 1, see here; for Part 2, see here.)

Some years ago I wrote a post asking if Battlestar Galactica was too religious. To this day it remains one of my most popular pieces. Controversial, too. Not because of the meat of the post itself but because some people just don’t like religion. At all.

But let’s put aside whether or not religion is good or bad or whatever. Let’s instead focus on religion in Battlestar Galactica. After rewatching the entire series I can say with 100% confidence that one of the major themes of the series was in fact religion. Not just religion, but God and our place in the universe.

In my opinion, Battlestar Galactica was one of the most overtly philosophical television shows of this century.

In the series we had two separate camps when it came to religion. First were the 12 colonies, each named after a zodiac sign (astrology—a quasi religion in my view). The colonists paid reverence to the gods. Not a single god but a collection, patterned off of the Roman gods. Devotions, sacrifices, all of that.

One of the most religious characters among this religion was President Laura Roslin. I can’t say for sure what her level of faith was before the events in the story, but when we meet her, she’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She turns to the gods and takes solace in the scrolls of Pythia, which foretell of a dying leader who will take her people to safety. She’s beset by dreams and visions (drug induced?) that she takes for messages from the gods. Her faith, whether or not conditional, is in the forefront of the storytelling.

And then we have the cylons. The Caprica who appears to Gaius Baltar talks of one true God, a God who had a plan for everyone. It’s obvious what the writers were doing here: contrasting a pagan faith of offerings and visions against the Judeo-Christian singular God who had an individual connection with each of his creations (children).

The show ping-pongs between these two world views. It also provides an interesting commentary. For both camps, the colonists and the cylons, their religions/faiths don’t necessarily make them better or more virtuous. If anything, they use their religions to justify their actions. It’s pretty convenient that at first, the cylons view killing billions of colonists as part of God’s plan.

That’s a pretty dark view of religion.

But Battlestar Galactica is suffused with religion, with belief, with gods or God, and that’s part of what makes the show so interesting, even 20 years on.

The second major theme of the series is one that’s become a sci-fi trope: what is the definition of personhood? Are the cylons persons? In the series this question arises with the twelve humanoid-looking models. And no character best represents this than Sharon.

There were two significant Sharons in Battlestar Galactica. The first was Boomer, an ace fighter pilot in the Galactica. What Boomer did not know was that she was a sleeper agent. She believed she was human. She’d had memories implanted. She was in love with Galen Tyron (who turned out to be a sleeper cylon himself, though not one of the baddies). Then she was activated and shot Adama, nearly killing him. The series portrays her struggles to retain her humanity even as she loses her world.

Then there’s Athena, the other Sharon. On the cylon-controlled Caprica, this one pretended to be Boomer in order to trick a stranded Karl Agathon. She always knew just what she was. But somewhere along the way she fell in love with Agathon. They return to the Galactica and she dedicates herself to fighting her fellow cylons, along with having a daughter, Hera, the first human/cylon hybrid.

The series made a strong case for the humanity of both these Sharons. And there were other models thrown in there too. When colonists brutalize one of the Sixes, for instance, who’s the monster? On the flip side, let’s go back to the miniseries, when Caprica snaps the neck of a baby. Monstrous. Inhuman. But…she changes and grows and eventually leads a faction of cylons to seek another path with the colonists.

There’s a third major theme of Battlestar Galactica, and in my view, it’s the weakest. Keep in mind when the series first aired: 2004-2009. America was coming off 1) a major terror attack, 2) paranoia about sleeper agents, 3) critiques of blowback from decades of botched foreign policy, and 4) not-successful invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the time I remember reading commentary stating outright that the series was a response to the GWOT, and if you look closely at the storylines you can definitely see it. We’ve got an angry foe seeing revenge, a clash of civilizations, rampant terrorism, sleepers (cylons), and then the cylon occupation of New Caprica (one of the weaker storylines). We’ve also got brutality and torture galore.

As a larger commentary on American society of the zeroes, this comparison leaves me kind of flat. Don’t get me wrong, within the confines of the show, this all worked. But maybe I’d just not rather relive those dark days.

Next up: the hits.

Trope or Choke: Episode 11

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The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines*:

Setting: Outer space

Genre: Solar punk + Reddit comment thread

Trope: Sweating like a whore in church

Characters: Morally bankrupt real estate agent + Used tire saleswoman

POV: 3rd/past

*Note: writer’s choice to ignore two elements.

The result:

Everyone Has Their Price

“Listen, I just need to get this bucket of bolts over to the Taurus nebula. I’ve got these new colonists fresh from Europa and there’s this asteroid field that I know they’ll pay top dollar for. Bunch of useless rocks, but between you and me, they don’t need to know that.” Saul Treppingham told the bulk of a woman in grease-stained overalls.

She sipped her energy drink in long, slow draws while eyeing his expensive-looking suit. Her name tag read Dervish. “Looks like your little baby here’s about to blow a couple of space tires. I don’t know how you even managed to land her on this runway in one piece without blowing her all to bits.”

“What? These tires?” Saul kicked one with a shiny wingtip. “I just got them replaced on my last turn around the old sun. Supposed to be good for five million miles.”

Dervish took a long slurp from her energy drink. “You ask me, my tires will take you even further than five million miles. Ten. At least.”

“It’s not the tires. I swear. The dome light came on. All blinking and flashing. Danger. You know.”

“Oh, yeah, I know,” Dervish said. “That means the tires are about shot. Like I said you’re lucky you even landed here. I have some of the finest used rubber. No better secondhand tires for nearly a light year. Honest.”

Saul sighed and took stock of the mostly deserted landing strip, some godforsaken bit of real estate on an out-of-the way asteroid. “You know what you need here? Some development. Surely there’s some ore to be mined in the belly of this baby. Say, who’s the owner?”

Dervish squeezed both fists around the bottom of her energy drink. She slurped the last of the dregs like a hungry camel. Then she ripped open the pouch, jammed grease-stained fingers inside and licked them clean.

“God, woman. You act like you were raised among space pirates. Tell you what, why don’t you relay a message to your overlords. I’ll offer them a cool million for exclusive development rights. Really, I’m being generous.”

She watched him rake a hand through slicked-back hair. “My people settled this little old asteroid generations ago. It’s been our claim ever since.”

“Come on,” he said. “Everyone has their price.”

“Tell you what, I’ll give you replacements, half price. Beam back an offer, and I’ll see that my overlords get it.”

Saul unbuttoned his blazer. “I don’t really think the tires are the issue.”

“You want me to relay your offer or not?”

He chuckled nervously, then boomed a laugh. “Alright, as long as you promise.”

She slapped his rear. “I swear, sweetcheeks.”

An hour later she watched Saul Treppingham’s spacecraft zip away. She laughed as loud as she wanted, because there was no one to hear.

Those used tires were too used to be of any good. Scrap rubber, actually. No way could he land without a catastrophic wreck. She could already smell their burning.

Battlestar Galactica Rewatch Part 2: Old vs New

by in Battlestar Galactica, Sci-fi and tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

(For Part 1 in this series on the Battlestar Galactica reboot, click here)

When I was a kid I hated Jimmy Carter for one reason: he got the Israelis and the Egyptians to sign a peace deal, and the televised signing of that peace deal interrupted the 1978 premiere of the original Battlestar Galactica. I still haven’t forgiven him for this.

The first incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, created by Glen A. Larsen, lasted just one season with 24 episodes. There was a short-lived resurrection called Battlestar 80 that expired after ten episodes. I forget a lot of the details of Battlestar 80 but reading the synopsis it sounds like the writers were heavily into whiskey and cocaine.

I won’t get into how the original compares to the reboot overall. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison for a couple of reasons. First, television technology—special effects specifically—has improved vastly over the quarter century between the two shows. Second, although they’re essentially the same stories with a bunch of the same characters, they’re from different writers who had different visions.

Also, I’m not going to go through a detailed list of the differences. But there are three differences I want to highlight.

The first, in the scheme of things, is relatively minor.

Seven-year-old me wanted to be the ace fighter pilot Starbuck. Played by Dirk Benedict, he was brash and wisecracking and cigar chomping and a good time. When news of the reboot came out, I learned that Starbuck was getting a sex change. He’d now be a woman, played by a woman (Katee Sackhoff). Seven-year-old me was not happy. Adult me considered it a cheap PC stunt. Nowadays sex-swapping characters is so commonplace it’s almost a cliché, if not a joke. But back then I can’t recall it happening all that much.

So, yes a stunt. Yes, odd. Yes, annoying. But…

…thanks to the writing and Sackhoff’s portrayal, it worked. Kara Thrace, aka Starbuck, was gritty and brash and complex and messy and fun, and while, in my opinion she could have remained a he (we didn’t really need that forced romance between her and Apollo), Sackhoff helped make the show what it was.

The second difference between the two series was a major change. In retrospect it seems like such an obvious idea I’m surprised it wasn’t in the original. In the original, the cylons were these hulking and bulky metallic toaster-looking robots.

The reboot had these steel cylons in spades, plus another type of cylon, a type that looked human, 12 models with many copies, to be exact, models with different personalities, and the reboot introduced yet another twist: some of these humanoid cylons didn’t even know they weren’t truly human.

This opened up a universe of tension. Who is a cylon and who isn’t? Who is a sleeper agent? Are cylons redeemable? Do they have a sense of self? A soul? All these questions are great plot fodder, and they’d be much harder to pull off with robots that look like toasters.

Another major change had to do with tone. Seventies sci-fi in general was fun and colorful, unintentionally campy even when trying to be serious. And the special effects were definitely underwhelming. The original fit this profile.

The reboot, in contrast, was darker. Literally. Early episodes employed the shaky camera technique that was trendy back in the zeroes (I hate it).

The tone was darker, too. It had a sheen of noir, which totally fit a series about the nearly total holocaust of the human race. No, you can’t necessarily call a show about robots massacring humans lighthearted, but compared to the original, the reboot went a thousand times darker. Torture of all kinds. Lots of violence. Lots of sex (censored). Humanoid cylons acting monstrous and humans acting monstrous.

It might all sound too heavy, but this is a heavy premise. Taking out the camp and throwing it away worked.

Next up, a look at the major themes of the Battlestar Galactica reboot.