The Final Five are talking to me...

[lizardbeth]

In some strange convergence of coincidence, I found out yesterday that Naomi Novik wrote a fic for yuletide pseudonymously (I knew she used to write fanfic, and she defends it vigorously, but I didn't know this was an ongoing thing, especially now that her series has been optioned for a gazillion dollars by PJackson). Then today one of my magazines arrives and she's on the cover. You think maybe some higher power is trying to tell me to just read Temeraire already?

In my copious free time. hee.

But I've been thinking a bit.

I have a meta idea on BSG, relating to Measure of Salvation. It struck me while watching Terminator 2, that the Colonies must not have had any science fiction tradition.



Because, if my Roomba (a small vacuuming robot, if you've never seen one) decided to take over the world, I'd at least have the vocabulary to discuss the options. We could ask whether it's a sentient being, whether it's a life-form (not the same question at all), and whether all Roombas are programmed to take over the world, or whether they are capable of individual decisions. We could compare them to images in our culture: are they the T-100 or more like C-3PO? We could ask if it was human hubris that made the creators not hardwire the Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into Roombas, and others could debate whether it would have made a difference. People could have debates about sending an EMP to wipe them all out. But we can only do this because we have a hundred years of writers and other artists who imagined very many different scenarios with machines "waking up", both cautionary and hopeful, and framed the issues for us.

That is, I think, not true of the Twelve Colonies. In fact I get the idea that no one so much as raised the question about whether smart robots might be a bad idea way back before the First Cylon War. (Caprica if it goes, may make that untrue, but for now, it holds)

I see it in the way the debate is framed in such a binary way: Roslin, Lee, etc think of the Cylons as machines. Toasters. Sometimes they may acknowledge that the Cylons are alive, but that's as far as any of them go. The Cylons are no more worthy of existence than a broken car.

Whereas Helo, because of his love for Sharon and Hera, made the jump to seeing the Cylons (all the Cylons) as People. Wrong People, enemy People, but people. But few others have made that conceptual leap: Baltar, and Bill Adama, probably. Others seem to acknowledge Sharon as a person, but without necessarily extending that to all the Cylons.

So Helo decided genocide isn't a moral option even in Self/species-defense. But Roslin and Lee never reached the question of the morality of genocide in this situation because to them it wasn't genocide at all. Genocide is only genocide, if you're annhilating people; otherwise it's pest control. And we rarely think twice about tenting our homes for termites, do we?

The two points-of-view ended up incomprehensible to each other because they didn't have the words to find middle-ground. That middle ground being closer to the truth -- the Cylons are their enemies, they are not-human, but they are sentient beings. But without a tradition of stories about alien visitors and machines-run-amuck, they're forced to use the only two boxes they have: machine or person. They can't conceive that someone can be both.

Whereas we, for example, already debate how intelligent chimpanzees and dolphins are and how much they think. It's not a stretch to imagine us debating, not whether our computers are smart, but how smart they are, or whether our cars are deserving of protections from abuse. Even animals not generally regarded as thinking beings are protected from cruelty, so why not Robot Dogs?

So, what does this mean? On a superficial level, I'm sure a RTF of Earthlings might very well have some more ideas of what to do about the Cylons. But more importantly, the Colonials are going to have to come to the realization that Cylons are not the monolithic, 'machine' society they think it is. We the audience already know, but the RTF still has to discover that Sharon isn't unique. At least some Colonials will have to move beyond their two cozy, narrow categories and find some more. The question for me is what they do with that knowledge. I've often wondered whether the conflict would become more three-sided (Hard-core Cylons, Hard-core Humans, and a small group of both working together in opposition to the other who only want war) and that knowledge may be the key to get them there. Without it, I don't think there's any hope of anything either than one side or other other's extermination.



*blinks*

ok, that was rather more than I intended to say on that. I hope it made some sense. *g*

And there's now a thunderstorm outside.

Comments

[gdwessel.livejournal.com]

I came here via a link by lyssie.

I think you have a salient point here. As a backup example, I use the comic Watchmen -- in a world where masked adventurers are real, superhero comics went away (Action Comics #1 was mentioned in the character Hollis Mason's autobiography, so there was a sense that Watchmen took place in the "real world"), as, well, there they were in the flesh. Instead, pirate comics were the big thing, with the biggest titles being things like Tales of the Black Freighter and X-Ships.

So here's my question to you -- if the Colonies have no speculative fiction tradition (at least as we know it), what superceded it?

[lizardbeth-j.livejournal.com]

hm, interesting question. We don't know that much about leisure things. We know they have books, and Adama gave Roslin one of his 'favorites', but I can't remember if they mentioned what kind of book it was. But yes, it makes some sense that the Colonies don't need fiction to tell them about hyperdrives and other planets, because they already have those.

My guess, however, is religion. Because if the culture's main (and only, apparently) religion's main tenet is "this has all happened before and will happen again" it crushes the whole idea of the future being something you can speculate about. Or perhaps thinking more broadly, history is more important than speculation, because to them all things are cyclical and so by studying the past, one really can know what's to come.

So perhaps histories, historical fiction and biographies are their equivalent? Other than that, I'm fairly clueless.

Or, pirates. *g*

[gdwessel.livejournal.com]

You can't go wrong with pirates. Ask Japan.

Seriously tho, you could be right about history replacing speculation. But then it begs the question of why their society seemingly chose to ignore it, letting it all happen again anyway. Or is Colonial society that fatalistic and pre-deterministic?

[lizardbeth-j.livejournal.com]

there's certainly an edge of fatalism, isn't there? Especially among the most religious.

And I would guess that studying history (if it's as important as I theorize) is done in the guise of understanding what will happen, perhaps in an effort to change it or guide it to a different outcome. I doubt many believe everything will be exactly the same, because then there'd be no point in anything.

And of course they may be some truth in it. If the Lords of Kobol were some kind of time-traveling advanced race then it's entirely possible they had future knowledge and brought that back to the twelve tribes.

[gdwessel.livejournal.com]

I have this wacky theory that at the end of it all the Colonial society, pushed to the limits by Cylons, actually evolve beyond themselves, become said Lords of Kobol, and thus end the universe and begin the cycle all over again, hoping it all ends up OK next time. Hence we can also tie in the old series, as they, too, are become Death, Destroyer of Worlds... ;-)