Positive Liberty

My review of Jeffrey Carver’s novelization of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries and of Craig Shaw Gardner’s The Cylons’ Secret is in the August issue of Liberty magazine. It’s not available online, so you’ll have to get it wherever fine magazines are sold. But here’s an excerpt:

Gardner, a hack writer known for novelizations of such films as Batman and Back to The Future II and III, seems to have little or no familiarity with the modern Battlestar Galactica. His Cylons, for example, shoot lasers—which Moore specifically excluded from his story, explaining in an interview that “We just felt that [lasers] had been done to death, it wasn’t as interesting, and it wasn’t realistic”—and the Galactica now sports an Enterprise-like bridge viewscreen which Moore also chose not to include on his show. Along with these errors of inclusion are errors of exclusion: there is no reference to the Cylons’ religion—which is perhaps their most striking characteristic. Without it, the Cylons are boring robots. The other characters also lack the compelling realism that Moore’s drama has painstakingly developed. The novel could easily be made into a Star Trek novel, using a search-and-replace feature to substitute Captain Kirk for Adama and Spock for Colonel Tigh. Aside from some references to Tigh’s alcoholism, and the weird use of Tom Zarek as a major player in a story that has nothing whatever to do with the character depicted on the show, there is little to bind the novel to the universe that Moore and his fellow writers have created.

While Gardner fails to mention the Cylons’ god, his novel features at least three deities ex machinae: for instance, in one scene, a character who’s been lost in the woods is easily tracked down by the suddenly-revealed fact that she has homing devices implanted in her shoes. The characters deliver lines like “No one gets the better of Nadu!” and “Death to Cylons!” There are dozens of single-sentence paragraphs such as “Tom Zarek would find a way.” And in one climactic moment, the identity of a mysterious spaceship is revealed, not by the characters, but by the narrator himself, who spends four or five paragraphs telling us all that we need to know. The Cylons’ Secret, like Victoria’s, is simply laid out for all to see—when the real fun ought to be the unveiling.

The story lacks any foreshadowing, so that we’re told only on page 251 that Tigh has been on board a Cylon ship similar to one that has just been revealed. And on page 278, when Adama hears an allegedly scary voice, he suddenly “knew who was speaking, even though he hadn’t seen him in close to thirty years.” The reader, of course, has never seen him at all, or even heard of him before now, and certainly has no reason to care about, or identify with, this character and his plight. Had Tigh mentioned his purportedly horrifying experience on the Cylon ship, or had Adama ever mentioned his buddy Chief Nedder, at, say, page 50 or 100, these later revelations might be more believable. As it is, the story has the washed-out feeling of a bad joke told by my grandmother, who forgets to tell the set-up until after telling the punch line.

In fact, even the punch line gets lost sometimes. The story opens on a pirate ship called the Lightning, commanded by the mad Captain Nadu, whose combative temperament and B-movie appearance wrestle with Gardner for mastery over the book. Eventually, the character overcomes the writer’s feeble attempts to be serious, and at the climax of the novel he barges in to attack the Cylons, crying fiercely, “You never expected this, you Cylon scum!” And then, he and his ship simply disappear. They are not destroyed, they do not flee—they are simply never mentioned again in the book; they abruptly cease to exist in the writer’s imagination. It hardly matters by this time, since the reader has long ago stopped caring.

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