Battlestar Galactica: 10/29/10

I am old enough to have watched the original Battlestar Galactica. I watched it when it was new and I grew up watching it over and over again in reruns at my grandmother's house. It came on after The Twilight Zone, right during lunch.

When the new series started, I was asked to review the second and third books in the companion book series. I really wanted to read the first in the new series too, Battlestar Galactica by Jeffrey A. Carver. Recently I realized I could get the book via an interlibrary loan and was finally able to mark it off my wishlist.

After years of not seeing the Cylons, they are suddenly back and out for blood. They have decided to kill humanity to make way for their kind. They fail in the goal of complete annihilation and end up having to chase the survivors across space. What the humans don't realize is that there are Cylons living among them. Some who know and some who don't know the truth behind their origins.

The miniseries and the book both begin with an explanation aimed at the folks who remember the original: why don't the new Cylons look like the walking toasters of yore? In trying to make that tie to the original the plot opens up more questions than are possible perhaps to answer. Ones that came to my mind were: is this just a clean retelling from scratch and are the current bunch repeating the war and migration of their forefathers? Those questions aren't addressed in the book or the miniseries but hints are dropped as fan service.

Did I like the book? Yes, slightly more than I did the miniseries. The book is faithful to the miniseries and it seems that adaptations from films to books are more faithful to their source material than when the process is the other way around. I would have liked to have seen things told in a different order than they were shown in the miniseries. The miniseries did a lot of jumping around between locations to show all the events happening simultaneously. In book form, the result is extremely short chapters with very little segue. I think things would have played out better had more time been given to each location.

That said, I'm still glad I went to the effort to find and read the book. I'm glad to have gotten it read while the mini series is still relatively fresh in my mind.

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