Battlestar Galactica and the Quest for Understanding

Battlestar Galactica and the Quest for Understanding. Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall, eds. Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. New York: Continuum Press International, 2008. 278 pp. $24.95 pbk. In casual conversation with two academic colleagues, we were able to imagine, in only a few minutes, over twenty different ways to organize an edited volume on the Sci-Fi channel's remake of Battlestar Galactica (miniseries 2003; series 2004-09). It is that rich a text and that open to interpretation. The themes abound from post-9/11, genocide, artificial intelligence, Hebrew mythology and history to the vogue academic regnant of class, race, and gender. With so much to choose from it would stand to reason that it would be relatively simple to find enough missing from Potter and Marshall's Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (BSG) to easily produce a negative review. It stands as a statement about this excellent book that the editors manage to cover much ground while still providing a unified theme. That theme, in this post-9/11 world, is explicit in the title if not equally in all the essays: that BSG is very American and must be read through an "American" cultural lens. And to a very real extent Cylons in America offers a series of essays that does precisely this and does it well.