I’ve been reading a lot of commentary about the ending of Battlestar Gallactica this morning. If you’re not familiar with the show, go fix that right now before reading this. See you in a few months, you’ll thank me. I’m going to assume that if you’re going to continue reading this post, you’ve seen the whole thing, and the SPOILER WARNINGS are unnecessary.

I feel the show was great over all – probably the best science fiction presentation in TV or Movies. I loved the finale, which aired last friday night. It wrapped up the story, yet left some ambiguity and unanswered questions.

One sticking point for a lot of people is that many events in the story were influenced by unseen forces, which I will call “God” as a convenient shorthand, even though the show is at times more, or less concrete. It seems that some fans wanted God to be nailed down, or defined in rational, even scientific or technological terms. My opinion is that this would have been a huge mistake, akin to Miticlorians from Star Wars. Even though I’m an atheist/humanist in my own beliefs, and like science fiction’s rational emphasis, I like the idea that there are unknowable and unseen forces at work. Without this, I don’t see how characters can be anything other than boring machines, going rationally from point A to point B. There’s some irony in fans wanting this in a show about humans fighting robots.

Do science fiction fans really want everything laid out like that? I like the world-building aspect of science fiction, but it seems to me that without some ambiguity, it’s really not that interesting. I liked how BSG treated its characters’ faith with respect and sincerity, and didn’t blow it all in the end with some sort of “there-a-master-computer-controlling-everything” finale to wrap things up.

It’s probably also true that the religious aspects of the show are superficial and unsatisfying for folks looking for religious stories. But I’d say that expectation is like expecting BSG to meaningfully explain AI robotics. I’d like science fiction to be entertaining, and leave me thinking about its ideas, in that order of priority.

My message to science fiction fans is that if BSG isn’t great science fiction, I’m not sure it deserves to survive. With the channel changing it’s name to SyFy, I’m afraid I know how this will end.

Given that it’s the dark, cold winter I’ve been driven down into the basement to exercise, either on the treadmill or doing some light free-weights. I picked on Metatropolis to prevent this from being a boring effort.

Metatropolis is a collection of stories edited by John Scalzi based on a future where cities and countries are in decline, with new social/economic structures taking their place. This is more than an anthology loosely based around a theme – the stories share this same world.

I’m currently half-way though the second story. This is the first audio book I’ve listened to. It takes a surprising amount of concentration to follow along. Fortunately, there’s not a lot of distraction as I plod along on my treadmill. So far the stories are very thought-provoking.

The themes seem particularly relevant to my field of software development, as the structures and business models are changing rapidly, leaving to me to wonder about my place in it. Old business models are dying, new ones are struggling. Countries don’t really matter. Physical locations don’t matter. The old business of making money be re-implementing the wheel over and over is gone. Solved problems are staying solved.

Both readers have been good. It’s kind of fun to have Col. Tigh read you a story (Michael Hogan). Metatropolis is also available for pre-order in print form if you want to do it the old-fashioned way.