Flow

How has the cult television program Battlestar Galactica been conceived, generated, produced, and reproduced? An introduction to the questions of textuality and technology, history and futuricity, production and reception, love and aggression that are addressed in this special issue.

Battlestar Galactica remixes pertinent questions and concerns about the war on terror with varying degrees of verisimilitude and with varying degrees of predictability.

Within the on-screen space of Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons illustrate questions of technophilia through the representational work that they perform both in relation to the remnants of humanity and in and of themselves.

Thinking about the wiki as fundamentally generative brings the Battlestar Wiki much closer to fanfic and other the creative endeavors classified traditionally as “female fan initiated.”

Television is learning that its offspring can be most fruitful when, like Hera, they’re orphaned: disseminated outside their biologically, technologically, and patriarchally authorized families and adopted by their audiences.

Battlestar Galactica’s use and abuse of its viewers’ affections offer one lens for thinking about the way that audiences interact with producers’ intentions and genre conventions in a media environment increasingly characterized by postmodern genre hybridity and convergence.

As cultured images, Cylons both evoke and exceed biological and media technological reproduction alike, a viral infectious non-human form of reproduction.

What’s striking about the many iterations of Galactica is how cleanly the coordinates of its fantasy lure have flipped over time, illustrating the ability of genre myths to reconfigure themselves around new cultural priorities.