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The new season of the Friday shows on Sci-fi start tomorrow!! !

I have been dying to see the next eps of BSG and SG-1 for months, *especially* BSG. SGA I've already seen the next six eps of so I'm not as concerned about that one.

How did you see the next 6 episodes of SGA??? That's not fair!! ! (Don't give any spoilers.)

I'm glad I'm not only one here obsessed with SG-1, SGA and BSG.

They have been showing on a Canadian movie channel for a few weeks now. Last year was even better; during the mid-season hiatus all three shows were showing on SkyOne in the UK andI got to see all of them ahead of time. This year it's just SGA.

SG (in all its incarnations) absolutely fascinates me...I spend a lot of time trying to think of valid science to explain it. In fact me and a guy I used to work with actually went through the trouble of coming up with some detailed theoretical stuff on how Stargate addresses work (including explaining the whole 7/8 symbol address thing), Maybe I'll put that stuff back up on the web this weekend and post the URL.

As for BSG, I'm amazed at how good it is. I resisted watching it at first, as I grew up watching the original and when I heard about how much stuff got changed it seemed like sacrilege to me. Thankfully I finally gave it a chance and now I'm absolutely addicted to it...it's so wonderfully dark. It's done by the same guy who did "Carnivale" which is yet another show I fell in love with that was killed before its time due to being too intelligent to attract a wide enough audience.

I wonder why Aspies are so into science fiction.

If I had to guess I'd say it's because sci-fi tends to shift more focus onto subjects aspies can identify with, such as science, instead of sticking to the human interaction stuff that we're not very good at.

I've also been wondering why lots of aspies are into anime too. I'm thinking it has something to do with the exaagerated facial expressions and stuff are obvious enough that we can read them more easily than normal body language. (and personally, I find spoken Japanese to be very soothing, and I tend to listen to a lot of jpop music as a result.)

True about sci-fi, but have you noticed that BSG (which you seem to like the most) is the least "science" oriented in the traditional sense. A lot of the episodes are character and socially driven, which is different from stargate where it is pretty much science oriented.

Some people call bsg a "space opera"

Firefly/serenity is simlar to BSG in this regard.

That's interesting!

With BSG I mostly watch for two reasons:

1. I'm dying to know what the Cylons are up to, exactly.
2. The whole Earth-as-a-lost-colony thing grabs my interest (it did when I watched the original too.)

I don't get much into the soap opera side...I mean I get the obvious stuff but for the most part they might as well all be aliens beacuse the way they act makes no sense to me. Firefly I just never could really get into. I watched it a little but mostly because I love the mechanic girl.

I would disagree that BSG is less "sci fi" than other sci fi shows.

In literature, stories tend to revolve around a conflict: man against man, man against nature, man against himself. Sci fi didn't evolved from a stories about science, per se, but around conflict that involve man and technology. The very first writers of sci fi - Mary Shelley, HG Wells and Jules Verne - explored the societal, psycological, philosophical and spiritual aspects of this conflict, and hence sci fi as a genre was born.

So that there can and should be a good deal of human drama in sci fi is a given. It's really due to the popular serials and pulp fiction of the and 40's and 50's, sci fi got a bad rap, because it was boiled down the genre into something formulaic and cliche, focusing of gimmicks of lots of robots, spaces ships and weird aliens. Sci fi's street cred has suffered ever since. Despite this, many great writers over the decades have written sci fi that is very human and earnest, yet always exploring the increasingly complicated relationship between man and the technology he invents.

To me BSG is very sci fi. It's essentially another twist of the story of Frankenstein's monster, but more contemporary, further reaching and the consequences for humankind are explored more extensively. There are a number of conflicts in the multifaceted story that is sheer sci fi, as it's deal specifically with the conflict between man and technology:

- Cylons attempt to commit genocide of their human makers
- Cylons' self-evolved capacity to appear just like humans, causing suspicion, distrust and paranoia among real humans
- Cylons that appear capable of love, fear, and pain, and whether humans ought to show Cylons love, mercy and compassion in return
- Humans in conflict with each other as the result of the limitations of their own technology, in particular the ongoign conlfict netween civilians and the military and their respectful demands of the available technology

In fact, there isn't really any subplot so far that doesn't ivolved technology. I think it's just people often assume that because it's sci fi, it can't be that good, relatable or engaging from the human angle. Yet BSG is. So rather than just say, "Hey, this is great sci fi" they feel compelled to seperate from the rest of sci fi by calling it something else.

As for Aspies liking Sci Fi - I think it's rooted in our "preference for object over people" thang. We relate to human-with-techology matters better than a simple human-with-human matters; whereas NTs tend to find technology alienating. Of course there's a irony in this, seeing human culture is virtually inseperatable from our technology.

Actually, it was Daniel Knauff (aka Chris Neal or Wilfred Schmidt) who made Carnivale.

Same director for a while though, that's what I meant.