Then, the 2003 series of Battlestar Galactica. This series was a study into how humanity behaves when there’s nothing left, and showed me what a space story with no aliens could look like. A story about people and their relationship to one another.
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Speaking of Aliens, Alien has always been my favourite of the franchise because of the way it depicts, first and foremost, a bunch of people doing a job. The militarism and jingoistic hoo-ra of the sequels doesn’t do as much for me as the terror of people having just the worst day at work.
Images like The Day the Earth Smiled with the earth visible as barely more than a pixel, the Hubble spacecraft’s pillars of creation, or any of the dozens of pictures I had in coffee table books that blew up my imagination with thoughts of the immense loneliness of the universe.
I wanted the world of Sunward Sky to feel lived in. I wanted it to seem like our current race toward climate collapse and technofeudalist didn’t stop, and we were surviving, trapped on the surface of the world we killed.
Andor has an amazing example of this kind of place - covered in junk and barely surviving, riffing on the retrofuturism of Star Wars in a really interesting way.
More than that, I wanted the grievances to feel real. Around the time I was writing Sunward Sky, many stories were coming out about the way people like Musk and Bezos were treating workers at their factories.
Musk forced people back to the factory, creating hundreds of new Covid cases in the process. Six people died in an Amazon warehouse when they weren’t allowed to leave prior to a natural disaster.
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