Matthias Stephan

Born 1974. Lectures in the English Degree Programme at Aarhus University. He is also a PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Comparative and World Literature, where he is completing his dissertation Exploring Postmodern Structure, which uses the genres of science fiction and detective fiction (in literature, film and television) to define postmodernism. He has presented conference papers and lectures on Postmodernism, Detective Fiction, Science Fiction and Romanticism in the United States and across Europe. Co-editor of Otherness: Essays and Studies.

Battlestar Galactica: Not Your Father’s Sci-Fi

FEATURE. Re-imaginings of old televisual ‘classics’ are becoming an everyday phenomenon with series like CW’s 90201, TNT’s Dallas and Sci-Fi’s Battlestar Galactica. In this context, Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is particularly interesting by representing a re-imagining not only of the popular Cold War era space opera, but of the boundaries of sci-fi itself. In his article, Matthias Stephan introduces the aforementioned series, shown on thebasic cable station Sci-Fi/SyFy, and he pinpoints how and why the series represents a re-imagining of the science fiction genre, as defined theoretically by Darko Suvin.