Metablog on Metafiction

A serial narrative is a story broken up across time, delivered in pieces rather than as a whole. Battlestar Galactica, the television series launched in 2004, is typical of a serial narrative: it has an overall narrative arc which stretches across four seasons, but, as is common for serials, especially in film and television, each episode has its own beginning, middle and end, so in effect we have many smaller stories making up a larger narrative. But these do not make up the entire tale of the Battlestar Galactica, not by a long shot. The recent TV series is itself an episode in a series of series, which extends into film, books, comics, games and webisodes, the whole of which is part of still larger traditions of science fiction, genre and religion. In fact, it is almost impossible to establish the limits of the story Battlestar Galactica, a serial within a series of series.

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In the mirror that morning, blinking and rubbing his eyes (the rain, the constant rain, seemed to blur everything), his reflection kept shifting, changing clothes. Why was it so hard to see himself? What was his role? Was he hung over? Too many pisco sours? What was the question he was supposed to ask himself?

He lifted his eyes from the mirror, looking around for something stable to focus on . . . a black dot on the wall, an insect, big and bloated, a mosquito, probing the cinder block with a spidery proboscis. What was it looking for? Already fat with blood, fat as a cherry. Whose blood? His own? Omar’s? The tourists’?

My blood?
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