Edited by Rich Handley and Lou Tambone

Sequart Organisation, available now

Battlestar Galactica, classic and reimagined, gets dissected by aficionados in its various media iterations in this exhaustive (though never exhausting) almanac.

As with their excellent Blade Runner volume [link to review], Sequart have called upon subject experts to write about what they know best, resulting in a spectrum of content from social commentary to toy reviews, and everything in between. Edited by Rich Handley and Lou Tambone, the former provides a fascinating, nostalgic ‘how I discovered the show’ that fans will certainly relate to, including the search for the limited tie-in material.

This is the sort of book you don’t really need to read from start to finish (though I did!) as its magazine-y style means that you can dip in and out of any of the articles, in any order. And with over 570 pages this weighty tome deserves time spent on it, such are the abundance of facts.

While a big fan of the show in all incarnations – I even have a soft spot for Galactica 1980, having seen the pilot edited as Conquest of the Earth in a double-bill with Smokey and the Bandit at the cinema – there was much that I didn’t know and picked up. The tragic story about a child’s death following the ingestion of toy missiles is fairly well known, but I didn’t know that Caprica’s lights spell out an expletive to the attacking Cylons or that Starbuck’s action figure body was repainted as Mork’s from Mork and Mindy.

There’s a detailed, personal section on the work and influence of the greatly-missed Richard (Apollo, Tom Zarek) Hatch, neatly summarising the could-have-been The Second Coming. I personally loved the section on the Mattel toys, the different comic strips (including Look-In), The novelisations and spinoffs, and the search for the holy grail – the Space Viewer. No sign of the Topps bubblegum cards or Dairylea Triangle Letraset transfer sets, but surely that’s an idea for volume two! Paul Simpson of this parish also spends a detailed section on the music of the show, from Stu Phillips to Bear McCreary.

The section on Evie the Chimp, who played Muffit the Daggit, offers food for thought, the idea of an animal being used in this way is problematic through 21st Century eyes (like the elephants as Banthas in Star Wars) but in an ‘It was acceptable in the 70s’ way, we can mark this as progress over 40 years.

Verdict: The perfect collection to mark 40 yahrens of Glen A Larson’s ambitious TV space epic, the legacy covered here shows that it is so much more than the Star Wars rip-off that it was accused of being. So say we all. 9/10

Nick Joy