[Eric Paddon]

But compared to the number of original novels that are not set in one consistent universe, Battlestar Galactica has gotten far less than any other sci-fi TV property I know of. And that again is Universal not giving us the fanbase, greater creative freedom to flood the market with more stories involving these characters. I do not believe one person, especially Richard Hatch, should have been the only one so lucky to do so especially when his novels aren't even remotely recognizable to me given their appalling disregard for continuity.

If anything, it's that lack of high visibility in novels from an active fanbase that I think creates the problems you cite on lack of focus because Galactica never had anything out there that explicitly built off the series except for the two comic book series in the early 90s. I think the solution was to have more people writing and showing what could be done, and also it would have helped to have some adaptations of the episodes in print form that weren't so far afield from the actual episodes like Larson's novelizations are. Case in point is how one thing that helped maintain interest in Trek during the 70s in the pre-VCR era was that James Blish's episode adaptations were for the most part fairly faithful recreations of the episodes themselves that managed to keep the template of Trek familiar in the minds of people when they weren't watching the show in repeats.

All this comes back to is that the greater the market for novels based on the original series that observed faithful continuity to what went on in the episodes (THAT is where a censor should have been needed. Not to give us one universe post-HOG but to just insure that a multitude of projects in different universes steemed from a consistent world of what the series established), then the better off Galactica would have been just like Trek prospered with dozens of novels that will never be part of their official timeline (even though some of them like "Yesterday's Son" deserve to be).