The Seattle Post-Intelligencer interviews Katee Sackhoff, Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica. Among other things, there's some interesting points about what it means to be a woman in sci-fi:

There has been a lot a positive and negative reaction regarding Starbuck. Initially, it surrounded just the idea of the character as a woman. But no one had gotten a chance to even get to know your character back then. Now, two seasons in, have you read anything about her?

I don't read them. My mom does. If there's a good one, or a funny one that's really bad, she tells me to read it. I think one time, someone said I was so ugly it looked like I fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, and landed on my face. (Laughs.) And then, I climbed on top of a 10-story building, fell off of that, and landed on my ass. I was like, that's really funny! Obviously someone went through that much effort to figure out, you know, how my ass got flat and my face ... that's funny. You have to laugh about it.

(via Gravity Lens, which takes a little umbrage at the idea that Battlestar Galactica "isn't really science fiction": I need someone to explain to me how a show about humanity, slaughtered and driven from the twelve worlds they occupy by technology that they created, now pursued and manipulated by these same enemies, having to determine on-the-fly what constitutes "human," and preserve the remnants of the race doesn't qualify as science fiction. I tend to agree. Just because some science fiction is juvenile and some science-fiction fans are weird doesn't mean the whole genre is toxic.)