I don't really agree about the reviewers definition of Science Fiction music cliches.
Using female vocals singing middle-eastern lyrics might be very popular in scoring these days, it's by no means a SciFi cliche. You can't take "Dune" as example and project that on the entire genre.
The common SciFi cliche unfortunately still is John Williams-like orchestral brass bombast

And the "Battlestar Galactica" Remake skillfully circumvents that. Both through the use of heavy percussion, vocals and later - in the regular series - strings, woodwinds, guitars and all kinds of other instruments

The soundtrack to the Miniseries has some great track, but isn't that suitable for just listening to it. Especially the vocal-heavy tracks are nice, but a lot of the percussion works far better on film where it underscores the images almost perfectly.

> I don't really agree about the reviewers definition of Science Fiction
> music cliches.
> Using female vocals singing middle-eastern lyrics might be very popular in
> scoring these days, it's by no means a SciFi cliche. You can't take
> "Dune" as example and project that on the entire genre.
> The common SciFi cliche unfortunately still is John Williams-like
> orchestral brass bombast

I think I would agree with Christian on this one. Sci-fi scored with ethnic elements really became popular during the 2000s. It wasn't just Dune and BSG. Ironically, the trend became so popular that even Star Wars got in on it. Kevin Kiner's score to The Clone Wars features the wailing female vocals and ethnic percussion. What Christian failed to consider is that the Sci-Fi channel (now SyFy, blech) was the genesis of this sound. When BSG used this musical style, it wasn't yet a cliche, and in fact I think the popularity of BSG is what made it a cliche (everyone started trying to copy elements from BSG).