Where to start with SciFi

[mattc]

Matt, Bladerunner was released while Neuromancer was being written.

really? Thanks. I am contrite 

(Anyway, the style of the film certainly didn't come from Dick's story, IMHO - and Harrison Ford wasn't in it. I'll try to dig out the relevant quote from Mr Gibson at some point - it was a long time ago ... They are still amongst my favourite films/books respectively.)

[Deano]

The look and the plot of Bladerunner is lifted wholesale from Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Bladerunner's better, though. And has sound.

[mr magnolia]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks

Wandering in a bookshop took me to Sarah Canary, from this list, most recently, which was a joy. Just order them all from amazon, stock your shelves and dig in!

I do like a William Gibson too, but it's tricky for him to be scarily cutting edge now as his stuff is so techno. Last ones have been a bit meh, but the early stuff is cracking,even now.

[caerau]

Blimey, I am stunned as to how few of those I've read.


No Azimov at all.

[LEE]

As a confirmed Star Wars hater (yes, I truly don't like any of the films at all, never have, it's just Lord of the Rings in Space ferchristssake) I'd say my favourite Sci-Fi films  (sorry to steal the thread from books) are, in a rough order (that would change on a daily basis naturally), are

1 - 2001 - A Space Odyssey (I think this sums up Sci-Fi as a genre/concept perfectly)

2- Blade Runner - I think this film is prophetic.  Give it just 100 years, just one human (?) lifetime.

3 - Alien/Aliens - Not prophetic, just rip-roaring yarns.  Both brilliant in different ways

4 - The Terminator/T2 - Prophetic, not in the time-travel aspect, but in the autonomous/drone warfare predictions (we are closer than you think).  Another 2 rip-roaring action films.

5 - Forbidden Planet - I absolutely love everything about this film.  It's a thing of beauty.

[tiermat]

Oh come on! If we are veering off into the film space, there are only two worth watching:

1) Earth Girls are Easy

2) Mars Attacks

[caerau]

Forbidden Planet   


Especially when you consider when it was made.


(Well it is Shakespeare in the end - it would be a good story )

[Vince]

I think I was 8 when I watched that. Didn't sleep well for about a week!

[vorsprung]

Oh come on! If we are veering off into the film space, there are only two worth watching:

1) Earth Girls are Easy

2) Mars Attacks

..and Dark Star

[caerau]

I tried to get the missus to see Dark Star a few months ago. She threatened to go to bed within about 15 minutes.  Shame I hadn't seem it for donkey's years.

I have a major soft spot for Silent Running.

[vorsprung]

I tried to get the missus to see Dark Star a few months ago. She threatened to go to bed within about 15 minutes.  Shame I hadn't seem it for donkey's years.

I have a major soft spot for Silent Running.

I must have seen Silent Running and Dark Star within a few weeks of each other.  Maybe they were on that Alex Cox series of cult films on the telly about 20 years ago.

[Ham]

I have a major soft spot for Silent Running.

I'd try Grease, then

[caerau]

 

Moviedrome! God I miss that.

[T42]

Odd comments:

As far as I know, 2001 is the only hard SF film so far in which the spaceships don't make a noise. That makes it pretty well the only hard SF film set in space.

The Fifth Element is one of my favourites, because it's highly entertaining.  Ditto Independence Day, despite the occasional lapse into (really quite good) corn.

A great opportunity missed: Stephen Spielberg's whack at The War of the Worlds. Levering in the cheesy old father/son-conflict schtick was cheap, nasty and superfluous.

Alan Moore's War of the Worlds pastiche in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series would make a great film. So would Stephen Baxter's The Space Machine.

Forbidden Planet was a great idea well executed in its time.  I would love to see a modern remake, provided it could be done with suitable reverence and without the likes of Cruise, Willis etc.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Odd comments:

As far as I know, 2001 is the only hard SF film so far in which the spaceships don't make a noise. That makes it pretty well the only hard SF film set in space.

Alien franchise - ditto.

Firefly/Serenity

Battlestar Galactica TV series.

Solaris

Red Planet

Erm, those are the ones off the top of my head.

[T42]

Odd comments:

As far as I know, 2001 is the only hard SF film so far in which the spaceships don't make a noise. That makes it pretty well the only hard SF film set in space.

Alien franchise - ditto.

Firefly/Serenity

Battlestar Galactica TV series.

Solaris

Red Planet

Erm, those are the ones off the top of my head.

Russian Solaris or the Clooney one?  Can't really remember what the spaceships did in either, they weren't there long.  Think the Clooney one had music over. Can't remember even seeing a spaceship in the Russian one.

Hold it, though - Nostromo (Alien) rumbles.  Firefly, & BG apart from the hokey 70s film, are TV productions (never seen 'em).  In the Red Planet trailer the spaceship rumbles too: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/1o-LAANg3s0&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/1o-LAANg3s0&rel=1</a>

[ian]

I'm rewatching Firefly at the moment, which is still enjoyable, but it's really a western. With spaceships.

I was persuaded to read those Gap series books. I did wade through them for some reason that now defies explanation. It wasn't just that they were dark and all the characters unlikable, nothing all much that seemed to happen, and what did, took a long time. It was the reading equivalent of a terminal illness.

SF, I think I ought to like, but I'm not sure that I do. The earlier Iain M Banks books aren't bad, but the latter ones got bogged down, and I'm sorry, I don't find the ship names hilarious. That said, I found Hitchhikers Guide rather tedious, so possibly it's the same strand of humour that I'm not wired for. Either that, or I'm just odd. I'm attempting to write my own SF novel, but as mentioned elsewhere, that was a bet so it's allowed to be awful. It has to be of Peter J. Hamilton length too. I'm only doing the one volume though and it's bonkers space opera with evisceration and robot children and huge spaceships. They probably make a noise in space (actually they don't). I did actually like the PJH books, but undoubtedly they go on a bit. I suppose by some measure that's value for money. I like the chop-socky space hokum kind of SF, I think, not the hard stuff. More Alien than Solaris.

[mattc]

it would be trivial to concoct and justify some technology that allowed space-peoples to 'hear' nearby spaceships.
I care as much about this bit of 'bad science' as I care about how many toes the hobbits should have had. Do you people watch those "Great Movie Mistakes" programs too? Someone must, own up!

[LEE]

it would be trivial to concoct and justify some technology that allowed space-peoples to 'hear' nearby spaceships.
I care as much about this bit of 'bad science' as I care about how many toes the hobbits should have had. Do you people watch those "Great Movie Mistakes" programs too? Someone must, own up!

I don't watch them but I do like the Movie Cliche web site.

Basically most/all Sci-Fi movies would be unwatchable if one were put off by bad science (and every movie ever made if exaggeration of real life upset you).

2001 - A Space Odyssey does at least try to deal with the lack of gravity to be found on Spaceships. 

It also demonstrates that it's unlikely that 2 spaceships will ever meet each other in the same plane, as 2 boats would, facing each other.

Nobody ever got blown 20 feet through a shop window by a shot gun (Isaac Newton would have known that)  but it looks good in Sam Peckinpah films.


Asteroids do however make a noise like a V8 engine, but only if they are huge enough to wipe out New York city.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Nostromo rumbles when on board - but not in space, as far as I remember.

[Kim]

Rumbling spaceships - it's all about context:

Obviously for interior shots, it's fine.  I don't really mind if it's an exterior shot of a single ship (as long as the sound doesn't change as if you were hearing it pass), which is a bit like adding foley to telephoto footage in wildlife documentaries - you *know* it's bollocks, but it's an approximation of what you'd hear from the ship itself.  Audible explosions, OTOH, are right out - even if you were hearing the explosion locally, it wouldn't sound like that.

What bugs me more is the complete disregard for how rocket-like engines are used on spacecraft.  Running continuously when it doesn't make sense to do so (though continuous thrust from an ion drive or similar does get round some of the gravity issues, but then they orient the decks the wrong way), and spaceships generally pointing in the wrong direction when manoeuvring, and generally steering like fixed-wing aircraft.  Other than 2001 and Babylon 5 (and then, only some of the time), I can't think of much that got it right.

[Chris S]

Apart from the blatantly made-up bits (eg "The Gap" - read hyperspace, so a "Gap Drive" is a hyperspace engine), a lot of the physics in Stephen Donaldson's Gap series "felt" quite believable and real.

Orienting a ship for deceleration so that occupants aren't turned to mush. Deceleration that takes days, that kind of thing.

Controlling the ships in the novels was mostly about writing scripts for the computers, rather than sitting at a joystick looking out of implausibly large windows. In fact, I don't recall there actually being any windows on the spaceships - at least, not the ones featured by pirates and freelancers, outside views were from cameras - and all completely silent of course.

Water was all recycled from waste and the air. Distances still "felt" huge.

If they weren't so grim and incredibly long, they'd probably make quite good films.

[caerau]

Orienting a ship for deceleration so that occupants aren't turned to mush. Deceleration that takes days, that kind of thing.

That's why you need intertial dampeners innit 

[mrcharly-YHT]

Or super-sized KERS

[Steph]

Speaking as a lifelong fan (a word invented by SF people) I have stayed out of this to see where it goes. In answer to the OP, what you might like in SF all depends on what you like as a story. If into big tech and vastly wideranging theatre, then there are all sorts of things in the Space Opera area, where Emperors struggle against invading space barbarians (eh?) and so forth. There are also high-tech futures where the 'alien' is made as alien as possible, such as 'Mote in God's Eye' by Pournelle and Niven, or Vernor Vinge's 'Deep' stories.

If what is wanted is closer to reality, but still off-kilter, John Birmingham's WW2 books offer a much more realistic view of what happens when a 21st Century navy drops into WWII, and bites the bullets of the sexism, racism and homophobia that existed back then.

Classic works to consider are 'Earth Abides', the collected stories of Philip Dick and Theodore Sturgeon, and the works of the late Bob Shaw. Bob Heinlein produced a lot of good stuff, and the one that everyone either loves or hates is 'Starship Troopers', which carries a huge load of philosophy as well as a sneak punch against the reader's assumptions about the narrator. Pity about the film.

Donaldson I stopped reading partway through the second volume of the current 'Covenant' Runes of Earth set, as he has now taken his thesaurus and disappeared completely up his own arse. His writing is so unreadable that his story concepts get lost.