Roy Batty’s “tears in rain” speech from Blade Runner.
Vincent Freeman’s line near the end of Gattaca: “You want to know how I did it, Anton? I never saved anything for the swim back.”
From the film The Andromeda Strain the whole sequence when they are scanning the capsule with cameras with ever higher magnification until the have the organism in view, then it moves. It’s alive!
Books: I always thought the moment(s) in Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness where
Estraven becomes female was wonderful and beautifully addressed. It changed the book for me from a somewhat boring political book to a life-changing, mind-changing event. It stayed with me, more than any of the other themes in the book. It opened my mind and eyes on trangenderism and made me really start to understand gender a little, for the first time.
Funnily enough so do I.
The great Orca spoiler in Steven Brusts’ Taltos series, there’s an awful lot of awesome in the whole series in fact.
Seconded. And the newspaper clipping that ends the book. Good stuff.
The last line to Joe Haldeman’s Tool of the Trade
when you realize that Nick’s son will continue his work of keeping humanity from destroying itself.
The last page of George R.R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging
when you realize the terrible choice Tuf has left for Tolly Mune.
The moment when the first officer invites the captain into the cave in William Brinkley’s The Last Ship
and they begin their illicit love affair, both knowing it’s wrong and could even destroy the colony.
The ending of Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God”
when the stars quietly go out overhead.
Rico stumbles into a gathering of Skinnies in Starship Troopers
and throws down a talking grenade that clears the room by announcing, in the local language, “I’m a ten-second bomb! I’m a ten-second bomb! Nine… eight… seven…”
The hero in Dark City goes to the pier at the end
and sees his true love aglow in the sunshine.
In Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, when Tom returns to find
he’s still young while his controlling older brother is not anymore, and his beautiful, telepathic, soulmate great-grandniece is very happy to finally meet him.
Obi-Wan’s expression when Han brags about the Kessel Run in Star Wars.
The ape flings the bone into the air and it “becomes” a nuclear-weapons satellite, millions of years in the future, in 2001.
And the immortal Aliens remark, “I say we take off and nuke them from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
Any appearance of the Shrike in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. Man, that was some awesome being!
The moment Gully Foyle becomes something more than a man in Bester’s The Stars My Destination aka Tiger! Tiger!).
The Medusan ambassador in Babylon-5.
The Paratwa assassins in Christopher Hinz’s brilliant (and unjustly neglected) Paratwa Trilogy.
The speech from Human Nature, Doctor Who, season three
And “This time, Rose, everybody lives!” from The Empty Child.
The very end of Deerskin, when Ossin tells Lissar,
“If you cannot run far because of your wounds, then we will run less far together.”
The answer to Asimov’s “The Last Question” (the question itself needs no spoiler, being “How can entropy be reversed?”)
In Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero, orbiting the Monobloc
The Senator’s deathbed scene in Lucifer’s Hammer. For that matter, the Hot Fudge Tuesdae interview in that book.
Adding my vote for when Major Mandela reads the decaying and crumbling note from Marygay. Darned dust.
Internal action at it’s finest: When Miles Vorkosigan, in Memory tells a friend that he’s wrestling with temptation. And intends to go for two falls out of three.
The speech that Kip Russel gives in Have Spacesuit - Will Travel, defying the Three Galaxies court. Followed immediately by the his request that he and Peewee can return home before the sentence is executed.
Heinlein’s The Long Watch, where Dahlquist is having a cigarette, and making the monitoring geiger counter scream when he blows the smoke at it.
On preview, I have to agree with Polycarp about the Hot Fudge Tuesday.
In Larry Niven’s The Ringworld Engineers, when a young Kzin asks his father, “Is it good to eat?”
Several here I’d agree with already … I would add:
The first appearance of the Heat Ray in H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
And, also from Wells, Griffin’s account of his transformation in The Invisible Man.
A little obscure, but I remember it - the final messages from Neptune at the end of Olaf Stapledon’s Last Men in London. (The idea is that both Last and First Men and Last Men in London are dictated from the very distant future, by the last descendants of the human race, living on Neptune and about to be wiped out … in Last and First Men, they’re shown as being nobly resigned to their fate, but Last Men in London includes those final, fragmentary images as the disaster actually hits.)
While I’m on Stapledon; the bit at the start of Star Maker when the unnamed narrator’s consciousness takes flight into the cosmos.
The final chapter of David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus - specifically, the bit where Nightspore finally makes it past all of Crystalman’s traps and snares, and prepares to enjoy eternal rest in what, for want of a better word, we might call heaven, and then finds out how many other people have made it up there besides him … Absolutely no one.
And the bit in E. R. Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison, where, on leaving the dinner table, Fiorinda pops the bubble …
That was my first thought. The scene is here on YouTube.
From L E Modesitt’s Spellsong Cycle, two scenes. Where Lady Anna destroys the city of Vult by creating a volcano; and the scene where Lady Secca concentrates all the light of the Sun into a beam that burns away all the clouds in the sky to the horizon and reduces the enemy fortress to a glass bottomed lake.
The scene from Icerigger, set on the iceball planet Tran-ky-ky where they have to drive off a beast called a stavanzer, also called a “thunder-eater”. The weapons to be used are large, sail propelled sharpened logs on skates - and aren’t expected to do more than irritate the thing. It’s rather . . . large. Bigger than a whale, like a huge grey slug on the ice sheet. And the log-spears have to be guided by one man ice craft for most of the way in; Ethan Fortune gets a Jonah’s-eye view of the thing.
Your playing my song.
TWDuke meant that you missed the point because not only did phouka not suggest this thread, s/he (apologies) suggested the direct opposite of this thread. Even in the very quote you quoted:
The whole point was that phouka’s generic “moments of awesome” thread was overrun by sci-fi/fantasy, so the idea was to bring other genres into that thread. Not to add more sci-fi/fantasy, not to start a new thread. Certainly not to create a new thread devoted to sci-fi/fantasy. Thus, you missed the point as much as it is humanly possible to miss it.
Just FYI. Carry on.
Yeah, it completely and utterly ruined the entire thread for me too 
So much so that I can’t add another vote in favour of Marygay’s letter to Mandela at the end of Forever War.
Nor could I comment on the silent appearance of Gort in defence of Klaatu.
And certainly not on the lush visuals of Forbidden Planet and its new sense of scale in the machinery of the Krell.
Heck, I’m not even going to mention the British TV series “The Tripods” and the moment when the heroes of the story suddenly realise they were standing under one of the titular machines. A walker so massive that they only see it when they come across one of its feet.
This probably doesn’t count as “good” science fiction, but…
The moment in “Galaxy Quest” when Jason Nesmith is leaving the Thermian version of the NSEA Protector for the first time, and the aspect ratio of the film switches to widescreen…
Two great moments from that film: Kwan realizes that his new alien girlfriend has tentacles, and doesn’t mind in the least; and Dr. Lazarus vows, “by the Hammer of Grabthar,” to avenge Quellek’s death.
I liked god’s apology too, especially what it meant to Marvin.
Why would it not count as good? It’s a very good film, and an awesome comedy.