Inspired, more or less, by this thread.
I’ve expounded my own new-series idea previously.
Has anybody esle got any good new SF series concepts?
Well, Mankind has decamped Earth for a new system, where they have terraformed dozens of planets and moons. Eventually there was a civil war. The series I envision follows the adventures of a small cargo ship owned by a soldier from the losing side as he and his crew struggle to keep flying in the face of the winners (let’s call them…the Alliance or some such). It should be a mixed sex and race crew so we have some sexual antics and tensions. There needs to be someone untrustworthy as a wild card. We need a reason for them to be on the run from the authorities, so let’s have them pick up a couple of fugitives…say a doctor and his sister. Stir in a pilot who wears Hawaiian shirts and plays with dinosaurs, a priest/minister/? with an unknown background and a hot female engineer and I think we have a winner!
Oh, there should also be hookers. Space hookers.
I’d enjoy a series based on the Horseclans books by Robert Adams, or Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers.
I like your idea, BrainGlutton.
I’m not a hard sf purist, but I think it’s good every once in awhile. I especially think that those who get close should go all-out. Eureka would be absolutely blissful if it were a little harder. The “humans only use 10% of their brains but this guy learned how to use 100%” episode really pissed me off.
I’d say a short-story series like The Twilight Zone would be good, but those Outer Limits episodes in the '90s were absolutely dreadful.
I think making a sf series work would be a balancing act with regards to the budget. If budget/popularity is large enough it has to be dumbed-down and it’ll be a casualty of the ratings war after a season or two. Not popular enough (small budget) means poor talent across the board - bad acting, bad writing, bad effects if used.
Stargate Atlantis seems to have struck a good balance here.
A Wagon Train to the stars!
With a Horatio Hornblower type of Captain.
Make sure ut has parallel evolution of alien worlds and a Utopia based on the concept of unchained technological progress.
Ooh! And fill up most of the starring roles with Canadian Jews and have a former war hero pilot who writes cop dramas for TV as the creative head. Make sure to have Negro and Asian actors in supporting roles.
[JTK] “Sounds like fun!” [/JTK]
I’d like to see a series where Earth is already partway through being conquered by an alien race. The plot would be split between people in those regions already conquered mounting a guerilla campaign against the invaders, and the leaders of other nations trying to keep their populace calm while pretty much not being able to do anything to defend themselves should the aliens attack. It would be set nowish, with the aliens having reasonably advanced tech. without approaching godlike abilities (no teleporters, replicator analogues, planet-destroying weapons, etc). Essentially it would be hard sf; they don’t have strange and fantastic technologies, just much, much better versions of what we have.
There may, however, be cool-looking robots. Because I like the concept of artificial intelligence, if not the use of it in many sci-fi shows. Plus I just like cool-looking robots. 
Human colonies throughout the Solar System evolve distinct cultures, beliefs, so forth. Some declare themselves independent from Earth. Terran govts. and commercial interests say “Oh no you don’t.” Series explores what comes next. Obviously, an allegory of the American revolutionary war, only without the kind of moral certitude Americans have in retrospect about victory.
Like BG’s idea, I want the science hard. No E.T.'s, realistic A.I., no impossible or energetically absurd space weapons, no FTL, no artificial gravity outside of centrifuges, no sound in a hard vacuum, no sleek spacecraft that fly like jet fighters, no instantaneous communication over billions of miles, no super-powered mutants, no psychopathological “clones”, none of it.
No this idea I love. There would of course have to be exaggerations of current technology and maybe a bit of speculative technology, but the harder the better.
Now this idea I love.
I’m not sure how all the incest, cannibalism and other ooky stuff will go over on TV.
Me, I’d like a decent cyberpunk series - Total Recall 2070 came close, very close, but I’d like more VR stuff as well as the gritty detectives&androids stuff. Maybe a police team of an old-school detective, a replicant and a hacker, working for a DA or something, solve various future-crimes, with the team sometimes having to go to orbitals, or Mars. Sometimes having to do a lot of “legwork” in the Matrix, where the hacker manifests paranormal-like prowess.
Give them a nemesis group, like a shadowy organisation that fronts for an AI collective.
Nothing new, but well-done, it could be Law&Order for the next century.
Space: 90210
I’d like to see a prime-time soap opera series based on Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. Call it “House of Amber.” The same basic setup as in the series, but more focus on the personalities and faction of the member of the House of Amber as they struggle for power and whatnot. It would be much like a story about a medieval power struggle, except of course that the Amber families’ ability to shape reality makes them basically godlings, and we could throw in conflict with member of the Courts of Chaos, who ain’t all that human, for good measure.
As in most soap operas, much of the expensive action – whole alien armies struggling with one another on behalf of this or that Amber faction – would be offscreen, but we could still have shots of this or that Amberite encamped on an alternate Earth where the majordomos are blue-skinned aliens.
And since the Amberites can and do sleep with humans and bear children, there could be plenty of half-godlings thrown into the mix with their various schemes and ambitions.
It could go on forever, and unlike your average soap opera, has enough room for maneuver built into the basic premise that it COULD go on forever in a very entertaining fashion.
It would stretch any conceivable technology to the breaking point, but so far as I can tell, the very laws of physics needn’t be violated. Economics and biology are probably the fields that will be abused the hardest, but it’s tough to make sci-fi interesting without at least bending the rules in half.
Just about any of C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union stuff would make great mostly-hard SF. She has aliens in a few books, but the main conflict is pretty much like Loopydude’s post lays out; between the colonies and Earth. So, the aliens could easily be dispensed with at first and brought in later, or not at all. In Downbelow Station, the aliens are mostly incidental and could probably be substituted for by serfs, maybe genetically manipulated humans. On the other hand, the aliens are believable and fairly alien, so could be used well even in a serious series.
The only “magic” tech she has for ships is an FTL drive, but all her descriptions of non-FTL maneuvers use real physics including inertia and time dilation. Cyteen and parts of other books deal with cloning where again she has a small bit of super-advanced tech: memory recordings. The recordings aren’t perfect though, since life experiences will always influence the individual.
I think that her dense plots would translate fairly well to the screen, but there’s a lot of internal stuff that would have to be brought out through flashbacks and alternate stories that fill in the present conflict. The basic situations are very believable and could provide a starting point for interesting and detailed storytelling over a long term project, even though most of her books have been fairly limited in time span.
Some existinf SF books already lend themselves to the idea of a series:
1.) Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld books. Ignore the stupid SF channel TV-movie (which wasn’t very faithful, what with horses and all, and suffering from the same US-centeredness that ruins a lot of other ideas). They’ve already had two collections of Riverworld short stories by writers other than Farmer to prove the concept works. It gives you a great excuse to bring together famous figures from different periods in history and different cultures, and have them cope with limited technology to accomplish – any of a number of goals.
2.) How about a series based on Jack Chalker’s well World – a world made up of hexagons , each with a different alien species, and with varying levels of technology. You can visit the very interesting aliens next door by hopping in a boat. nd everyone has already coped with language issues and First Contact and the like.
3.) How about a series based on “Lewis Padgett”'s “Robots have to Tails” stories? Or Robert Sheckley’s AAA Ace stories? In both cases, the comic adventures of characters who have enough trouble dealing with themselves. You might have to rewrite Padgett’s, though – drunks aren’t a laughing matter anymore.
I would love to see a good adaptation of Fables (the comic book), but I would be afraid they would screw it up.
A good D&D type medieval fantasy, but with non-stereotype thought out characters. That would be nice.
I’d love to see any sort of hard SF on TV, the harder, the better. We’ve gotten close, but we’re still not there. Firefly, for instance, was mostly-hard, but they still had technomagical artificial gravity. And then, of course, in the movie, they jumped from “River has eerily accurate hunches” to “River is full-on telepathic”, which isn’t so hard SF any more.
Which brings me to my worry: I don’t know how long any hard SF show could stay hard. Even purportedly nonfiction things like some of the Discovery channel’s offerings have had a tendancy to make the jump; it would be that much harder for a fiction show to stay on track. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t try, of course.
I would love to see a movie made based on Christoper Priest’s The Inverted World; however, a SF TV series would also get my attention.
How did River get any more telepathic in “Serenity” than she did in “Safe”*?
-Joe
*“Safe” being the episode where River was able to tell what happened to the old mayor of Hillfolksburg
River Tam was obviously evolving in Josh’s mind as time went by. I feel that much of what was ‘revealed’ in the movie would’ve also been revealed in seperate 2nd or 3rd season eps if the series had survived Fox’s scorn.