Yeah, I know, but I grew up BEFORE Star Wars, but after Star Trek and I LOVED Sci-Fi…this kid living way down at the end of a dirt road with not a lot of friends in the 70’s and I devoured anything SciFi I possibly could…and it was BAD.
Now, there’s more than you could ever possibly watch and the best is amazing, and the worst still has enough budget to make it at least look believable.
And now I can’t help but feel like a smug hipster, watching my Sci-Fi movie where you can see the painted wood-grain paneling on the space ship.
(Don’t mind me, I’m just salty the wife and I finished The Expanse and I’m suffering from withdrawl.)
I’m about your age and I remember reading a book in the Seventies that had a one or two page synopsis of almost every SF film ever made. Even with the numerous photos, it was barely 250 pages.
I think there’s a bunch of things that went to make it easier to completely make up a universe (I suppose the same might be said for fantasy, but creating an ORC army is kinda expensive)
Blue screens, easy access to CGI engines like Unity, 3d printing, and enough funding to completely enclose the camera and actors convincingly in an environment that looks like a space ship…even with the price of plywood, I’m betting it’s a smaller percentage of the budget than I was in the past.
The expanse is amazing–I’ve had trouble finding sf worth watching, once we finished that. I’ve seen (or tried and rejected) most of the older shows; is there any space opera being made today that’s worthwhile?
Bookwise, though, there’s never been a better age for SF, in my opinion. If you’re a fan of the genre who’s mostly read books published in the 60s and before, hie ye down to the library!
I think it’s more that there’s so much, it’s hard to pick out the wheat from the chaff. We’ve spent a LOT of time in the Cosmere, and Disney+ (and all that entails), and the James Holdenverse, and A little Westworld, The Hunger Famse, and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, and Live Die, Repeat, and the reboot of Lost In Space
And…and…and…I guess inn bitching to bitch. There’s just TOO MUCH.
Yeah, I was going to say that since about the 1950s, there’s been a steady stream of good science fiction in book form.
It’s only since about 1976 when it has been in the mainstream more or less, and only in the last 15-20 when it’s been very popular. (and yes, I’m counting a lot of the MCU as science fiction).
So go to the library! Some of the best sci-fi novels were written in the 1970s and 1980s. And if you liked the TV version of “The Expanse”, you’ll really love the books. They’re dramatically better, if you can believe it.
Even in the past 10 years there’s been a glorious renaissance in SF novels. Looking at the Hugos and discounting fantasy, we’ve got The Three Body Problem, Ancillary Justice, A Memory Called Empire, and The Calculating Stars, all of which were great. And of course there’s NK Jemisin’s masterpiece trilogy The Broken Earth, although that could debatably be called fantasy (said debate would involve massive spoilers, so I’m not gonna go there)–if you’ve not read The Broken Earth, put it at the top of your list!
I read all the books and enjoyed them, but I think I liked the show better. It may be that the books are better than the show, but the show is so much better than most SF shows, whereas the books are just very good books with excellent company and didn’t stand out in their medium the way the show did.
I think the books were better in terms of characterization and story, but the TV show did a great job of actually bringing a lot of that stuff to life in a visual and auditory way, mostly through brilliant casting and visual effects. I mean, Avarasala was hysterical to read, but watching Shohreh Aghdashloo as Avasarala brought the character to life in a way that the book couldn’t quite do. Same with Wes Chatham as Amos. It’s one thing to imagine the character, but it’s another to see him.
The other thing they did well was that the writers of the show were mostly faithful to the story, and they got the overall story and the characters. There are quite a few lines in the TV show that weren’t actually in the books, but were completely in-character despite that. That’s an unusual trick for TV writers; usually the characters seem to lose something in the translation, but not with “The Expanse”.
I was all caught up with the Expanse books when the TV show debuted. When the next book came out all of my visualizations of the characters switched to the ones on TV. I don’t think that’s ever happened for me before. That either speaks to the brilliance of the TV show or maybe my imagination is just getting lazier.
The problem isn’t finding sci-fi that’s good, it’s that sci-fi that LOOKS AMAZING is now CHEAP, and doesn’t necessarily have to have a good story….and there’s so much of it.
Star Wars was incredible in part because it LOOKED great, and there were a handful of others (close encounters, etc) and it’s an exponential curve at this point.
I’m jealous of anyone younger than I am. Imagine anyone growing up in the late 50s/early 60s, devouring SF books, but being starved to actually see it on a screen.
And what Sci-Fi there was, was either the “We’re filming a drama, with lots of scientists talking to each other through cigarette smoke, and we’ll mention wild SF stuff happening but never show it” or the “adventure or horror movie with a few crap painted-on-the-film effects”.
I remember being so desperate that I watched Journey to the Center of the Earth multiple times, and was so excited when Lost in Space came on TV. And after 2001 came out, my friends said “Oh, so Science Fiction is boring, okay, we understand it now.”
That was the world that Star Wars debuted in. We were hungry for exciting Sci-Fi.
So for me it was was written post-war to the mid-60s or so.
More than Human, The Long Tomorrow, Double Star, The Stars My Destination, The Space Merchants, The Martian Chronicles, Way Station, Flowers for Algernon, The Left Hand of Darkness, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Man in the High Castle, Stand on Zanzibar
There was a show my wife watched because it had Katee Sackhoff (Battlestar reboot) and it was just AWFUL. The writing has the characters doing things that made absolutely no sense…it was pretty as hell, and I couldn’t stand it. It was like Prometheus (where xenobiologist looks at alien thing that looks like a snake, so they get real close to it and take off their gloves
I’m in my forties, and I think the golden age of science fiction is right now. I’ve read it all my life, but what’s being written today blows away most of what I read growing up. It’s so, so good.
That quote sounds like it comes from someone who either hates science fiction, or who hasn’t kept up with the field.
Well, if you followed the link, most of the possibles were s-f writers so I doubt the former, and most of the attributions were 1960 to 1977 or so – they’d have to be pretty prescient to grok the field today.
There used to be a truism—I heard it first from my then agent Terry Carr in 1964—that the golden age of science fiction is twelve, the age we begin to read SF and are wonderstruck.
–Thomas M. Disch
StarLog magazine - somewhere in the first five issues (number 1 maybe) had a list of the ‘100 SciFi films’ that had been made to that point.
I remember staying up late night to try and capture the signals on the tv to watch some of those to complete the list - way before cable made it easier.