This magazine is aimed at fans and creators of sci-fi and related media of all kinds. It includes all content related to the sci-fi genre and only content related to the sci-fi genre. The goal is to build a community for everyone who enjoys science fiction and related topics. This includes the obvious books, movies, and TV shows, but also original writing, the discussion of writing SF, futuristic art and designs, and the science and technologies that inspire the sci-fi genre. **Team Top 20**
I think this might be a truly unpopular opinion, but I could not get into the expanse at all. Just never got invested in the characters enough to stick with it. I've retried watching it 4 times due to everyone recommending it, kind of given up now!
Also the latest star wars films killed any interest I had in star wars.
well, I love The Expanse, but I applaud you for posting an actual unpopular opinion!
Avasarala would be proud.
The books are great. Show does a good job moving the intrigue and conflicts to a screen but man if Avasarala and Amos aren’t the absolute best portrayal of those characters.
Avasarala has a heart of gold and a fist of iron in equal measures.
This means she’ll do horrible things (even at her own expense) for what she believes is right and she doesn’t put up with any kind of nonsense.
And yet she plays the political game so well all while pretending she’s above it.
And the Shohreh Aghdashloo knocks the character out of the park. Every move and word both foul and sweet personifies the character in the book that it’s impossible to convey how absolutely masterful the performance is.
And Wes Chatham as Amos is a close second. A man whose moral code is simple because he’s broken, knows it, and so he defaults to “who is the most likely good person I can use as a guide.” Chatham portrays the violence is necessary like doing the laundry.
Turns it on, does the job, goes back as if nothing happened. Oh, I should do this instead? You got it boss.
Or how he conveys in the simple things how Amos feels there is a moral right but having grown up as he did it’s hard to know what that is and who has the authority to enforce it it just chefs kiss
What? Stop beating this guy? Ok. Sorry fella, buy you a drink?
That means you've missed out on Andor, which I think is better than any live action Star Wars (including, perhaps controversially, Empire Strikes Back)!
It's mature, deep, detailed, grounded, and very political. The characters and world are built up phenomenally, and it's much more contemplative in its pacing, and it definitely treats its audience as intelligent rather than beating them around the head with obvious exposition. It feels more like an HBO show than your standard Star Wars affair, frankly. And it works as a standalone, too - it's not just yet more Skywalker family drama.
I've always loved anything Star Wars that didn't really involve Jedi. The universe is incredibly diverse and interesting, and cutting out the light side vs dark side trope most star wars content is centered on lets writers make really interesting characters and situations. Like in Mandandolrian the scene with Bill Burr confronting the Imperial officer that spearheaded the Burning Khan massacre was just fantastic, regardless of it being star wars.
If you are least made it past s1e4 CQB then you gave it a solid shot. That episode imo is where you either pick it up and like it or move on. The first 3 episodes can be a bit slow and introduce so many characters.
I heard this, and so I think I get to episode 4 or 5 drop it and then I leave it too long, try and watch it all again but I've seen the first 4 episodes too many times.
Maybe I'm due trying to watch it again!
My sci-fi unpopular opinion is probably that I don't consider Star Wars to be sci-fi. It shares more with fantasy in that it's more character and story driven and less about philosophy and the way technology changes the human experience which imo is what defines sci-fi.
Isn't it not sci-fi? It's usually more classed as sci-fantasy, if memory serves.
True sci-fi is rare most of it is sci-fantasy. Great recent sci-fi is Expanse - author was pissed about these warp nonsense so he grounded it in physics and only added few technologies which could be made in future.
Unpopular opinion: Star Wars is in space and has spaceships and aliens. Good enough, it's sci-fi.
People attribute these silly, gatekeepy characteristics to sci-fi, but sci-fi doesn't need to be about anything. Sci-fi is allowed to be shitty or irrelevant.
so brave
Sci-fi and fantasy are genres that naturally bleed into one another, and everyone will draw the lines differently. I'd personally agree that Star Wars is more fantasy than sci-fi, but I wouldn't want to gatekeep anyone who called it their favorite sci-fi franchise.
My unpopular opinion is that I don't like space operas. I'd rather read pages of explanation of technology and world building. I don't care that the star princess in exile has to assemble a rag tag bunch of fringe worlders to take back the throne from the cruel council of the galactic core. How dat engine work tho?
Seriously most of these stories might as well be written by AI for how original they are. I am trying to read scifi and fantasy for the originality that just doesn't exist. Authors will even accidentally add great ideas to the books on background characters or in random world details and do absolutely nothing with them. They instead will repeat the most generic trope driven story every. They might aswell be plagiarizing for how little their stories add to the genre at least then I could just throw their book away without trying to read it.
I think sci-fi writers constantly make their stakes far too high, stack the odds far to heavily against the protagonists, and go for a scope far to broad. I don't need 3 people to save the entire intergalactic population from a super mega back hole bomb with .002 seconds to spare. I've seen it and read it a thousand times.
Give me the guy who thinks maybe his spaceship could take on exploring one planet, tell me what he finds and why it was wise for him to run home and call for extra resources to be redirected to that planet. Tell me how the technology of your imaginary world brought 2 characters together and allowed them to build a beautiful life together.
That's why I adore The Martian and can't get excited about Star Wars.
This is exactly the problem I also have with Marvel movies. Once you've raised the stakes so far it's impossible to go back without seeming less than your predecessors. It's why Iron Man worked so damned well as it was a pretty small, personal story... same for most of the early Avengers movies. Ever since Endgame it seems like everyone wants to either make it even bigger still (?!??) or challenge these people who have saved literally the entire universe with.. emotional trauma? I don't know... I've seriously lost interest.
And the earth apparently is to the Marvel Universe what New York is to aliens.
Becky Chambers books tend to be pretty low stakes, so you might want to check those out.
Enterprise was an absolute solid series. Not perfect, but I wished it would have had more fans when it was on TV
2001 book was great. Arthur C Clarke has always been my favorite author. I think Rendevous with Rama would’ve been a more approachable story to adapt into a movie. Full of mystery and curiosity. Creative direction could go wild on art without changing bay of the books story. Starts with a mystery, reveals bits and bobs in the middle, ends with mystery. Leaves you questioning. Chefs kiss.
Haven’t really kept up with modern sci-fi opinion. So maybe my opinions are popular maybe not.
I believe Ilium and Olympos are part of the greatest sci-fi story ever written. Far better than Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos. It presents wild and imaginative futuristic ideas with insane scientific basis for them.
Denis Villeneuve is planning to do Rendezvous With Rama after he's done with Dune!
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is highly overrated!
The main characters were obnoxious, I didn't end up caring about any of them, and quite frankly, I wished the towel guy had died at the beginning along with everyone else on Earth (except the dolphins). I wasted hours of my life over those 3 books!
Well, that's certainly an unpopular opinion.
I just can't go with you on it =P
Upvoting cause I hate this.
I've got one. I thought John Carter was a fun movie and I have no idea why everyone was so pissed off about it.
I don't care for Deep Space 9.
Characters were mostly bad and uninteresting - they had to bring back worf. Limited plots stuck on a station - they had to add a ship. Then start a war just to have something to do.
Now THIS is a bold claim. DS9 is the only consistently beloved Star Trek series I've seen online. I personally enjoyed it more than most of the series.
I disagree with you completely, but I boost your opinion and am glad you can voice it!
Star Gate is just as good if not better at time then Star Trek and Star Wars.
A lot of sci-fi (at least where TV/Films are concerned) keeps getting too bogged down in what it thinks that it should be, and doesn't actually try to explore new possibilities or expand much, which generally means that the quality of sequels progressively gets worse, and the show ends up being a sort of even mush vaguely resembling the original.
The main example I could think of is probably Star Trek. It's too fixated on everything as it is, so even things that are supposed to be radical changes just re-establish the status quo with a new coat of paint. A radical show with radical viewpoints would never take off, as newer iterations would try to emulate the success of the show, and keep to the old.
It's part of why later Star Trek shows seem to be a bit more conservative, by comparison. Sure, values have changed since the original show, but the level of radical progressiveness has also gradually wound down too. Compared to the original show, which tried to push things from all angles, something like Star Trek: Discovery would seem almost conservative. Most of its more progressive elements are fairly standard for the time period it is set in, rather than pushing the envelope like the original did.
Similarly, all the shows end up trying to emulate the same formula, and even the same rough starship design. The Enterprise was originally specially designed and built to seem future-y, but many other of their starships since them seem to just be iterative designs on the original. Even one of them set 900 in the years in the future seems to have almost identical technologies, polities, and culture as one set in the 24th century. The visuals are different, but everything seems to be effectively the same under the coat of paint.
Not having that baggage is probably why up-and-coming shows, like The Orville, tend to be able to get away with more, since there isn't a previous Orville that it keeps trying to recapture, just yet, which should mean that it gets more leeway.
From a non Star Trek standpoint, it's also rather happened to Star Wars. The newer films are just trying to recapture the older films, rather than expand into their own thing, to the detriment of the films as a whole. The latest trilogy seems like a rehash of the old ones, down to having what is basically another death star, Rebellions, Vader-ish Masked Sith Lord, and Friendpatines.
I don't really have much of a solution, besides wanting the shows to just branch out more. I think Star Trek in the 32nd century should have gone with a brand new slate, where everything was different (from both an ideological, political, and technological standpoint), and the 23rd century ship that ended up there would be woefully outdated, not just on paper, but with the technology it was fitted with.
Star Wars has a bunch of interesting things that it could run with, such as the aftermath of the major wars, where the Rebellion is now having to deal with multiple smaller wars from various factions under the splintering empire, or have to secure its place in the resulting power vacuum.
One show that hasn't succumbed to this as much is Doctor Who, but that had a major revamp in its 2005 revival which drastically changed the nature of the show itself. Still, it doesn't seem to be particularly immune to it either. Behind-the-scenes, they're suddenly going back to the old composer and old showrunners, and the main character doesn't seem to evolve too much beyond "conflicted, but brilliant and eccentric hero". It also seems to be slowly settling into its own ruts, as well, with the most recent run rather resetting a redeemed villain's character development suddenly.
As a slight tangent, I also feel like that considering the messaging of the show itself, there could be quite a bit of interesting mileage that could be achieved by having a companion who is a species that is normally an enemy. Maybe something like a Dalek.
The writing in The Three-Body Problem is so dry that I could barely keep up with the plot due to being deceased from boredom.
Totally a me problem but it just did not vibe with me. I could never bring myself to read the second book. Tho to be fair to Ken Liu I have trouble with translations in general and I've never read a translation of Chinese-language literature I did vibe with.
Not sure if this is a hot take or not, but modern Star Trek sucks arse. The magic died with voyager, everything after that has been trite and forgettable. And I’m not even talking about those god awful movies.
Deep Space 9 is and always was the greatest Star Trek series. Also I'll go one more and say that I would take Sisko over Picard or Kirk any day of the week.
In The Pale Moonlight (s6e19) sealed these opinions for me.
Not sure how unpopular this is, but I think Interstellar was fantastic and loved everything including the climax (which everyone seems to hate).
This should make some people mad... I thought The Dispossessed was an awful book. The characters were flat and the way Le Guin explored the themes had all the nuance and subtlety of a Garfield comic. It's the only book of hers that I've read, put me off exploring the rest of her work.
hottest take, and written with poignant scorn
I really liked it when I was a teenager, but I'm forced to agree, I re-read it a couple years back while I still enjoyed it overall, there were a few aspects I found didn't age super well.
"Left Hand of Darkness" was way, way better. "Earthsea" too, actually (here's a bonus fantasy hot take: LOTR is at least as good as Earthsea). "The Dispossessed" gets hyped because left-anarchists like the depiction of anything close to what they're into, but in many ways it's not actual a very strong novel for the reasons you mention.
My point is, some of her other books are much better if you ever feel inclined to give her another try. IMO She developed a lot both as a writer and in terms of the depth of her personal philosophy. "Always Coming Home" is an extremely ambitious scifi project that is IMO underappreciated in expanding the idea of "worldbuilding" as a thing that authors share with audiences rather than do behind the scenes. It's less of a novel and more of an anthropological survey of a fictional future culture. Also it's the only scifi novel I know of that comes with a bangin soundtrack.
I'm a great admirer of Isaac Asimov, but Foundation - the book - hasn't aged well at all.
Foundation sucks ass.
The premise was great: restart the human race after a predictable collapse by writing an encyclopedia galactica based on our collective knowledge that would help the survivors to rebuild a civilization. I was all for it and I was thinking about my own encyclopedia.....and boom the story was a boring political struggle. What a letdown.
Star Wars is not good, for the most part. There are a couple good movies and shows, but the majority of Star Wars is not good at all.
Rian Johnson’s movie didn’t deserve the hate it got! It wasn’t bad.
Rogue One is fantastic. Full stop.
I like the Total Recall remake with Kate Beckinsale, Jessica Biel, and Colin Farrell more than the original with Arnold. The original is overhyped gibberish, in my opinion.
Also, perhaps a premature unpopular opinion: If - IF - it continues to present the same level of quality for the length of its run, Silo will be better than The Expanse.
I don’t think the original Star Wars trilogy holds up well. It takes too long for the scenes to unfold and feels more monotonous than I remember it feeling when I watched it in my youth.