Ray Bradbury is probably my favorite SF author.  Fahrenheit 451 was a great book,  Some of his work was like reading a surrealist painting.  I do like Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.  There is also John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness.   Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Huxley's Brave New World.   Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.   I could go on.

As far as shows I am definitely an OG Star Trek fan.   My mother had a picture of my brother and I watching Trek when I was about a year old back in 1966.  😆  I also loved the old BBC SF shows from the 70s like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Red Dwarf.   Definitely an OG Dr. Who fan too.  Tom Baker will always be my Doctor although I've liked some of the others.  Space 1999 was a show I really liked.   

@cyberlucy 

I always thought Tom Baker was the best Doctor on Dr. Who.  He seemed like he was actually was the Doctor, and as he said in interviews, he really believed that he was the part in real life.

I also loved Gerry Anderson’s shows from the 1960’s and ‘70’s. Space: 1999 and Thunderbirds were real classics to me.  The models of planes and spaceships used in Anderson’s TV shows were unique and special. The puppets on Thunderbirds and the other Supermarionation series were real works of art.   🙂

The original Star Trek was always my favorite. I own the entire series on Blu-ray and some of the other series on DVD.  It was always the kind of science fiction that I preferred. I have always liked the stories and characters better than Star Wars because to me they have more depth, but of course that is just my own taste. 🙂

I really liked the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and its source book by Arthur C. Clarke. It is true that the plot is rather slow moving, but I think it is very realistic in its depiction of space travel.  It doesn’t matter if there is less action and more visuals, which were stunning and gorgeous in that film.  And the soundtrack music was marvelous even though none of it was especially composed for the film. 

Posted by: @narnian78

@cyberlucy 

 

I also loved Gerry Anderson’s shows from the 1960’s and ‘70’s. Space: 1999 and Thunderbirds were real classics to me.  The models of planes and spaceships used in Anderson’s TV shows were unique and special. The puppets on Thunderbirds and the other Supermarionation series were real works of art.   🙂

 

About 10 years ago someone had a Gerry Anderson fan site going and there were pictures posted of the different models used for different shows and blog post with an interview with Anderson.  It was great stuff.  I tried to find it again a couple of years ago and it was gone sadly.  Thunderbirds was really fun and the models impressive.

I'm not exactly new to SF, (having read way more Star Wars books than is necessary), but i recently discover so many other universes besides Star Wars. The likes of Dune and, more recently, Foundation. Reading these books without knowing anything of the plot and timeline was so refreshing. What would happen in this world? How will the author (Herbert or Asimov) develop these characters? So many questions i haven't asked in too long. I cannot wait to complete these series, they are already so promising.

Some people do not like the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey because there isn’t lot of action in it.  It is true that a lot of the film is pure special effects, but they are so well done and the film shows the realism of space travel perhaps better than any other science fiction.  Must something always be happening in the environment of outer space?  There can be quiet times as well as excitement. The soundtrack music works very well for the film even though none of it was composed for the movie. I would encourage people to read the book by Arthur C. Clarke for the excellent story, which is the source of the film. 

I actually read the story before I saw the movie, and was a little disappointed at some of the changes (such as setting it at Jupiter rather than Saturn, because portraying its rings was beyond what they could do at the time).

I have come to appreciate the movie upon more-recent viewings.

Trivia note: during one of the Skylab flights in the mid-70s, an astronaut recreated the movie scene with the astronaut running around the circular part of the ship.

StickyPanda, I read some of the Foundation books back in the 70s (new ones were still coming out then and I got behind in the story). I really liked the story and setting Asimov developed but haven't finished the series.

I really liked Star Trek: The Motion Picture and believe it was one of the better Star Trek films. The story could have been better and more complex, but the special effects were some of the most beautiful of any of the Star Trek films. Finding the spacecraft Voyager was a bit too obvious for the plot of the story.  It was a rather predictable adventure. But the soundtrack music was great, and it made up for any shortcomings that the movie had. The new Enterprise was a very attractive ship. 🙂

I loved the fantastic car series

I wonder if some of the people here have seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. : The Extra Terrestrial. Now decades have passed, but these films don’t seem at all dated and many people still love them.  These movies aren’t science based, but they are very entertaining and the filming is well done. I think they are the best movies made about alien encounters and probably nothing really good in that genre has been made in recent years.  Steven Spielberg is such a great film director, and his films will always be remembered as being artistic and beautiful.

Remember the movie Contact which starred Jodie Foster as a scientist who discovers extraterrestrial life?  It was based on the novel by Carl Sagan which has the same title.  I think now it could be considered a classic since both the movie and book are over twenty years old. I loved the story of the film and especially the friendly rivalry of the preacher and the scientist.  What would really happen if we contacted life forms from another world and they responded to our messages?  If you are a fan of science fiction and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series I definitely recommend both the novel and the movie.  🙂

While I am not a huge sci-fi fan, there are some stuff that I still like. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is a great classic.

Do the people here like the use of models in science fiction TV shows and movies? They are not used so often today since there is the modern technology such as CGI. I liked models with their old fashioned toylike appearance. There is a certain nostalgia about them.  Gerry Anderson had some of the best models in his puppet shows. I loved the old Enterprise on the original Star Trek. Models were an important part of classic science fiction and they made it so enjoyable. 🙂

@narnian78 You've just reminded me of Red Dwarf, a very funny British sci-fi spoof series that was on in the 1980s and '90s. I used to have a video of out-takes from it, which were even more hilarious than the show itself, and one section of it was on models going wrong — mainly spaceships falling out of the "sky" or falling apart!

There was also a comedy sketch show on Australian TV years ago (I think it was The Late Show in this case, but there were several similar programs) that did a send-up of Thunderbirds, with human actors imitating the jerky movements of the Supermarionation puppets (with strings attached)!!  

There was often gender bias in the titles of stories about the space program in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.  Men Into Space was a science fiction TV series made at that time. The show was not all bad if you like old science fiction, but the title promoted men as astronauts, and unfortunately that policy of gender preference would not be changed until Star Trek.  I thought the models and spaceships used in Men Into Space were interesting.  The sets were quite artistic and looked like something from Jules Verne’s stories.  The series was better than you might expect.