For discussion of all things sci-fi. Great books, great TV shows, great movies, great art.
@Trolly, you inspired this with your ongoing enthusiasm for all things sci-fi and Twilight Zone. Hopefully there will be one or two suggestions ITT that you haven’t encountered and will enjoy 
To start us off, I made a playlist that’s like a bonus season of Black Mirror. All titles available Netflix US. Each movie or episode is around 1.5 hours or less.
Episode 1: “White Chamber”
MOST excellent. This is everything you want from an episode of Black Mirror with technology ruining people’s lives and a premise that’s always ready to surprise you with a new twist or layer. I would say go into this one blind. No context. Just turn it on and you’ll quickly see what’s happening (even though you’re wrong).
Episode 2: “Sweetheart”
Excellent. Goddam what a ride. A Black teenage girl is stranded alone on an island, at first desperate to escape, but soon desperate to survive. It turns out there’s something else on the island. A malevolent creature that won’t let her leave alive.
Episode 3: “Extinction”
Imagine Take Shelter takes place within ten minutes, and the rest of the movie means facing what comes after the credits. And guess what? IT’S ALIENS. If you think that sounds kind of goofy and a lot less satisfying than you were hoping for, that’s how I felt after watching this. There are some very cool scenes and more than a few oh hey it’s that actor (the film stars Lizzy Caplan and Michael Peña). It’s just that the sum of its parts is but a passable affair. Be prepared to read the wikipedia to make sense of the plot LOL. This one has more “uh…wtf” twists than a (bad) Shyamalan movie.
Episode 4: “Revolt”
In the war-ravaged African countryside, a U.S. soldier and a French foreign aid worker team up to survive a deadly alien onslaught.
Holy shit is this bad. There’s always at least one Black Mirror episode that’s barely worth watching again. This one fills that slot. A shame, because the trailer looked fun.
Episode 5: “Only”
Will and Eva (played by Leslie Odom and Frieda Pinto) are forced to hide after ash from a comet containing a virus kills most of the women in the world. Pretty strong feels amidst the pandemic and the chaos that manifests when the population is divided into three classes: the immune, the infected, and the yet-to-be infected.
Episode 6: “Re-Memory”
An amateur sleuth steals a machine that can extract, record and play the memories of another person. Played by Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones and Elf fame, the detective uses the device to try and solve the mysterious death of the man who invented it. Co-stars goddess Julia Ormond. Commanding performances that take the movie from good to very good.
Episode 7: “ARQ”
The oil supply has run dry, and corporations fight against nations for the world’s remaining energy supplies. Trapped in a house and surrounded by a gang of mysterious masked intruders, an engineer (Robbie Amell, brother of Stephen Amell of Green Arrow fame) must protect a technology that could deliver unlimited energy and end the wars that have consumed the world. The only problem is that the technology has created a time loop that condemns him and his friends to relive the same day over and over.
Not amazing, but very entertaining.
what are peoples feelings on the Forever War? I feel like it was discussed a bit recently but not going to look lol.
I liked it alot when i first read it, and intersteller always makes me think of it because of the time relativity effects present in both. Was thinking about reading it again.
Forever War (1974)
Damn you old. I haven’t read this but enjoyed this bit from the wikipedia on how the novel was received.
The novel is widely perceived to be a portrayal of the author’s military service during the Vietnam War, and has been called an account of his war experiences written through a space opera filter.[5] Other hints of the autobiographical nature of the work are the protagonist’s surname, Mandella, which is a near-anagram of the author’s surname; Mandella being a physics student, like Haldeman, as well as the name of the lead female character, Marygay Potter, which is nearly identical to Haldeman’s wife’s maiden name. If one accepts this reading of the book, the alienation experienced by the soldiers on returning to Earth – here caused by the time dilation effect – becomes a clear metaphor for the reception given to US troops returning to America from Vietnam, including the way in which the war ultimately proves useless and its result meaningless. He also subverts typical space opera clichés (such as the heroic soldier influencing battles through individual acts) and “demonstrates how absurd many of the old clichés look to someone who had seen real combat duty”.
The Forever War is popularly thought to be a direct reply to Hugo award-winning future war novel Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein… Heinlein wrote a letter to Haldeman, congratulating Haldeman on his Nebula Award; Haldeman has said that Heinlein’s letter “meant more than the award itself”.[8]
lol I’m 34, i just came across it somehow and read it. I enjoyed it but i dont think I knew about the vietnam significance when i was reading it.
Good for you opening up something so old. How dense a read did you find it to be? I love sci-fi but sometimes struggle to get into hard sci-fi due to having to process so much world building just to get to the story.
I don’t remember it being hard to read at all, it’s been 5+ years but I really don’t think it was. It doesn’t go into relativity much, just uses the effects as part of the narrative
Long time since I read it but I loved Forever War. I’m not a fan of hard sci fi at all (though there’s the odd thing I like) and my recollection is the same as wirelessgrinder’s in that it doesn’t dwell on the science at all.
I’ve been reading and re-reading my way through Philip Dick’s novels on and off the last six months or so. He’s slightly dodgy on women like pretty much all old sci fi is (e.g. a recurring motif is that in the future women don’t wear tops, phwooaar!), but apart from that he’s just as great as I remember.
I’m close to finishing watching all of the original Twilight Zone episodes. I plan on doing an AMA thread about that experience.
For the last 4ish years, I’ve been reading alot of PKD and Kurt Vonnegut. I plan to eventually go through their entire works. They’re fun reads to alternate in to my queue after reading more difficult novels. I tend to visualize them in my head as cartoons.
Bi-Mon-Sci-Fi-Con
Yeah, I read them in between ‘heavier’, usually non-fiction stuff. Vonnegut is next on my list, just like Dick I read a bunch as a teenager and loved it but there’s lots I didn’t read and I’ve forgotten most of what I did. So, obviously, I need to read them all in exact chronological order 
I’ve just finished the stuff Dick put out in 62-64, it has to be one of the best creative runs of anyone ever. Between Oct 62 and May 64 he sent 11 novels to his publisher, all of them were worth reading and 4 were as good a thing as he did (imo). I imagine some drugs were consumed along the way.
(Martian Time Slip, Dr Bloodmoney, Now Wait For Last Year and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
How good a title is Now Wait For Last Year? It’s pulp sci-fi perfection.)
The best SF novel I ever read is Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. At least, I read it in my early twenties and still think of it that way, probably due a re-read.
The most over-rated SF novel I ever read is Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney. It was pitched to me like a life-changing experience; I found it pretentious and uninteresting.
The SF author I admired most when I still read a lot of SF is Alfred Bester. The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination (aka Tyger! Tyger!) are must-reads. Bester was writing in the '50s and anticipated aspects of every generation that followed up until at least the '90s. His later work is… for enthusiasts and completionists only, don’t start with The Computer Connection or Psychoshop, for the love of God. But read Bester. The extremely short and readable The Pi Man was something akin to a religious experience for me reading it at fifteen.
The author I’ve read most is either Philip K. Dick or Kurt Vonnegut, doubt I can add to the Dick discourse here and expect most to be familiar with Vonnegut.
“Vorga, I kill you filthy!”
I read The Stars My Destination earlier this year. So much fun. I love the “gutter talk”. I have The Demolished Man on my table of books to read soon.
Always a lovely day somewhere, sir.
I was watching ST TOS and noticed they had the same actress playing the same minor character in the consecutive episodes, Balance of Terror and Shore Leave. At the end of Balance, her fiance is killed and she’s sobbing in Kirk’s arms, but by Shore Leave, she’s already hooked up with another dude. Not that it’s any of my business but dang, girl.
One of my favourite sci-fi novels is a book from the 30’s called Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon. Basically a bloke wearied by family life goes off to sulk on a hill. There he lies back and transmits his consciousness across the cosmos. As he does so he becomes aware of and conjoins with the mind of an alien species. Together they scour the galaxy in search of other minds to join with. The end goal being to create a sort of universal hive mind capable of perceiving and eventually communicating with the ‘Starmaker’. That conversation may not go as planned.
Eventually he fucks off back home.
It really is a spectacular achievement of the imagination. Endlessly inventive and often prescient. Definitely worth a read.
I think it might be the book Sagan cribbed from when he wrote the famous Pale Blue Dot segment.
On every side the shadowy hills or the guessed, featureless sea extended beyond sight. But the hawk-flight of imagination followed them as they curved downward below the horizon. I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labor and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars
I like the story about Stapledon bringing his first work (either Starmaker or Last And First Men, forget which) and the editor’s like “This is a really impressive work of science fiction” and Stapledon’s like “What the hell is ‘science fiction’?”
Yeah, I think he was a philosophy grad who took to writing novels to transmit his ideas because nobody wanted to read his theses. I imagine him as a sort of angry socialist Spinoza
So I’m watching Twilight Zone episode #151, “The Encounter” starring George Takei and it’s just so intense and incredible. I have no idea how Rod Serling tricked the networks into airing this episode; it’s all about WWII and war guilt and racism and I can’t even imagine the kind of impact this had back in 1964.
I will quote from the wiki entry for this episode:
its racial overtones caused it to be withheld from syndication in the U.S. On January 1, 2016, the episode was finally re-aired as part of Syfy’s annual Twilight Zone New’s Year Eve marathon.
This episode was so hardcore that the networks suppressed it for 50 fucking years. If you grew up watching New Year’s Eve TZ marathons like I did, you would never have seen this episode because everyone was too cowardly to air it. This is what I love about Rod Serling, he just gave zero fucks. He told stories that hit so hard and touched so many raw nerves that his shows didn’t get re-aired until 2016. There’s just no other TV show that brings it to you as hard as the original TZ did.
