Science Fiction Fans

Question

Hello there! If you're reading this, you probably love science fiction as much as I do. Which are your favourite sci-fi books, films or games? If you love science fiction in any other form, this is the place to let the world know.

I'll start with the films I love the most:

2001: A Space Odyssey - So slow that you could watch this film at 2.5x the speed for the most part. But it is a pure work of art that you must watch. The special effects still don't look dated and that's a massive achievement for a film from 1968 (yes, 46 years ago!).
Stalker - This is a slow, artistic film. The beauty of Stalker lies in its cinmetography. A group of people want to explore an area abandoned after a nuclear disaster, even though there is the threat of radiation poisoning. The film was shot at a place where there was an actual radiation hazard. Small wonder the entire crew passed away less than 10 years after the film was released.
The Matrix - It's a great film that's got something for everyone. The Matrix is a unique blend of philosophy and some crazy action sequences. I've watched this one many times and am yet to tire of it.

Feel free to share your favourites!

Pranay Parab · Answer

Finished reading The Sirens of Titan. It started off as a really funny book but turned into black humour around the halfway mark. It ends on a melancholy note. Well worth a read, but don't expect a laugh riot.

Pranay Parab · Answer

Now reading The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut. Haven't read a funnier book since The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Fully recommend this for a good laugh. Get the SF Masterworks edition (pictured below) if you can. The awesome cover alone makes it worth getting.

Gopal Sathe · Answer

Been reading a fun steampunk series lately - Clockwork Century. Plays fast and loose with the science part, but does well on the fiction front

http://www.goodreads.com/series/43930-the-clockwork-century

Pranay Parab · Answer

Looks interesting, and turns out that one of my Goodreads friends also recommends this. Marked as to-read. Got a bunch of sci-fi books that I haven't read. Will post a photo over the weekend. My mini-library looks really nice - full of untouched books.

Pranay Parab · Answer

I really like a good space opera. Stories where the characters are travelling to different worlds in the hidden corners of the galaxy, going through the centre of the galaxy and even heading to other galaxies. That's why I'm enjoying Tau Zero by Poul Anderson. A crew heading a star system 30-odd light years away has an accident and their ship's deceleration system fails. Since the ship can't travel faster than light, it is bound by the principles of relativity and time dilation. An hour for the crew means around 100 years back on Earth. Fascinating stuff.

I got the SF Masterworks edition, which is highly recommended:

Rishialwani · Answer

Mean Girls is the best sci-fi movie ever. It made Lindsay Lohan watchable.

Abhinav Lal · Answer

They are masterworks, what more can I say than already written on the Internet? Lord of Light is about the recreation of the Hindu pantheon and caste system by settlers of a new Earth, with a trickster god taking on the rest to save the masses. Flowers for Algernon is tour de force diary of burgeoning intellect, and probably the most tragic SF book I have read.

Gopal Sathe · Answer

Get Flowers, you won't regret it. And it is a classic that informs a lot of later works, so it is helpful to teach you about the context of the references being made.

Pranay Parab · Answer

Can you elaborate on Lord of Light and Flowers for Algernon. Both have SF Masterworks editions and I've been thinking of buying them. What are those two like?

Abhinav Lal · Answer

Here's a list of books I recently made (omitting some non-sf ones) in no particular order, recommended must reads all of them:
1. Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
2. Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
3. Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
4. The Dark Tower (Series) - Stephen King
5. Dying Inside - Robert Silverberg
6. The Foundation Series - Isaac Asimov
7. The Sprawl Trilogy - William Gibson

Pranay Parab · Answer

Ready Player One looks like a nice book. Adding it to my wish list.

@aqiulc Timecrimes is a Basque film (if you call it Spanish, the Basque will be out to hunt you ).

Anfie · Answer

obviously I watched it before Inception, watchu sayin' man?

Pranay Parab · Answer

Timecrimes is one of my favourite films. Sunshine, sadly not. The science in Sunshine is all flawed. Even as a film, barring the parts where they go into the first Icarus ship, it wasn't that great.

@Anfie The Matrix series? The first film is so awesome that the next two don't exist for me. Eternal Sunshine is also a great film, but I wish you'd watched it before Inception.

Anfie · Answer

What about The Matrix series? I recently got a chance to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and found it to be similar to Inception in many ways (just an observation).

Pragati Shukla · Answer

How has no one included Timecrimes and Sunshine - which is sadly pretty underrated

Pranay Parab · Answer

You're probably right about that. I always wondered why no one filmed Asimov's books.

One book that I'd love to see a good film version is Frederik Pohl's Gateway.

And @mister_G fantasy and science fiction do tend to blend into one another after a time. I like your awesome theory though.

Mister G · Answer

I have a theory that Game of Thrones is actually a science fiction novel - it's a video game being played in the future through a super augmented reality thing, which explains the magic, the constant sex (think about it - even a game about taking revenge on the Gods features random sex!) and generally ridiculously overpowered characters like The Mountain! It'll all be revealed in the last book of the series - sorta like the Assassin's creed Animus

Pranay Parab · Answer

I've read the entire Foundation series (some 15 books) and while I enjoyed it back then, I've read much better stuff since. Not particularly looking forward to it.

Culture series is great, but will be hard to film I guess. Characters keep changing and the books are not related to each other, so...