It’s a slightly click-baity title, but as we’re still generating more content for our magazines, this one included, why not?
Unpopular opinions from last time include:
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My Sci-fi unpopular opinion is that 2001: A Space Odyssey is nothing but pretentious, LSD fueled nonsense.
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I could not get into the expanse at all.
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My unpopular opinion is that I don’t like space operas.
What’s yours?
Frank Herbert had no clue what to write after Dune and the rest of the Dune series is just an exercise in trying to one-up himself in weirdness.
Star Wars is a fantasy series, not sci-fi.
Id agree about Dune. The first book is great. The rest feel like they were handed off to someone else to write.
Well, after the first four they were handed off to someone else to write: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert#Posthumously_published_works
Smaller stakes are better.
They’re more personal, interesting, and relatable.
All these movies that are about the ends of worlds or civilizations… it’s too much.
The Terminator? Yeah ostensibly it’s about the end of the world due to AI run amok but it’s really about one woman fleeing from a seemingly unstoppable force.
The last Star Wars movie? Oh no, the planet destroying weapon now kills stars and is smaller. yawn
Foundation holds up.
Edit: I missed part one. I imagine this was already hashed out.
There’s way too little sci-fi w/o FTL
All I want is a sci-fi series (any medium) that just plays in our solar system, without FTL, magical rocket drives, or aliens.
Just “what can humanity achieve in the far future, realistically?”
Cause even in 10000 years, we’re not going to have a star-system-spanning civilization (we may colonize other stars with hibernation or generation ships, but they’ll all be isolated by the distance). We’re not going to have much better rockets (cause the only way to move forward in a vacuum is to push stuff out the back).
But we could terraform and live on or around all planets in our solar system even with current tech, given enough time.
Expanse is very close, and I loved it, but it did have physics-breaking aliens which I didn’t care for much.
I don’t consider Star Wars to be sci-fi. It’s a futuristic space fantasy.
Also, Star Trek Enterprise is one of the best Trek series, IMO. Top 5.
I don’t consider Star Wars to be sci-fi. It’s a futuristic space fantasy.
Is that an unpopular opinion? Most sci-fi/fantasy fans I know would probably agree with this. I love Star Wars, but in the same way I love Lord of the Rings.
Also, Star Trek Enterprise is one of the best Trek series, IMO. Top 5.
I would say the final season of Enterprise is arguably the best single season of any Star Trek show so far. But it was a long road getting there…
The human crew (particularly Archer and Trip) were difficult to warm to in seasons 1 and 2 - I found them so much more emotional and overdramatic than an intelligent professional human would be today, and that it made it difficult for me to accept them as the bridge from today to the 23rd/24th century Starfleet we know.
Season 3 was tough for different reasons - maybe it played differently in America, but watching from outside the US a lot of it felt like post-9/11 revenge fantasy. Very proto-‘America First’.