Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
I'm going to go meta and say that having the collected Nebula Award Winners for each year would be a nice start.
The Most Important Works In Science Fiction
- Thread starter Plazma Inferno!
- Start date
I'd suggest that those are the science fiction stories that science fiction critics think are the best stories of the year - which are not necessarily the most influential.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Quaffling.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
I tried at least 4 times to read this. Could not get past page 40 without falling asleep.
Then again, I also couldn't finish the Foundation series.
I should prolly hand in my sci-fi fan badge.
i read the entire rama series by arthur c. clarke back in high school. i have no idea why because it was quite tedious in some parts. i guess i was trying to develop my patience and concentration. i was quite the bookworm wanting to explore everything. now i have little interest except i do read star trek novels at times. i thought probe was one of the best.
i was a big sci-fi fan and still am. one of my favorite authors was pamela anderson (science fiction writer, not the actress).
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Currently coming off an Alan Dean Foster kick. Read all fifteen Pip and Flinx books in chronological order. Foster rocks!
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Yeah, I like Foster. Read about a dozen of his books. Didn't really get into Pip & Flinx though.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Huh. Not heard of her.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
He does get into descriptive text a bit heavily, I think he sees those worlds a lot better than I do.
In terms of efficiency in influence, amount of influence on the people who have influence themselves (the music guy's criterion for influential musician: influence on other musicians) per word of text or second of screen time, the nomination here is:
The One's Who Walk Away From Omelas - a short story by Ursula Le Guin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas
Eight pages of prose, turning up yet today everywhere from interviews with authors about their formative reading and high school class assignments in social studies to political and university level philosophy discussions of early postmodern literature, near fifty years after its appearance in a cheap paper SF genre magazine.
Per verba bang for the buck, hard to top that.
The One's Who Walk Away From Omelas - a short story by Ursula Le Guin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas
Eight pages of prose, turning up yet today everywhere from interviews with authors about their formative reading and high school class assignments in social studies to political and university level philosophy discussions of early postmodern literature, near fifty years after its appearance in a cheap paper SF genre magazine.
Per verba bang for the buck, hard to top that.
Star Wars is important in its influence on the science fiction genre even though it is not science fiction.
It showed people there was lots of money to be made with whatever some people think is SF.
It brought Star Trek back. I do not comprehend why so many people over 15 care about Star Wars though.
It showed people there was lots of money to be made with whatever some people think is SF.
It brought Star Trek back. I do not comprehend why so many people over 15 care about Star Wars though.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
I have fun watching the Star Wars movies, but I would care if no more ever got made.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Or...
... it showed that people don't make their decisions about what they want to see based on the "purity" of a film's subjective genre labels.
Most SF isn't SF to purists. But that's OK. The rest of us know what the label means.
It is very much science fiction as far as I'm concerned. It is certainly not hard sci-fi, but i see it as science fiction nonetheless. Some might argue that it is purely fantasy in a space setting, but the stuff that makes their engines go FTL, or allows for single stage to orbit etc, is technical in origin and not magic, even if it is not explained. That, to me, is sufficient to warrant referring to it as sci-fi.
Okay, it also has some fantasy elements (especially with regard the Force - even if it was explained away as owing to a life-form etc), and is oft referred to as being in the genre of "space opera", a genre which does lean heavily on fantasy yet maintain its sci-fi heritage. Droids, AI, artificial limbs, energy weapons, that all claim to have technical justification put it firmly in sci-fi territory, even if at the fluffiest and lightest end of the spectrum.
It showed people there was lots of money to be made with a film that pushed back the boundaries of what films can be, a film that told a story that appealed to the masses, irrespective of what genre it may be classed as.
Because they were probably lucky enough not to have grown up with the prequel trilogy as their first SW experience. Because they were lucky enough to have grown up when the cinema blockbuster was not simply a superhero film where everything was filmed in front of a green screen, and because they are grown up enough to recognise an important landmark in the history of film-making, science fiction or otherwise.
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Yes. Do hand it in. Hang your head in shame. And take the long lonely walk back to whatever Jilly Cooper-inspired reading list you might prefer.
I would say Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". Second only to 1984 in it's relevance to society. Not sure if you could call 1984 sci-fi.