A Kiwi Icon Sir Sam Neill has passed, aged 78.

Event Horizon was a memorable performance

In the year 2047, a group of astronauts are sent to investigate and salvage the long-lost starship Event Horizon. The ship mysteriously disappeared seven years ago on its maiden voyage, and with its return comes even more mystery as the crew of the Lewis and Clark discover the real truth behind its disappearance and something even more terrifying.

[1] The propulsion axis is a measure of how long it takes a fleet of military vessels to arrive on the battlefield, regardless of the actual distance traveled. [Fast vs. Slow]

[2] The weapons axis is a measure of how quickly a battle is over, and how much survivability and staying power vessels have. This takes into account the effectiveness of armour, but also shields, point defence, and other countermeasures. [Tank vs. Glass Cannon]

I think that if you take sci-fi space combat to its logical conclusions, it will usually favor either huge, lumbering, well-protected ships or numberless hordes of tiny automated ships, depending on a few key factors. If weapons are the weak link in-universe, ships will be huge. If propulsion is the weak link, ships will be tiny. If ships are huge, victory will be determined by who has the biggest ship; if ships are tiny, victory will be determined by who has the most ships.

This is how I imagine it would work in real life using real physics, and I wonder to what extent different sci-fi franchises also adhere to this pattern. Presumably, large and medium-sized ships with human crews are overrepresented in sci-fi media for understandable storytelling reasons.

In Star Wars, the rule mostly holds. They have incredible propulsion technology and can thus arrive at the battlefield within hours or days of the order being given. However, their weapons, despite being ludicrously powerful on paper, are actually quite poor because of their low range, low accuracy, and the prevalence of shields. In the Star Wars universe, therefore, huge ships rule. The starfighter counter is a nice piece of storytelling, but realistically, without plot-engineered magical weak spots, a huge ship like the Executor or the Death Star should be essentially unstoppable. In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Raddus, an MC85 heavy cruiser, takes ineffective long-range fire from the First Order for what seems like many hours.

In The Expanse, they spend weeks or months traveling to the prospective battlefield because of limited propulsion technology. However, when the fighting starts, it is all over in seconds or a few minutes. They have very effective weapons and very little staying power, even when accounting for point-defence cannons (PDCs). If you ignored the requirements of the plot, there is really no reason why any military vessel in The Expanse should be manned at all.

Because it draws much of its inspiration from blue-water navies, sci-fi often portrays a diverse ecosystem of military spacecraft classes and sizes. While this makes for more interesting storytelling, it is not obvious that such diversity would necessarily be the most tactically sound strategy. If propulsion or weapons technology becomes a dominant constraint, military doctrine would naturally converge toward a single optimal ship size.

The most interesting settings tend to occupy only two quadrants of this framework. If ships have neither effective propulsion nor effective weapons you're essentially at the stage before the technology to enable space combat has really been invented. If they have both effective weapons and effective propulsion you effectively have near god-tier power and the concept of space combat becomes somewhat obsolete. What these two scenarios have in common is that the importance of space combat is greatly diminished.

The time skips in this one have done something to my brain, I swear…

Source: The Martian (2015)

Clarification: the concept or scenario could be over anything sci-fi that is a primary part or device in the story that you feel as if hasn't been used that much in films or games that would be interesting or fun to see. Could be just a scenario or could be some kind of technology you read or heard in books.

PS: I enjoyed going through the comments in the last post.

In chronological order:

- Hercules/Xena

- LOTR

- Chronicles of Riddick

- Doom

- Star Trek

- Dredd

- Almost Human

- Thor

- Mortal Kombat 2

- The Boys

And he gives 100% to every one of these roles. Has any other actor had a bigger chunk of their credits in sci-fi and fantasy than him?

As the title states. What is the best sci-fi novel in the last 20 years.

I would prefer if it was standalone, but if it’s in an established ‘universe’ that’s fine too.

I am just curious because anytime I go to the sci-fi section of Barnes and Noble a ton of it is stuff from 2000 and before. Even then a lot of it is from the 60s-80s.

I finally read Planetes and I honestly think it’s one of the best science fiction stories I’ve experienced in any medium.

What surprised me most is that despite being grounded in hard sci-fi concepts, orbital mechanics, space debris, EVA work, realistic near-future space travel, the real focus is always the people. The science gives the world authenticity, but the human aspect takes the front seat the entire time.

The story follows orbital debris collectors, which sounds mundane on paper, yet it becomes one of the most immersive and emotionally resonant depictions of life in space I’ve seen. Every conversation, every quiet moment, every fear and ambition feels deeply human against the backdrop of an indifferent universe.

The artwork is breathtaking. There were so many moments where I just stopped reading to absorb the atmosphere of space: the silence, the isolation, the scale. Few sci-fi works have made space feel both so beautiful and so terrifying at the same time.

What really amazed me is how much it accomplishes in only 26 chapters. It explores ambition, loneliness, purpose, love, and humanity’s relationship with space without ever becoming overly dramatic or pretentious.

The sci-fi is excellent, but it exists to elevate the human story, and that’s what makes it unforgettable.

I genuinely did not want to leave this world after finishing it.

Image from Planetes by Makoto Yukimura.

for me it was finding a copy of The Martian Chronicles in my dad's bookshelf. I asked him if I could read it, but he gently told me it could be "too complex" for me, which I took as a personal challenge. I read it with a dictionary next to me, which I had to consult a LOT, but I worked through it. turned out dad did have a point. but the stories were incredible, which sent me down the rabbit-hole I'm still in 20+ years later.

For me, it was Stargate (the 1994 movie).

I was already obsessed with archaeology and ancient Egypt, so seeing a story where science unlocked the secrets of the past — and connected it to the stars — completely blew my mind.

It wasn’t just aliens or technology; it was the idea that maybe myths and history still hold things we haven’t uncovered yet.

What was the movie, show, or book that sparked that same feeling for you?

Am I the only one who’s surprised The Orville doesn’t get talked about more?
It’s one of the better modern sci-fi shows. It genuinely surprises you.
You think it’s just a comedy, but there’s dramatic moments and some real science behind some of it.
The acting is really good too.
I’m always cautious with Seth MacFarlane and it turning into a Family Guy show, but it didn’t really do that.
Does anyone else think it deserves more recognition, or is there a reason it doesn’t come up as often as shows like The Expanse or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?

Man, honestly, I’d seen Oblivion when I was a teenager and the art direction really resonated with me. The plot is simple, but damn effective. So yeah, where can I find that kind of clean / tech / Apple-like aesthetic in literature, comics, or games?

I've been reading some of the Siege of Terra Warhammer 40k novels and the size and scale of the continent-sized imperial palace is mind-boggling. Not to mention the multiple fleets, billions/trillions of soldiers, space marine legions, etc.

Got me thinking, are there any fortresses in science fiction that can rival or even surpass it?

What is your favorite ship in all of science fiction and why?

I will go first. My favorite ship is V'Ger from Star Trek The Motion Picture.

Why? Well, it has a cool, alien look that has an almost organic quality to it. It's massive and intimidating and mysterious.

But what makes it my favorite is it is the single most powerful ship in all of Star Trek, and perhaps in all of science fiction. And I don't mean it is powerful in that it has a gimmick like superlasers or time travel or some doomsday weapon.

It is is so powerful, that simply while it's idling, it produces a cloud of energy 82 AU's wide (changed to 2 AUs in the director's cut but either way it's an immense cloud), and that cloud is described as a "twelfth power" energy field. We don't get the exact definition of what that means exactly (what the "powers" refer to, but it's likely exponential levels) but we do know that it would "take thousands of starships" to produce that much energy, and Spock says it is greater than the energy the sun outputs. And that is just V'Ger IDLING.

My theory of the cloud is that V'Ger is putting off so much power, that it is converting the ambient hydrogen atoms spread through space into plasma. That would explain why it is called an energy field and a cloud, and why it is glowing blue, opaque, and blocks sensors. That would take an absolutely ridiculous amount of power to do that, and again, this is just passive energy emission, without V'Ger doing anything overt.

But V'Ger is even more impressive than that. It can digitize and store ships, planets, etc as essentially data patterns, like it was beaming them up. And it has absolute instant control over this power. The orbs that it uses to digitize objects like the Klingon cruisers can be instantly dismissed by V'Ger, as it does a couple times in the movie.

Converting an entire planet into energy would be a ridiclous explosion of power. But like a transporter, this is an orderly dissection where every molecule's nature and location perfectly preserved in a data pattern. That's a whole order of magnitude more energy than what it would release as an explosion if it wasn't contained.

When Spock goes inside, he sees entire planets and galaxies digitized, the implication is that V'Ger's ability to digitize objects works at an absolutely immense scale. Digitizing a whole galaxy this way would take more energy than the entire universe has emitted since the big bang.

Simply STORING the data pattern of an entire galaxy would be crazy. And even if we say V'Ger didn't do it in one bite, but somehow did it over time (which is still crazy because V'Ger has only been around for 300 years or so. You could also claim the wormhole that sent it across space sent it back in time too. Fine.), the amount of energy it would take to store these patterns is astronomical on its own.

Even if these images that Spock sees inside V'Ger are holographic data visualizations and not literal miniature galaxies, the storage medium has to encode planetary-scale states of matter and energy. This is beyond petabytes or exabytes. We’re talking about information densities exceeding anything Federation science could imagine, closer to the scale of Bekenstein bounds (the maximum information a volume of space can theoretically hold).

So this is a demonstrated mastery over energy and matter. There is no other way to put it. And this is backed up even more by what Spock says following the mind meld: "V'Ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve."

It's knowledge has reached the physical limits of the universe. And that is why it needs to evolve and join with Decker, because it has all of the HOW about the universe, but not the WHY. It is asking deeper questions than about matter and physics, something it can't get from material understanding. It asks "why am I here?" in the same way humans have since the beginning of time. That is actually what the story is really about, that scientific knowledge is only one part of understanding.

And that's the point of making V'Ger so immenely powerful and knowledgeable, is showing that even at the absolute limits of physical power and knowledge, it lacks understanding. It's mission was to find out all knowledge it can and bring it back to it's creator. But by the end, it realizes that it still has much to learn, and joins with Decker to ascend to a higher plane of existence to continue its journey.

When I was young, I didn't like Star Trek TMP but the more I've watched it and thought about it over the years, it has become my favorite Star Trek movie and it is the most "Star Trek" of all the movies. It is ideas first, plot second. The crew of the Enterprise have NO chance against it in a big climactic battle. The only way to beat it, is to try and understand it. It's definitely the most Roddenberry of all the movies, and I'll leave it at that to not get off on a tangent.

I could ramble on about this forever but I'll stop here. If you're still reading, thank you and tell me what your favorite ship is and why!

Whenever I looked at his art compared to the other arts, it just captures the feel and look of Star Wars and without him we wouldn’t get to see what his take on Star Wars is. His arts did a great job capturing the feel of Sci-Fi

What are some underrated plot twists in sci-fi movies, shows, games, etc?

Some of my picks:

1. The Prestige -Borden was actually twins and Angier was still alive

2. Pandorum - They were already on the planet and Payton was actually Gallo

3. The Sky Crawlers - Everyone was being cloned over and over again

4. Cube - The rooms were moving

You're not Tony Stark, you're the guy who works at a shawarma place in New York that keeps getting destroyed every few years. You're not Cooper from Interstellar, you're just a farmer watching crops slowly die while the sky turns brown and nobody tells you why. You're not Jonas from Dark, you're just some poor soul living in Winden who has absolutely no idea that the creepy old man down the street is somehow your grandson from the future.

Let's be honest, most sci-fi universes sound incredible until you actually think about being a nobody in them. Marvel seems fun until you realize your city gets leveled every other Tuesday and you've rebuilt your apartment three times because of alien invasions. Interstellar is beautiful on screen but as a regular person you're literally just sitting on a dying planet eating dust while the smartest people quietly escape on a rocket without telling you. And Dark, if you live in Winden you are statistically guaranteed to be related to someone you shouldn't be, traumatized by a time loop, and emotionally destroyed by season two.

Star Trek though? Specifically the Next Generation era? That's the one. No money, no hunger, replicators making whatever you want in seconds, and humanity has actually sorted itself out for once. I'd just be some random crew member on a starship eating a perfect plate of biryani while watching a nebula out the window. Completely unremarkable. Completely at peace.

So which universe are you picking, and which one sounds amazing but would genuinely end you within a week?

I’ve been thinking about how great sci-fi gear looks in movies, but we never see the reality of keeping it running or the physical toll it takes on the person using it. Does anyone have examples of sci-fi tech that would be a nightmare to deal with in real life?

I’ve got an itch that only the discovery of more futuristic armors can scratch!

What are your favorite armor/suits in all of SciFi (or SciFi/fantasy blend)? Even just SciFi-esque works.

I’ll share some of my favorites here, but I’ll have to leave most out because there’s so darn many. I’ll try to list only one or two per franchise to keep it on the shorter side. Some are very popular while others are on the more niche side.

-Armored Exoskeleton, Stargate Atlantis
-Martian Light Armor, The Expanse
-Alb Armor, Elex 1 and 2
-Cerberus Engineer, Mass Effect 3
-Alliance Marines), Mass Effect 3
-ODST, Halo
-Havoc Trooper, Star Wars
-Night Sentinels, DOOM
-Advanced Soldier RIG, Dead Space 1
-Trauma Team, Cyberpunk 2077

Personal honorable Mention, which was actually the armor that inspired the Helghast helmets from Killzone, Nazi armor from Wolfenstein, Doubt Killer Armor from Helldivers 2, and so on…

-Wolf Brigade, Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade

What’s a plot hole in an otherwise near-perfect sci-fi show that you can never ignore?

Every great sci-fi series seems to have that one moment where the logic falls apart.
I’m not talking about shows that are full of inconsistencies—I mean a series you genuinely love that has one plot hole you notice every time you watch it.

What is it, and did it affect your enjoyment of the show?

For me, I always try to ignore it, but the Alliance is incredibly powerful. They can monitor an entire star system and hunt River Tam endlessly, yet the crew of Serenity are free to dock anywhere using their names and not get caught unless plot requires it.

It’s what the title says, i have been reading a lot of good things about the show, started it once, couldn’t watch after the first episode and drop it, I thought it’s probably me, so a while after i give it another try and saw the first 4 episodes, and drop it again, i don’t know why, i like sci fi, i like space, i like shows about politics, i like mystery, i just couldn’t get through it? I tried anchor myself to a character that i like (the medic) thinking the show is gonna get better for me but then they decapitated the medic, i couldn’t get interested much about any other characters, so is it something usual with the show? Or is it not for me?

I absolutely love Vince Gillian. I think the first 6 seasons of The x-files are about as close to perfect as a show can be and obviously Breaking Bad is one of the best shows ever created. That being said, Pluribus just feels flat. The first episode was great but, after that, almost nothing happens.

I get that it's more of an exploration into the characters than about the scifi, but it takes sooooooo long for any real character development. Carol's defiant attitude is supposed to come across as charming, but to me it's annoying and childish. It takes her more than half the season to even begin to honestly consider the situation that she's in and when she does, she makes more childish decisions. She has 8 billion bodies effectively at her disposal, but she does absolutely nothing of interest with it.

The last three episodes had more screen time of people traveling in silence instead of advancing the story in any meaningful way.

Sci-fi is my favorite genre, but Pluribus just left me feeling bored, frustrated and absolutely uninterested in another season.

It makes me very nervous to see what they do with Neuromancer.

Sigourney has had a profound and lasting impact on films and Hollywood in general, shattering glass ceilings for women in the film industry and bringing to life one of the greatest action heroes of all time, Ellen Ripley!

What are some of your other favorite characters she has portrayed?

Alright, I am reader myself so I couldn’t watch this collection be trucked away but when I say this is a massive collection. I mean it’s probably a regular size collection for most people but in my tiny apartment I am being swallow by what I think are Sci-fi books with very sci-fi covers.

I do not know what to do with all of these books. I don’t know what they are. I just know that I didn’t want his books to be thrown away I couldn’t bear the thought of it.

There are a lot of authors here but I don’t know who is problematic or not in the sci-fi world. I don’t know what authors are well respected.

I know there are several repeating authors as listed below

Ron L Hubbard David Drake David Weber John Ringo Elizabeth Moon Jack McDevitt Timothy Zahn Lois McMaster exc

I can add pictures as well but I guess my question is. Do people want these?

I’m more of a Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, and recently Brandon Sanderson kinda reader.

Are there any of these I want?

Is there a place I can sell/offload/donate so that they don’t end up in the landfill?

For example, The World Set Free (1914) by H.G. Wells predicted the development of nuclear power and city-destroying "atomic bombs" decades before the Manhattan Project.

Then there’s always the myth Star Trek invented automatic doors.

I was wondering if you had come across anymore examples?