Trek pwns that shit.

I prefer Star Trek just for the reason of being more subtle and contemplative. I like Star Wars as well (sort of), but it's the same, old mishmash of archtypes and tropes since the dawn of time. Star Trek has plenty of clichés as well, but it explores the gray areas of morality and the wonder of humanity's future; it leaves room to breathe. It can get pedantic with its meaningless techno babble and navel-gazing (especially in TNG and voyager), but that's nothing we haven't seen from Doctor Who. While both are guilty of underestimating the vastness of space and the means of transcending it, Star Wars is very much on the lower end of that ("half-way across the galaxy by now..." please...).

One, halfway across the galaxy is pretty small when you have faster-than-light travel.

Two, the original Star Wars trilogy may be a mishmash of classic archetypes and cliches, but a) this isn't inherently bad and b) it came out during a time when anti-heroes and rather downbeat films were popular. Star Wars was a breath of fresh air and completely changed cinema.

No, it isn't inherently bad, just rather boring IMO.

I didn't take the circumstances of its release into account. I don't see how it changed cinema though and, if so, was that change necessarily good? I also don't think the Star Trek films are so bland and repetitive like Strike Witch described. All of the films made within the last twenty years, excluding Nemesis and the reboot, don't really fit that category.

I haven't seen either. What?

We all know what you've been doing instead.




I enjoy Star Wars more than Star trek... I've watched a bit here n there of Star Trek, but it was never really more to me than a TV series.

the boringest science fiction ever made was the new battlestar galactica

which show is better is a matter of opinion and is different from person to person. me personaly prefer farscape over both of them. (I still like star trek and star wars but farscape is just much better)

I intended this to be a thread of which would win in a battle scenario, in my opinion obviously star trek but I want to hear some arguments of why poeple would mistakingly think starwars would win

My favourite science fiction film was 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I still prefer Star Wars to Star Trek, though: at least Star Wars wasn't about one single spaceship.

I don't like to call a lot of "science fiction" these days "science fiction" at all. There may be a sliding scale of the "hardness" of science fiction, but I demand a certain degree of hardness to be worthy of the name. Otherwise it's just fantasy in space. Which is absolutely fine, I'm into that, but it's not "science fiction" to me.

As it is, there would only need to be one chapter in Harry Potter in which Dumbledore apparates onto the International Space Station to battle Voldemort and it would be a sci-fi series forever more.

I once read an interesting definition for science fiction someone proposed: if the story revolves around "what if?", it's science fiction. Usually, the "what if?" needs to revolve around something "sciency" in relation to us as humans.

By this definition, 2001 is science fiction because the plot is basically "what if there were aliens that came before us?"
Star Wars by this definition would not be science fiction because the plot is not speculative; it's more of a fantasy adventure that's set in space.

The fullest and best sci-fi story I've ever read is Ever17: Out of Infinity.

It has time travel, immortality, a killer virus, a romance between a human and a female machine, the many worlds interpretation, fourth dimensional beings and is in effect an essay on identity.

The best sci-fi short story I've read is The Dandelion Girl, which is pretty archaic stuff for science fiction.

Ironically, the term used to cover both science fiction and fantasy, without worrying about drawing a line between them, is ‘speculative fiction’.

Fantasy generally speculates about the big concepts, like Good vs Evil, Light and Darkness, love and death etc.

I thought speculative fiction was a euphemism for 'Fantasy written by a Proper Author who doesn't want to admit to stooping to the level of genre fiction'.

What the hell is a "proper author"?

Not Stephenie Meyer.

This is totally true if you ignore 99% of the Star Trek films.

Star Trek 2 and 3 are masterpieces. 4 is pretty good. And the rest of them range anywhere from awful (the new one, and Generations), to okay.

First Contact was on tonight. Seeing Picard kill those Borg with a Tommy gun never gets old, and his speech about the advancement of the Borg through the galaxy is epic.

One who considers what they write to be literature and looks down on any author who writes for a specific genre.

Note also that I used ironic capitals when I mentioned the phrase.

I would have accepted "uses chapters," except that that would exclude Pterry for most of his career.

Precisely. Proper Authors wouldn't consider Pterry a proper author.

my favourite scifi show is gundam

book = uhhh

probably Infinity Beach by Jack Mcdevitt

I am trying to think of a Gundam show that's hard sci-fi.

I am coming up blank.

2010: The Year We Make Kotaku

i am so sorry

We're talking about star trek and star wars, it clearly doesn't need to be hard.

Anything is harder than newtypes, Devil Gundam cells or Trans-am mode.

Hell the most sci-fi Gundam series is Wing, and that's just a boring space opera.

Strike Witch watches Gundam. Heh.

I'd say human evolution in space, a virulent biomechanical virus, and an increased particle dispersal rate on an advanced reactionless drive is sci-fi enough.