Victor_D wrote:Funnily enough, they tried to remake SMAC and the result was just as shallow as I expected it to be (Civ: Beyond Earth).
Yes, the SMAC "remake" was a real downer. I've played better Civ4 mods then this.
Victor_D wrote:I am not so sceptical the source material is unadaptable, but obviously the challenges would be high, I understand that. However, I also feel that until someone *tries* to make hard(ish) SF work in a miniseries/high-value TV series format and does it well, we'll just keep receiving sub-par TV shows for mainstream audiences who probably think that the superhero genre is what "sci-fi" should look like.
I'm not saying that the material is unadoptable, merely that currently nobody deems it profitably enough. You see, the companies value return-on-investment and profit, not artistic merit. Therefore they would rather play it safe and invest into something proven instead of risking their money with something new. This approach nets good money at the cost of milking every franchise/universe dry with countless prequels, sequels, spinoffs, crossovers and alternate-reality scenarios until it's no longer funny and then some more. Even (somewhat) successful shows were abandoned after one season not because they were bad, but simply because they didn't make enough money and were replaced with something deemed more profitable. In order to break this cycle somebody would need to risk a lot of money and currently the chances for that are rather dim.
Victor_D wrote:Kim S. Robinson said on multiple occasions that he wants to elevate sci-fi into a proper "literary" genre, so perhaps his source material should do the same for the small screen
Kim S. Robinson is a good writer, but not necessarily my favorite one. Remarks like "making sci-fi a proper genre" are partly responsible for this, because it already is a well-estabilished genre. Works like "
Hard to be a god" are what makes good Sci-Fi because it makes you think. Half of Star Trek's "first contact" scenarios are silly fanfics of this work.
Robinson on the other hand, well, let's say as a political scientist, I find his works not nessesarily naive, but he tried too hard to use it as a vessel for his own ideas, especially his "
Aurora". Overanalyzing the inner structures of works of fiction is kind of a "professional disease" for me. But even when I turn it off for the sake of suspension of disbelief, I'm still not buying this paragon stance of his.
Anyway, I think we went too far off the topic in this thread. The initial question was about good contemporary sci-fi. But since good shows are somewhat scarce nowadays and anime is not everyone's cup of tea let's have a look at a different format:
games.
Even Mass Effect, despite it's not-so-well-received ending, is still a better sci-fi then most modern shows. Just don't bother with the Andromeda spinoff, unless it's on sale for 10 bucks or something. Any other suggestions?