Science Fiction

Same. It did nothing for me until I watched The Force Awakens. I actually really got into that and started to think this was what people who liked SW felt.

Then I watched the Last Jedi and the feeling was gone.

I read it.

I'll do it again. You can't stop me.

Not reading it

Ignored

Ayup. Can't stand that show, and its (vocal) fan base makes it worse. Far worse.

Omg. Star Trek and binging it when I was like six or seven when I visited my uncle as a kid. He had the then-entire collection on VHS and I found them and started watching.

Then, he found me watching trouble with tribbles and was like “ooh this is my favorite episode! Rewind it, I’ll go make popcorn.”

Yes. We binged the rest of everything else. Everyone else was either doing adult stuff (BORING.) or at my brothers soccer tournament (even more boring) all weekend.

Yes, this started my sci fi addiction. He also kicked off the fantasy addiction with the admittedly pulpy Belgariad.

I’m biased, so I say start with Next Gen. That’s what got me into it. I later went back and watched TOS. The other good starting point is Deep Space Nine.

I'm a very casual Star Trek enjoyer, and reckon the 2009 film wouldn't be the worst place to start.

I started watching star trek in my late thirties. Tried TOS, couldn't tolerate more than one episode. Then started TNG and fell in love half way through first season. Now I am on Voyager. According to me, it's a good replacement for me for TNG. Not sure what I will watch once I finish this.

Strange New Worlds is probably the best start. I like Discovery a lot, esp. since it kicked off this new age of Star Trek, but it is a different format than you'd usually expect from Trek, thus the outcry. Strange New Worlds takes the classic Trek formula (which is not a bad formula--there's a reason it has legs) and updates it with modern values/stories/special effects/etc.

Older Trek is massively nostalgic for many, but it's also massively uneven in quality as they were churning out seasons on a shoestring budget and it often shows. Also, they didn't always correctly predict how tech would go (esp. computer tech) so you can have things that are plot holes given what we know of technology today. If you want to start with older Trek, I think the Star Trek Next Generation movie First Contact might stand well enough on its own, esp. if you cherry-pick the Borg-related episodes (there's only a few) from the TV series and watch them first.

There are multiple Stargate shows, each with its own target market. So if you don’t like SG-1, give Atlantis and SGU a try. Atlantis is fun fluff, and SGU is darker sci fi. None of them rely on you watching any of the others — they are fairly self contained stories.

I can promise you that you definitely won't regret watching Stargate! Definitely one of those series that I wish I could experience for the first time again.

It took me two attempts to get through Stephenson's Cryptonomicon even though it was thematically up my alley. He includes so many tangents and explanations that it can be tedious at times, however interesting some of them might be. I'd almost prefer footnotes to the longer tangents so I could just get into them optionally if I choose.

I enjoyed Snow Crash, but I think he's better at world building than following a plot to a satisfying ending. It seems a common criticism that some of his books end a bit abruptly without enough investment in the conclusion, especially in contrast to the significant detail he puts in to the world building.

The Expanse is a little slow for the first couple of episodes, it picks up after that.

I can understand completely why you didn’t like The Three Body Problem. It is, especially at the beginning, very Chinese and incorporates outlooks and ideas that are utterly alien to the western mindset.

Oddly enough, that’s not what got me. I studied Chinese (I’ve sadly forgotten so much I wouldn’t even try to read it in Chinese), have been to China, and love a lot of Chinese movies, web novels and dramas. Plus, I’ve lived in Asia for nearly half my life at this point (yeah, countries all have their own unique cultures, but there’s a lot of influence and overlap). It was something about the writing style that I couldn’t get into, which was why I tried reading it in Japanese, to see if it was just the translation I wasn’t vibing with. lol but trying to read it in Japanese threw me for an entire different reason, because my brain switched to the Chinese reading the Chinese names and then it was just a linguistic nightmare inside my head as my brain struggled to pick a single language to read in. I’ve had to give up watching Chinese movies if the subtitles are in Japanese because my brain can not handle both languages at once.

For The Expanse, the first few episodes are definitely not the most inviting (although they get better once you've seen the whole show once already). Very much worth pushing through with it though

I didn't like the first few episodes of The Expanse either, I thought they were so focused on the world building that they didn't flesh out the characters well enough for me to care. But they figure out a better balance about halfway through season 1 and by the end of the season I was all in. I consider it one of my favorite Sci Fi tv series now.

As I said elsewhere in this thread, the first couple of episodes of the Expanse are kinda slow. It picks up if you stick with it :)

I'm still mad they ended it early :(

I tried it on audiobook and couldn't finish it. It didn't help that it was one of the ones with 500 different readers for different characters (and very distinctive voices like Scott Brick were different characters in the second book or part or whatever than the first), but while the world was kind of interesting, I really couldn't be grabbed by the story at all.

And I finish almost everything. Especially on audiobook.