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Way back in 2008, after I'd written a post called Top Sci Fi of the Past 25 Years, Frank said Greg, after reading some of your comments, I'd really like to see what your top 25 list would look like

So to answer Frank's question from a half-decade ago, I've thrown together 25 of my science fiction favorites. It was tough coming up with that many that were truly good, so I've included fantasy in with the science fiction, and I've expanded beyond just movies, including TV shows, books, and video games in the grouping. After all, it's not “Favorite Sci-Fi Movies”, it's “Favorite Sci-Fi”.

I've found it good that I had to struggle to come up with twenty-five, because I'm including some selections beyond my best-of-the-best list, which probably would have only been somewhere around 12 or 15 titles. I'm also intentionally not ordering the list - it's just alphabetical. I'll admit that there's a good chance I'm forgetting some amazing movie, book, or TV show in here. Let me know about it in the comments. But I will say that I'm intentionally not including Lost, Blade Runner, Battlestar Galactica, or Foundation.

The 4400 - If you've been following my blog for any length of time, you are likely sick of my incessant raving about two things, and they're both on this list. I've written about The 4400 so much that I've got a category for the posts. There were four seasons to the show, and it was cancelled before the story could get a satisfactory conclusion, which is sadly the norm for television. I was given a conclusion in The 4400: Promises Broken, but I can't help but feel that the original writers might have taken a different, better tack.

The show's premise? Over the past sixty years, there have been thousands of unexplained disappearances. Then, one night, they all return to Seattle, unaware of any time having passed, and not having aged a single day. Then, some of them begin exhibiting unexplained abilities...

What made the show great was that its very premise and direction changed from season to season. What made the show great was the introduction of new plotlines and characters as seasons progressed. What made the show great was Jeffrey Combs and Summer Glau. What made the show great was that it never felt like a superhero show.

I miss The 4400.

The Abyss - James Cameron's undersea masterpiece still stands up, although the Director's Cut is far better than the theatrical version. It's a long movie. But I often forget how good it is. What makes the movie great? Michael Biehn is as good in this one as he was in Terminator and Aliens. The drill crew's comeraderie and One-Night's country singing. (And I hate country music!) Hippie and his rat. And that scene in the flooding mini-sub always blows me away.

Alien / Aliens - I agree that the special effects on the original are wildly dated. But the movie had one of the best blow-your-mind cinema moments of all time. If you hadn't been spoiled on what was coming, I can only imagine what the experience would have been like.

Whereas Alien was a horror movie, Aliens was an adventure movie. Both were great in their own ways, and both had the same dirty future aesthetic that we saw in the early Star Wars films. The characters aren't heroes, they're just blue collar workers trying to do their crappy jobs when everything goes to hell.

Altered Carbon - If someone is looking for a gritty, well-thought-out, far-future science fiction novel, I always recommend Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon. What makes it great? The book introduces a single ultra-advanced technology, and explores every conceivable angle. So many books posit a technology and leave dozens of loopholes and plotholes, but Morgan's got them all covered, which is awesome.

In Altered Carbon, people have "cortical stacks" embedded at the base of their skulls that store digital copies of their memories and personalities. Life insurance takes on new meaning when you can get a new body if you're killed in an accident. Travel at light speed is tackled by transmitting a personality to far-distant planets for re-sleeving in a new body rather than trying to move actual matter. People can enter computer simulations and overclock themselves, experiencing two weeks of simulated time in ten minutes. The possibilities are mind-numbing, and the book is incredibly good.

The Avengers - As this one is the most recent entry on my list, you likely don't need me to tell you much about Joss Whedon's Marvel team-up movie. It simply took some good characters from a number of well-made movies and combined them masterfully in a well-written movie that was all about fan service.

Beyond Good and Evil - The other item in my duo of incessant raving, Beyond Good and Evil is my favorite video game. I've bought five copies for three platforms and played it six times start to finish over the past decade, always with at least a year between each play.

So what makes Beyond Good and Evil a great game? The gameplay has a lot of variety, the characters are well-written and well-acted, and the story involves a government conspiracy, and that's a plot device for which I'm a sucker. It's also got amongst the best stealth gameplay I've seen. The game is ancient at this point, and the HD remake has some control issues, but I've got a soft spot for Beyond Good and Evil that will likely never fade.

The Dark Knight - Yes, yes, Heath Ledger always gets all the credit for the movie being good, and yes, he does deserve a ton of credit. But the film's writing was also a huge part of it. What made The Dark Knight great was the portrayal of The Joker as perhaps the only actual insane genius ever portrayed in film. His plots were genuinely insane with huge amounts of personal risk, but they paid off because they were well-planned and because The Joker thought in such radically unanticipated ways.

The Dresden Files - Few series get better and better as they progress. But that's exactly what Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files series has done. As one podcaster (I can't recall exactly whom) once put it, he writes exactly the stuff that I love to read.

Harry Dresden is an underemployed wizard/detective in Chicago. He works for people finding lost items, and occasionally consulting for the Chicago PD. As the series progresses, we see Harry grow in experience and in power, becoming embroiled in a number of different local and global situations. I can't succinctly describe the allure of the series, but it's probably my favorite book series of all time. They're very quick and light reads, and they're nearly impossible to put down once you've gotten going.

What makes Dresden great? He cracks wise like Spiderman while fighting supernatural baddies, befriends the fairy folk by buying them takeout pizza, gets punished worse than Ash in an Evil Dead movie, drops Star Wars quotes constantly, and occasionally plays Dungeons and Dragons with some college friends who happen to be werewolves. I haven't seen such an excellent combination of action and humor since True Lies. As I read what I've written, some of it sounds hokey, but believe me - it works.

Dune - It was my wife who originally got me to read Dune, and I've not read any of the sequels. I'm guessing that many peoples' only experience with the Dune universe is from the eighties movie with Sting and those weird heart-plugs. While much of the story remains the same, the book was so much better than that movie. Even the newer sci-fi channel remake was better than that old movie.

At this point, it's been so long that I can no longer remember the specifics of what made Dune great, but I can't compose a list like this without including Dune.

The Empire Strikes Back - I'm betting that I get no arguments here. Probably my favorite movie period, and I can't imagine that I'm alone in that. I could easily have included all of Star Wars here, but given the prequels and their many failings, I'll limit my entry in this list to the best Star Wars movie Lucas ever made.

Farscape - By the time Linda and I started watching Farscape, the series had already concluded and the post-finale miniseries follow-up was being aired. While much of the first season was slow, seasons two and three got amazing. No other television series has done such an excellent job of combining sci-fi adventure with humor. Fringe came close at times, but not nearly as consistently.

With a show like this, where a human from present-day Earth goes into space and encounters alien life, you would expect (in regards to the comedy) for the human to be the straight man and the aliens to be wacky and humorous. The writers of Farscape went the opposite route. John Crichton doesn't always adapt well to his situation, and at times verges on outright insanity. He drops references to American pop culture frequently, and the aliens can't figure out what he's talking about. Example: "Woo! Slicker than snot! / "That had to have been translated wrong."

What made Farscape great? Other than the beautiful comedy/action mix, the show eschewed episodic norms in a way that other shows never did. In a show like Star Trek, the producers must have been so concerned about losing viewers who might have missed an episode that they made sure that viewers could jump in at any point and not be lost if they missed an episode. At the end of one of those shows, everything was reset back to the status quo. Farscape was one of the first shows to decide that the status quo was overrated. They had an episode where crazy stuff happened and you just knew that everything would have to be somehow reset back to how it was at the end of the episode. And then it wasn't - they went forward with it, and it turned into one of the most amazing multi-season subplots I've ever seen.

Fringe - Like so many other shows, season one of Fringe wasn't great. And like so many other shows, there were unclosed plot threads and dead ends. But so much of Fringe was so unbelievably good. Seasons two and three were particularly excellent. The introduction of the other universe and The Observer, the backstory of Walter's Big Mistake and Peter's history, and William Bell's appearance and his out-of-body experience were amongst the best television I've seen.

So why was Fringe truly great? There were a number of reasons, but John Noble's brilliant and often hilarious portrayal of a scientific genius who was at the same time a child at heart was a big part of it. He remains one of my favorite mad scientists of all time. Anna Torv's acting is brilliant as well, and I'm not one who often takes specific note of anyone's acting ability. The setting that they created in the alternate universe was likewise believable and very well done. In the end, Fringe went perhaps a season or a season-and-a-half too long, but the heart of the show remains some of the best TV evar.

Half-Life 2 - I actually got the game initially back in 2005 as part of a video card offer. I've replayed it start-to-finish three times. If Half-Life was A New Hope, then Half-Life 2 would be Empire Strikes Back. The graphics that were beautiful to me then still look very good now, and the visuals to performance ratio is outstanding, by which I mean that my computer has failed to adequately run newer games that don't look as pretty as Half-Life 2 does on my machine. The physics engine was groundbreaking in 2005, and the enemies such as barnacles and headcrabs were very innovative. But that's not what makes Half-Life 2 truly great.

When I speak of Half-Life 2, I'm also including "Half-Life 2: Episode 1" and "Half-Life 2: Episode 2" in the deal, and as good as the facial animations were in the original Half-Life 2, they're worlds better in Valve's later titles. The combination of facial/body animation and voice acting creates video game characters that are more believable than in any other game I've played. The ending of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is probably the best ending to a video game I've ever seen, and that's really saying something.

Jurassic Park - It had been so long since I'd seen this movie that I'd forgot how good it was when I rewatched it last year. Michael Crichton has quite a good body of work, and many of his books were made into films, but I don't think any of them have been done better than Jurassic Park. My commentary here is brief, but I feel that this movie is a solid addition to this list.

Little Brother - Although the book is very much an echo of the Bush years, Little Brother tackled civil rights issues beautifully in a way that made those issues accessible to young adults, and yet remained interesting to older readers. The book delves deeply into technological issues such as encryption, networking, and the paradox of the false positive, in which a 99% accurate test can be wrong 99% of the time - that's a snippet that everyone should read and understand.

Doctorow envisions a near-future San Fransisco after a terrorist attack similar to 9/11, and writes of a very believable goverment overreaction to the attack. Innocents are detained and held without due process, and our main character, a high schooler, is caught up in the mayhem. A little bit of teenage defiance worsens his situation. But he's a very tech-savvy kid, and his brand of tech-based protest quickly gains a following, much to the chagrin of the Department of Homeland Security.

Lord of the Rings - I am of course speaking of the movies. The entire trilogy. The books were no doubt good, but I remember skipping over a half dozen chapters of discussion with Treebeard in The Two Towers, as they were mind-numbingly boring. The movies were not only the best book-to-film adaptation I've ever seen, in my mind they actually surpassed the books in quality, which is the inverse of what book-to-movie adaptations generally do.

The Man From Earth - There's a good chance you've never heard of this one. It's a very independant film, and was initially distributed via peer-to-peer networks. It was later adapted to a stage play, which is a natural fit for the film, since the entire thing takes place in a single room and consists entirely of dialogue.

What makes The Man From Earth great is watching the mixture of reactions from the main character's colleagues as he reveals to them that he is in fact thousands of years old, and that he picks up everything and moves every decade or so to prevent people from catching on.

The Matrix - It's easy to let the trilogy's less-than-stellar conclusion cloud the first movie's epic and truly original story. I don't recall the trailer spoiling the movie's surprise premise either, which in itself is saying something.

The film is surrounded in controversy. Given the second two films' divergence from the first, it's not difficult to believe that the original may have been written by Sophia Stewart rather than Wachowski Starship, but no one seems to know the truth.

Beyond the movie's mind-blowing main plot, The Matrix was rife with metaphor and layered meaning. What is real? How do you define real? What is the nature of choice? If there is predestiny, how can there be choice? Is blissful ignorance better than painful truth? Remember the Alice in Wonderland metaphor?

It's sad that the series took such a drastic left turn after its wonderful genesis. I do believe that in my lifetime, we'll see a return to the world of The Matrix - such a valuable IP will not be left to founder. I can only hope that when that happens, the writing is up to snuff.

Somewhere in Time - Christopher Reeve in perhaps his best non-Superman role. The movie is at heart a love story, and thus a chick flick, but it's got a great sci-fi edge. The science behind things is pure garbage, and thus this film is more in the realm of fantasy than science fiction, but as I mentioned, I am including fantasy in my list.

The movie's premise is that a man falls in love with a woman only by seeing her photo, and learns that she has grown old and recently died of old age. He then resolves to travel back in time to be with her. The movie is slow paced, but very well done. The classical soundtrack sticks with you after having seen it, and the movie's climactic scene, which involves a penny, is enough to give me goose bumps just thinking about it. Guys, if you're looking for a chick flick that you'll be able to stomach, and even enjoy, go with this one.

Spin - This book will take you on a ride. Spin starts off with a group of kids sitting in their parents' backyard one night, looking up at the stars. Then, the stars go out. All of them. And they stay out. This is the start of a global event that forever changes human history. I'd be ruining everything if I told any more, but what makes Spin great is that you're constantly learning new information as the plot continually evolves. The plot is full of twists and turns, and it's not easy to predict what's going to happen next in Spin as it is with so many other books. The book's sequel wasn't nearly as good, but if you're looking for a book recommendation, this one is near the top of my list.

Super 8 - I know that not everyone loves the movie nearly as much as I do, but I love Super 8. It's amongst my very favorite movies. It's partially the setting - it takes place during a time when I was six years old and the setting is laid out so very well. It's partially the fact that the movie invokes the same vibe as E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But it's more than that. Super 8 is great for its acting - the kid actors in the movie are all unknowns, and they're all stellar. They completely carry the movie, which is a rare thing. The mix of adventure and humor is perfectly executed. And the themes are carried out well - losing a loved one and being able to finally let go and carry on.

Terminator 2 - Another James Cameron movie. But it's amongst his very best, and he's done some damn good stuff. The original Terminator movie was excellent, but if you rewatch it now, the special effects come across as seriously dated. Amazingly, this sequel surpassed the original in nearly every way. It's only failing is that it didn't have Bill Paxton in a bit role like the original did.

Having the roles seemingly reversed at the film's outset was a brilliant move on the part of the film's writers. In the original film, Arnold played an unstoppable mindless killing machine. Now, he could be somewhat humanized. It's easy to lose track of what a radical change this was to the franchise's foundation. But as great as that was, it's not what made Terminator 2 truly shine. What made Terminator 2 great was Linda Hamilton. The kid playing John Connor was sufficient. Arnold? He was Arnold. But Linda Hamilton, who was just so-so in the original terminator film, came back in the sequel - just seven years later - looking like a completely different person. She looked like what you'd expect a normal waitress to look like after she found out that she was central to a worldwide machine-led plot to destroy all of humanity. She was hardened to a razor edge and zero bullshit. Seriously - during the shoot of that movie, Linda Hamilton had to have zero body fat. And - unsurprisingly - she was in an insane asylum. She played edging-on-insane very well. Realistic rather than humorous.

It's a damn shame that the third movie was crap and the fourth was even worse, but it's all because James Cameron wasn't involved, and Linda Hamilton wasn't involved.

The Time Travelers Wife - The manner of involuntary time travel that the titular Time Traveler exhibits isn't completely new. It's been seen before in Quantum Leap, Journeyman, and others I probably can't think of right now. But I believe that this book does it better than any of them.

What makes The Time Traveler's Wife great is its relationships, and its exploration of the angles of this scenario that many other stories would ignore. When you travel in time and visit your loved ones at different points in their lives, how do you relate to them? How do you treat your wife when you visit her at age 14, long before you were ever married? How do you treat your daughter when you visit her in the future, when to you she's not yet been born? And of course, the problems of dealing with the fact that when you travel, all physical objects including clothing stay behind.

The book is half love story, half science fiction. Like Somewhere in Time, I loved it.

The Wheel of Time - The Wheel of Time series is the king of epic fantasy. I won't say undisputed king, because many people make a very good case for Lord of the Rings. But while I enjoy The Lord of the Rings, you'll note that I included the Lord of the Rings movie in this list but not the three books. Those are a difficult read at best. And while the Wheel of Time has rough bits - The Path of Daggers (672 pages), Crossroads of Twilight (822 pages) and Knife of Dreams (837 pages) were particularly rough tomes - I feel that overall the series is a success, and it concluded wonderfully.

From a 30,000 foot view, the story is based on an abused template: village boy learns he's special, grows into a great hero, defeats evil and saves the world. (Perhaps I've twisted that just a bit to avoid spoilers) But what makes Wheel of Time great are the rules it creates governing magic and how it works. Saidin and Saidar, the male and female halves of the True Power, The Breaking of the World, The Taint that has corrupted saidar and how that's affected world culture, Linking, Shielding, Skimming, Ter'angreal, A'dam, Mashadar, Tel'aran'rhiod, and a dozen other magical phenomenon realted to The Power. If you've not read the books, those words are a bunch of gibberish. If you have, they're all very familiar.

The Darkspawn are also very creatively written. More than simply orcs, the trollocs are massive disgusting beasts with the heads of rams, hawks, bears, and other animals. They're undisciplined in battle and require a Myrdraal to lead them. The Myrdraal is a manlike eyeless creature that inspires fear in all. Blindingly quick and near-impossible to kill, the Myrdraal are The Dark One's lieutenants. And those are the least interesting of the Shadowspawn - there are Draghkar, Grey Men, Darkhounds, Gholam, Jumara, and more.

Peoples' biggest objections to getting into this series generally have to do with the daunting page counts of the books, especially after hearing about books 8, 10, and 11, wherein nothing much happens and there are more characters than you'll ever be able to track. Those books are very comparable to large segment of The Two Towers where Treebeard spends half the book walking and talking about essentially nothing. But the first six or seven books are worth reading just for those bits of the story, and as soon as Brandon Sanderson takes over the writing in book 12, everything begins improving and the story becomes far more readable. Tackling The Wheel of Time is an undertaking, but it's a worthwhile undertaking.

World War Z - One of my favorite books. An oral history of the zombie war. This book is a series of tales, presented as interviews with those who have survived "World War Z". There are no characters who persist through all the short stories, but the pastiche presentation works well to layer a patchwork story, as the individual interviews are told in chronological order and sometimes reference the big events related in earlier interview segments.

World War Z's interconnected short story model does an excellent job of presenting a worldwide picture of the various differing struggles that humanity faced as a result of the zombie crisis. From shutin japanese otaku to naval vessels to third world india to the international space station, everyone everywhere was affected. And the story is very well written.

So there it is. I had a number of runners-up: Donnie Darko, The Newsflesh Trilogy, Contact, Frequency, Heroes season 1, Star Trek tNG, and Back to the Future. In the end, it was tough to trim it back to 25.