Serenity

IF ONE thing is clear from our poll it’s that you love science fiction: you posted thousands of votes and comments. In the film category, you voted for 129 titles, but two stole the show. The favourite was Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film based loosely on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which attracted 12 per cent of votes. "This film literally drips with atmosphere and foreboding, offering us a dystopian world which is all too easy to imagine," commented one voter. The movie drips with atmosphere and a sense of foreboding

A close second was 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 epic based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke, popular despite (or perhaps because of) its notoriously enigmatic finale. "It is still the breakthrough vision of near-Earth space travel, the paragon of a robot gone bad," wrote one enthusiast. Incidentally, neither of the books that these films were based on did well in the poll.

To prove that you’re not only stuck on films from the previous century Serenity, the 2005 "space opera" from Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), was voted third place. If the votes for individual Star Wars films were lumped together, they’d have come in fourth, no doubt resulting in howls of protest from those who commented that "Star Wars is not science fiction".

Instead, fourth place went to Forbidden Planet, the 1956 classic starring Robby the Robot. Other popular films were The Matrix, Contact, Dark Star, Gattaca and Silent Running. Less obvious were the votes for The Truman Show, Dr Strangelove and Starship Troopers: "It was so bad it was amazing".

By far the favourite of the 254 books you voted for was Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 epic set on the desert planet Arrakis. The comments accompanying your votes reveal just how much this book blew your minds: "The immersion into an alternate universe/culture/environment is incredible," wrote one voter. But you weren’t impressed by the film based on it, directed by David Lynch (one of you described it as "disastrous").

Second place went to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which started out as a short story collection published in 1951 ("The history of the future," wrote one voter). Douglas Adams’s sci-fi comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the New Scientist staff’s favourite sci-fi book) came third. "Full of brilliant speculation masked by liberal doses of humour," wrote one voter. The 1985 Orson Scott Card novel Ender’s Game (in which child genius Ender Wiggin must save the world from aliens) was voted in fourth, followed by Dan Simmons’s Hyperion series - a futuristic Canterbury Tales, the first of which was published in 1989.

Showing that New Scientist readers are up with the modern stuff too, also popular were Neil Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk (or post-cyberpunk?) novel Snow Crash and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy about colonising the Red Planet, published in the 1990s. The most amusing entry must be this one advocating The Bible: "A superman creates a lot of rubbish out of dust and sets up a version of a "simulation of a city" game... there’s a twist at the end but I won’t spoil it for you."

Science fiction is a genre often ignored by the mainstream, but this poll reveals the profound influence that sci-fi has on many of you (also see the "lifesaving" perspective that it gave the writer William Gibson). Many of the comments that accompanied your votes reveal how a film or book caused you to question the world and what it means to be human. "Dune pretty much blew my mind when I was a teenager, and I still think about it more than a decade later," wrote one voter. Another described Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke: "This book changed me as a person like no other. When I first picked up this book at the age of 13, little did I know where it was to lead me."