Cheaper in the sense that less money is less than more money, yes, of course! But cost effectiveness is a useful metric as well. As awesome as robots are, they don't substitute for the Mark One eyeball, a pair of hands and a present mammalian brain.

Unfortunately, this wonderful series is over 20 years and outside the 21st century. If only we had a film version sometime in this century. Would probably need to be a miniseries of some sort.

That's like the 900th mention of the Mars trilogy. I'm buying it tomorrow.

Not if Jenny McCarthy has anything to say about it.

It depends on what you, the reader, want. I'm a huge fan of the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, thus I expected some real hard science in those books. But for stuff like the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks, I'm willing to switch off and enjoy the story. But I cannot stand, literally cannot stomach the people…

Mass 2x3 times that of the earth? you do realize that would make spacefaring civilizations almost impossible on those planets. No space elevator, rockets are nearly impossible, and the life support requirements for those organisms in space.. no bueno.

I work on this part. The booster Avionics and Controls System.

both

Maybe you meant to post this...?

Per Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, This could be very bad...

Someone may correct me on this (whether they qualify as hard sci-fi) but Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy gets my vote for a good starting point. These are some of my favorite novels ever. The tech is all extrapolated from existing technology and there's a ton of actual science and ecology going on. It'll really…

I don't know about the CG on "Gravity" per se, but my experience with CGI artists is that they are wholly overmotivated, and will do ANYTHING to make a scene look better, more realistic, or cooler.

To which I counter with ageless Lisa Simpsons, ageless Gandhis, ageless Malcolm X's, ageless John Lennons. People only assume the bad guys will be ageless. There is no justification to assume that.

I disagree 100%. The show was magical. If it lost its way at the end—and by the way, by sheerest coincidence, I am watching "The End" as I type this—so what? The writing was amazing, the acting superb, and even at its worst it is still better than 90% of what is on television. I think the show solved more loose…

It's a great movie, and Im not taking away from it at all, I loved it... but I think it took alot of people by surprise, myself included, by being so good. Alot of my friends who do not watch any science fiction loved it as well. Its a surprisingly good movie