10 best sci-fi films and TV series, ranked by our science expert

10. The Last of Us (2023-)

The mycologists were delighted. Mushroom scientists don’t normally get much Hollywood glamour. But here was a prestige zombie drama and it was (they insisted to anyone who would listen) all about fungi. What’s more, it was about a mind-controlling fungus that actually exists (in ants). Look, there are unanswered questions about zombie biology, and don’t get the physicists started on zombie thermodynamics. Ignore the quibbles. Just enjoy the mushrooms. Oh, and the exquisite acting and plotting.
Sky/Now

• Could The Last of Us bring zombies back from the dead?

9. The X Files (1993-2018)

At first, the most improbable element was the aliens. At first, they were seen in shadows, half-glances and ambiguities — their half-existence half-proof of a deep-state conspiracy. Mulder wanted to believe; Scully was the rational sceptic. After a decade, more than 200 episodes, and a lot of aliens, the most improbable element was that Scully was still a sceptic. Unlike her, we all wanted to believe. The series has stopped. The truth is still out there.
Channel 4/Disney+/Sky

8. Westworld (1973)

What was the elevator pitch? “It’s a western, but with robots. And it’s not stupid”? Whatever it was, someone listened. Westworld is a Wild West theme park populated by realistic robots you can shoot with, drink with and sleep with. It sounds awesome. Except, what if the robots feel pain? What if their apparent emotions are real emotions? After all this time worrying whether robots will subjugate us, what if the real concern is us subjugating them?
Buy/rent

7. Red Dwarf (1988-2020)

The dramatis personae are: a robot with a polyhedron head; the last human in the universe; a hologram of the most annoying human in the universe; an AI; and a bipedal feline that evolved over the course of three million years from the pregnant cat of the last human in the universe. And they are in space. It is, in other words, a classic odd couple (in this case odd quintuple) sitcom. And it popularised the word “smeg”.
U/iPlayer/Sky

6. Independence Day (1996)

Yes, there are flaws. Not least that the premise relies on believing that a vastly superior alien race can sustain itself only through the enormous faff of travelling light years to suck the life out of inhabited planets. Leave that aside. Watch the US president leading the world’s fightback with a stirring impromptu speech declaring the world’s “Independence Day”. Watch Israelis fight aliens alongside Arabs. Most of all, watch as two RAF officers exclaim, “It’s the Americans!” … “About bloody time.” Embrace the cheese.
Disney+

5. Black Mirror (2011-)

It’s the near future and AI allows you to converse with dead relatives. Tiny, autonomous drones hunt you down. A prime minister has sex with a pig. It is now actually the near future and a lot of what Black Mirror predicted in the near past has moved from “speculative” to “plausible” or “implausible but still alleged in a meretricious biography”.
Netflix

• Charlie Brooker: Black Mirror is shorthand for ‘that’s a bit f***ed up’

4. The Truman Show (1998)

John Stuart Mill asked if it was better to be Socrates or a happy pig. The Matrix asked if we should take the red pill (difficult knowledge) or the blue pill (blissful ignorance). The Truman Show asked the same question, but better. Should Truman live in perfect picket-fenced America, where he unwittingly starred in a reality TV show? Or should he escape, for freedom and the truth outside? Critics loved this social sci-fi, but spotted one flaw: who, they asked, would be entertained by the boring minutiae of a person’s life? Then a few years later Big Brother came out.
Prime Video/Sky/Now

3. Contagion (2011)

In China, a bat virus has jumped to humans. Terrified populations panic-buy basic goods (although not loo roll). Scientists talk earnestly about something called the “R-number”. Conspiracists claim it’s a government plot. There’s a race for a vaccine. In 2011 epidemiologists loved Contagion. It was accurate and, they said with a sigh, probably the only time the public would be interested in their discipline.
Prime Video

2. Jurassic Park (1993)

In the 30 years since Jurassic Park we haven’t extracted dinosaur DNA from a mosquito trapped in amber. We have, though, constructed the mammoth genome from corpses buried in permafrost. We haven’t resurrected long-extinct species to walk the earth, but there are plans (not completely madcap) under way to do so. Like the best sci-fi, Jurassic Park stretched what was plausible, but remembered that plausibility was its power. It also had scary velociraptors.
Prime Video

• Laura Dern: Was our age gap in Jurassic Park ‘completely appropriate’?’

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

This is not a film in which spacecraft audibly whizz by. An explosion in the vacuum of space doesn’t make a boom. Arthur C Clarke’s novels were very much science fiction rather than fictitious science, and so is the 1968 film. Generations of aerospace engineers were inspired by the realism of his vision for the early years of human spacefaring, then disappointed that this vision, which was achievable, went unrealised.
Buy/rent

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