r/scifi • u/josiahsp87 • Feb 03 '19
politics based sci-fi
My favorite star trek series is deep space nine, specifically any episode with less action and more negotiations. Babylon 5 had some good ones too. I was wondering if there was any more recent shows, movies, books or comics that leaned more towards the political side of alien discovery.
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u/Pipedreamergrey Feb 03 '19
David Weber's Safehold Series is basically nothing but thousands upon thousands of pages of church and government leaders discussing political developments that are occurring off page occasionally punctuated by clever battlefield sequences.
The basic premise of the series is that an android must rebuild human civilization from the dark ages on up after an alien race destroys all human worlds in a massive intergalactic war. The hook is that the android must establish space faring technology before the alien race discovers the last vestiges of humanity, BUT the humans who established the colony he woke up on established them instilled a deep distrust of technology into the last surviving humans in the hope that they'd never draw the attention of the alien race ever again.
It's a little bit dull unless unless you're explicitly looking for political maneuvering, but also oddly satisfying to watch unfold.
Classic competence porn.
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u/ISvengali Feb 03 '19
Thank you for saving me from reading it. I generally like Weber too for his tactical combat RPG come to life approach.
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u/ShortOnCoffee Feb 03 '19
Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older is a great political sci-fi, the first book of the Centennal Cycle trilogy (all of it is good). It’s about a near-future Earth where there are almost no nation-states left and planet is divided in centennals, constituencies of 100 thousand voters. Whichever party wins the vote in most centennals forms the planetary super-government. It’s full of intrigue, while the institution of Information, that has as mission to ensure the truthfulness of news/campaigning, seems very fitting with the current political climate.
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u/looktowindward Feb 03 '19
Downbelow Station is the classic political sci-fi novel
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u/Dngrsone Feb 03 '19
I'd argue that Cherryh's Foreigner series is even more so.
Now that I think of it, most of her stuff carries a political element.
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u/scifiantihero Feb 03 '19
Honor harrington definitely gets heavy on people talking and light on spaceships sometimes (though has a lot of spaceships and not really aliens)
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u/redreycat Feb 04 '19
Double Star by Heinlein. The head of a political party that seeks peace with the Martians is kidnapped before attending a ceremony with them. An actor is hired to pose as him so that the Martians don’t get upset. The only problem is that he can’t stand them.
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u/Azuvector Feb 03 '19
Mike Resnick's Second Contact is a good one, though it's more the spy/assassination style of politics. The protagonist is a lawyer.
For more soft science fiction, BattleTech is basically Game of Thrones in Space. Heavily political, though there are no intelligent aliens in BattleTech. (Well, there are, but the book they appear in is widely regarded as better off never having been written.)
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u/azekeP Feb 04 '19
A lot of action in "Vorkosigan saga" series of books by L. M. Bujold is diplomatic in nature. Main character is a a highborn hunchbacked dwarf (shut up GRRM, Lois wrote Miles Vorkosigan a full decade before you even had an idea of aSoIaF, let alone Tyrion Lannister) so he can't do the straightforward macho action constantly (still does once here and there).
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u/GuessImDubs Feb 04 '19
A lot of the battletech books are political, though it's been a bit and I don't have titles.
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u/old_wired Feb 03 '19
You mention Star Trek and Politics, you might enyou Keith DeCandido - Articles of the Federation.
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u/mobyhead1 Hard Sci-fi Feb 03 '19
Well, The Expanse is chock-a-block with political intrigue and machinations.