Tom Hunter writes: This article was originally conceived as a personal coda to my regular Best SF Movies Ever! series of articles that ran across Matrix in 2007 and 2008, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the BSFA and running back decade by decade from the present day to the 1950s.

I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about lists.

Lists and list-making are, I think, an intrinsic part of the fabric of fandom; the secret maps and hidden territories that flow from our collective obsessions and the need to somehow communicate that obsession to others.

Or, if that’s too convoluted for you, here’s a simpler take. Lists are fun, and also innately geeky, which is surely part of their appeal.

This article was originally conceived as a personal coda to my regular Best SF Movies Ever! series of articles that ran across Matrix in 2007 and 2008, published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the BSFA and running back decade by decade from the present day to the 1950s.

This wasn’t intended as anything even remotely approaching an exhaustive piece of research (lots of obscure but good films were certainly missed out) and the definition of ‘best’ and even SF was deliberately broad and never really tackled from any kind of critical perspective. A more honest series title would have been something like An Introductory Guide to Mainstream, English Language (mostly American) Cinema of Potential Genre Interest Organised Chronologically by Year.

Honest, yes, but no fun. There’s no way to justify the excessive use of exclamation marks for a start, so Best SF Movies Ever! it was. After all, the BSFA already has a venue for critical discourse in the shape of Vector, so I’ve always partially viewed Matrix as the home of the sort of critical discourse that mostly happens in bars. And bars, as we should all know, are the natural home of best of list conversations.

The one big lesson I’ve learnt is that making lists is a complicated and taxing task, even without the aid of alcohol, and one of the key challenges is drawing the subjective line between best and personal best, and it’s the very subjectivity of even this process that makes lists such a compellingly personal and problematic process.

Here’s one for you when you’re next in the pub. The best year ever (!) for science fiction cinema was 1982. That’s right, the start of the eighties. Not the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not the year of Forbidden Planet or The Planet of the Apes or even Star Wars, so what gives?

Well, simply going on the numbers, 1982 has more of everything - More variety, more quality and more future classics than any other comparable year. Yes, there might well be better films in other years, but for sheer consistency and longevity 1982 has to be the high tide mark that our next generation of budding Kubrick’s, Cameron’s and Bay’s (ok, ok, I’m just kidding about Kubrick) should be aiming for.

It was the year that E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, and thus the science fiction meme in general, smashed every single box office record out there, the year of the bestest, properest, space operariest Star Trek film ever, The Wrath of Khan, not to mention the year SF properly got its noir on in Blade Runner. In case that’s not enough evidence, that year you could have also gone to see Tron, Videodrome or The Thing and come away just as happy.

By happy coincidence, this ties in nicely with my other main public (as in pub) debating point that the 1980’s represent the golden age of science fiction cinema. Feel free to disagree with me, but feel equally free to buy me a pint first. Here’s some of my main conclusions…

First off, it seems to me that when anyone starts calling science fiction golden age on any particular time period you can almost always safely assume that, by sheer coincidence, this will also correspond to the time they personally discovered the genre and will contain any number of their own particular favourite works.

I’m guilty as charged on this one, though secretly I’ve expanded the decade a bit to start with the late seventies so I can include Star Wars and Alien, and then roped in Terminator 2 from the early nineties at the other end.

First off, for me Star Wars and Alien, though very different box office beasts, are both prime examples of the way special effects came to the foreground of sf cinema while also disappearing directly into the background in exactly the way the effects in, say, 2001 didn’t.

For me it’s a question of texture, and both films are noted for the way they dirtied and beat-up on the technology rather than keeping it pristine, shiny and ultimately unlived in. At the other end of the spectrum, you can’t get more shiny-looking than the T1000 in Terminator 2, yet while still representing an evolutionary leap forward in CGI terms, the film is still ultimately perhaps the final hybrid of the computer graphics palette and the traditional language of non-digital filmmaking.

In other words, watching outside of this idealised timeframe I find myself often either dislocated from the story by the (subjectively) poor past effects in one timezone, or somehow missing the sheer physicality of a pre-digital effect like the Alien Queen or an AT-AT on the other.

I’m beginning to adapt though, and forcing myself to appreciate new works in both directions.

It’s easier going forward, of course. My original issues with CGI are fast eroding as the technological possibilities push further and further on (imagine the special effects they’ll have on the other side of the Singularity!). On the one hand CGI has got better at hiding itself in the details, so whereas a modern-day blockbuster like The Dark Knight employs all kinds of digital trickery behind the scenes, these moments are carefully blended into the real world. The flipside of this is in films like Wall-E, which don’t exist in the physical realm at all.

Going backwards in time, it seems, is harder to do.

Working my way back, year by year, through the best of our past decades it began to occur to me that there were huge gaps in my viewing knowledge.

I was missing out on vital heritage here, and while there were not so many old classics I hadn’t heard of I was becoming increasingly surprised by the number I hadn’t actually gotten around to seeing. I call this The Planet of the Apes effect, or that point where a film or other cultural artefact is so perfectly engrained in your popular cultural frame of reference there’s actually no real need to see the original article. With Apes for example I saw the Spaceballs parody years before I ever got to see the actual movie.

Worse though were the greater numbers of older films I had seen but couldn’t technically remember much about. Old black and white classics that had played at tea time or as part of ultra late night compilations back when I was a kid and would watch anything so long as at least a few of the genre staples of aliens, spaceships, lasers or big monsters were featured somewhere in the mix.

I’ve come to realise that if you want to be a proper fan of science fiction you need to be as active in embracing your heritage as you are in looking towards the future.

These days, thanks to places like Amazon and the economies of the Long Tail, these films are almost certainly easier to find and experience than back when they were originally released. Then the trick was to find the cinema that was playing the film, whereas now perhaps the trick is more about the correct mental prepping you need to employ to watch an old school classic on a Saturday night, rather than the latest slice of easy-viewing beer and pizza entertainment.

Setting the stage is important, I think, as old films have different beats and rhythms so you need to pay more attention. Suspension of disbelief is also more of an active process as the effects are clearly going to jar in lots of places. My advice here is to consider your approach from a different angle and focus on the storytelling rather than the eye candy. In this way the experience is more akin to watching theatre than cinema, where the lights go down between scenes, the wires are almost certainly on show and the actors may well step out of character and publicly rebuke you if you forget to switch your mobile off. And yet four hundred odd years of retelling doesn’t seem to have done Shakespeare any harm, and so it goes for many of the sfnal classics of yesteryear.

For me it’s helped to make the watching something of an event I can share with likeminded friends, and in my case I’ve come up with the Science Fiction Saturday Night Movie Double Bill.

For less than the price of a cinema ticket, I can easily order two or more classic dvds (including postage) from Amazon or Play or their various equivalents, and then it’s just a decision on how to best pair them up.

I’ve found putting the older movie first works best; the slower rhythms help you focus, and if you’ve also still invested in beer and pizza as well then obviously something a little louder later on is going to fare more favourably.

It also helps to be flexible with the themes of your double bill combinations. A theme is important, I think, but also not something to be taken too seriously.

For example, one of my favourite recent pairings was science fiction politics. For this I cannily matched the original and political The Day the Earth Stood Still with the equally politic and (hopefully) satiric Starship Troopers, and any other suggestions for instant classic combos are more than welcome.

So, to come full circle, Best Of lists are an important part of being a fan (any kind of fan) but it’s equally important to remember that a list will never represent the whole story.

I think it’s important to use these kinds of lists in the right way, whether it’s a simple Ten Best Movie Monsters or the latest Hugo Award nominations, and for me that way is not to look for validation of my current tastes and opinions, but rather to actively seek out the differences and try to fill in the gaps.

As I said in my opening, I spend a lot of time thinking about lists these days, and I spend perhaps even more time watching people’s reactions to those lists. The internet is a marvellous place for watching points of view take shape, and what’s fascinated me most as the various Best of Anthologies and SF Award shortlists have been published this year is the depth and variety of reaction to even the most seemingly simple of announcements. It’s a healthy sign that the science fictional world has both a definable historical legacy to draw on as well as a bright future of new and evolving work to look forward to.

When looking for parallels, people often talk about the differences between the SF&F and Crime genres, at least in terms of book publishing, but for me a more vital and engaging comparison is between contemporary science fiction and contemporary art. Both are a language of ideas, both are hard to define, although most people certainly claim to know it when they see it, and both are complicated enough in terms of their histories, cultural references and codes of behaviour that they can be difficult for those outside the circle to access, and thus are often exposed to outside bemusement and ‘As Others See us’ style dismissal.

This is where our plethora of lists can help, but while any best of list is certainly a useful guide book for reference it should only ever stand as the first step to visiting a territory personally and making your mind up for yourself.

Tom Hunter is a former editor of Matrix Magazine and the current administrator of that other big best of list, the Arthur C. Clarke Award.