What is the single best science fiction or fantasy franchise?

[Eyes of Nine]

Gene Wolfe's entire Solar Cycle ouevre, starting with Shadow of the Torturer and ending with The Return to the Whorl

(Toss up between that series and the Vorkosigan series mentioned above)

Runner up - The Finder graphic novels by Carla Speed McNeil (not to be confused with the yaoi manga series Finder)

 

[Dausuul]

George Lucas tried to do something radically different in the prequels, and the nerds turned on him because it wasn’t derivative enough. Lesson learned: don’t trust nerds.

I can't speak for any other nerds, but the reason I turned on him was the atrocious dialogue and acting. (The excessive reliance on primitive CGI didn't help either.) The plot and vision of the prequels were fantastic. If Lucas had just had the sense to recognize his own limitations and hire a top-notch director, and a good editor to polish the script after he wrote the first draft, I think they could have eclipsed the original trilogy.

To the original topic, I'm another vote for Middle-Earth. All the books are excellent, and the LotR movies are spectacular.

 

[Parmandur]

I wouldn’t call Shepherds Crown, Unseen Academicals or Going Postal Terrible by a long shot. I enjoyed them immensely

Going Postal was perhaps his finest novel.

 

[deganawida]

At this moment, I’m tempted to say The Venture Bros., but I’m little worried about the movie tomorrow.

 

[Mannahnin]

I made an obvious joke about Discworld being indebted to Fritz Lieber’s Lankhmar, something that even Prachett admitted in both The Colour of Magic and in the name of the city Ankh-Morpork itself. What I got in response was this weird defensive aggression to defend the brilliance of Terry Prachett, a type of anger you seem to only get on forums that have anything to do with nerdy pursuits. Comes with the territory, I guess.

Also, Prachett’s later works, because of him sadly slowly losing himself to Alzheimer’s, are terrible.

I don't think anyone thought your comment was intended to be hostile or anything, as the smiley face emoji indicated to me "said with a smile". This is a discussion. You made a slightly vague comment which came off a little contradictory to his point and seemingly suggesting Leiber as a better candidate, and he responded to it with his thoughts on Leiber as well as some expanded thoughts on Pratchett.

Certainly it seems that he's a passionate fan of Pratchett and of Leiber's earlier works, but I think you're reading in anger that wasn't there.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Fritz Lieber's last two Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser collections were bad and then awful and they couldn't get published for the first time today except by sketchy outfits doing so to outrage people for political points.

What exactly happened with the last two collections? I assume the brain worms got Leiber as they get about 5-10% of aging fantasy/SF authors (the only one known to have survived being, of all people, Frank Miller, who somehow recovered from early-onset brain worms, albeit just back to being Frank Miller, which is a low bar), but you'd think there'd be some page on the internet revealing the horror of this decline, and I can't find it.

As for "best SF/fantasy series" I'm going to have to boringly go with Star Trek like a number of others. It's one of very few with a genuinely positive outlook on the future, and which still manages to have interesting things to say, even if it went through some hard times.

 

[Scribe]

Its 40K.

My lawyer will not be taking questions at this time.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

What exactly happened with the last two collections? I assume the brain worms got Leiber as they get about 5-10% of aging fantasy/SF authors (the only one known to have survived being, of all people, Frank Miller, who somehow recovered from early-onset brain worms, albeit just back to being Frank Miller, which is a low bar), but you'd think there'd be some page on the internet revealing the horror of this decline, and I can't find it.

His wife died, leading to decades of alcohol and drug abuse and near homelessness. He really spiralled and didn't get the help he needed for a very long time.

 

[Yora]

Star Wars.
At least, it was until 1998. And it was still really impressive until 2007-ish.

 

[Moonmover]

If I must vote in an election for the greatest Star[thing] franchise, I'm going to back the dark horse.

Despite changing mediums and passing through multiple producers' and companies' hands, the Stargate franchise managed to not produce anything genuinely crappy for fifteen years (when the craptastic Stargate Universe premiered). And then, the powers that be had the good sense to let franchise to drift into a peaceful sleep, for the most part.

As it stands now, the vast majority of media under the Stargate umbrella is good television. If you put every movie and episode into a jar and pulled one out of random, whatever you pulled out would usually be the good stuff. The same cannot be said for other franchises that have been mentioned.

It helps that the premise is great. Stargate offers the same fantasy of space exploration as Star Trek, but makes it more grounded and relatable by setting it in the modern day. (Doctor Who could potentially achieve the same, but that isn't what it is going for.)

It's a shame they never did manage to get a video game off the ground.