Every month, the Love Thy Nerd community does something dangerous. In May, LTN ran a bracket to determine the best sci-fi property set in or heavily-influenced by space, and the Discord had opinions. Strong ones. The kind that end friendships and start arguments.

Here are the results, counted down from ten to one, based on your votes. We created this list first by bracket winners, second by number of votes, giving us a solid Top Ten.

Special thanks to Michael “MDB” Brown, Luke Filipiak, Radio Matt & the LTN Community for creating and participating in the bracket that these results were pulled from.

Alien is a franchise built on a simple premise — space is dark, corporations are evil, and something in that egg room is absolutely going to ruin your day. What started as a lean, terrifying horror film grew into one of sci-fi’s most durable mythologies. The xenomorph became an icon. Ripley became a hero. And somewhere along the way, we all agreed that maybe the real monster was the company policy.

Landing at ten in a bracket this competitive is nothing to be ashamed of. Just surviving the first round is basically a Weyland-Yutani miracle.

Men in Black takes the concept of alien contact and turns it into a bureaucratic comedy. The universe is enormous and full of impossible things, but apparently someone in a black suit has a handle on it. The genius of the franchise is that it treats the cosmic as completely mundane. Aliens aren’t invaders. They’re neighbors. Cab drivers. Weird little guys hiding inside other weird little guys.

It’s funny and stylish, and surprisingly easy to rewatch. Ninth place, but it never loses the charm.

Giant robots. Ancient grudges. A civil war stretching across galaxies. Transformers has been around long enough to exist in basically every medium, and somehow the core idea never gets old — alien robots that turn into vehicles and also have very strong feelings about freedom.

Optimus Prime has given more motivational speeches than most actual humans, and people keep showing up for them. There’s something genuinely mythic underneath all the metallic yelling, and that’s why it’s still here at number eight.

Halo built something rare: a video game universe that felt like it deserved to be studied. The Covenant, the Forerunners, the Flood, the mystery of the rings themselves — it was military sci-fi wrapped around something much older and stranger. Master Chief doesn’t say much, but the world he moves through does a lot of the talking.

Seven feels right. It’s a franchise that earned its place in the conversation without ever needing to explain itself too hard.

The reimagined Battlestar Galactica is the kind of show that makes you feel like you need a nap and a debrief afterward. It’s a survival story, but it’s also about faith and politics and what happens to people when everything familiar is gone. The Cylons aren’t just enemies — they’re a mirror, and the show never lets you look away from that for very long.

Prestige sci-fi before prestige sci-fi was a marketing term. It belongs in this top ten.

Nobody expected Guardians to work as well as it did. A talking raccoon with weapons, a walking tree, a grief-riddled assassin, a literal-minded alien, and a guy who is mostly just vibes — and somehow they became one of the most beloved franchises in the Marvel catalog. The comedy lands because the emotion underneath it is real. These are broken people who chose each other anyway.

Top five feels exactly right.

Doctor Who has been running since 1963, which means it has also been confusing newcomers and delighting longtime fans since 1963. The show is hard to summarize because it can be almost anything — horror, comedy, adventure, a gut-punch in a Welsh quarry. The TARDIS makes the whole universe feel reachable, and the Doctor’s approach to it (curious, compassionate, occasionally dressed poorly) gives the show its real identity.

Four is a respectable home for a show this big and this strange.

One season. Fourteen episodes. A devoted fandom that still hasn’t fully let go. Firefly is probably the most significant canceled show in sci-fi history, which is a genuinely strange thing to say, but here we are. The space western setting gave it an identity unlike anything else on television at the time, and the crew of Serenity felt like real people — messy, funny, loyal to each other in ways that cost them something.

Bronze in this bracket is a better legacy than most full-run shows ever get.

Star Trek is the rare franchise that actually believes something. It imagines a future where humanity got its act together — not perfectly, not without conflict, but enough to go exploring instead of just surviving. Across dozens of series and hundreds of episodes, that optimism has held. You can debate which captain is best, which timeline is canon, which holodeck episode traumatized you the most. But the thing underneath all of it is consistent: the idea that going out there is worth it.

Second place in this community. Warp-core influence on the genre.

And the Love Thy Nerd community’s pick for the best sci-fi property set in space is Star Wars. This is the one. The John Williams score, the twin suns, the ragtag rebellion against a monolithic evil. Star Wars took the oldest stories humans tell — about destiny and temptation and what it means to choose good when it costs you — and launched them into space with lightsabers and droids and a villain who breathes like a haunted radiator.

What makes Star Wars the winner isn’t that it’s the best-written or most complex. It’s that it became a shared language. Across generations of fans, across wildly different entry points and eras and opinions about the sequels, it holds. That’s harder than it looks.

Galaxy far, far away. First place on this list.

Final Thoughts

What this bracket actually shows is how much range the genre has. Space sci-fi can be a survival horror film, a political drama, a philosophical thought experiment, a Saturday morning cartoon with giant robots, or a show about a man in a blue box who just really wants to help. The Love Thy Nerd community gave every one of these a fair shot. Star Wars came out on top. But the whole list is worth a second look.

What do you think is missing from this list?

Make your voice heard in the latest LTN Bracket by joining the LTN Discord!