When Haldeman returned from Vietnam, with a Purple Heart for the wounds he had suffered, he wrote a story about a pointless conflict that seems as if it will never end. It was set in space, and the enemies were aliens, but 18 publishers decided it was too close to home before St Martin's Press took a gamble. The book that "nobody wants to read" went on to win many prizes. It's not perfect - it's hard to take seriously a future in which hetereosexuality is a perversion - but the anti-war message is as powerful as ever. Known for his intricate short stories and critically acclaimed mountaineering novel Climbers, Harrison cut his teeth on SF. In typical fashion, he writes space opera better than many who write only in the genre. For all its star travel and alien artefacts, scuzzy 25th-century spaceports and drop-out space pilots, Light is actually about twisting three plotlines as near as possible to snapping point. This is as close as SF gets to literary fiction, and literary fiction gets to SF. Jon Courtenay Grimwood Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop Amateur stonemason, waterbed designer, reformed socialist, nudist, militarist and McCarthyite, Heinlein is one of the most interesting and irritating figures in American science fiction.

There is bound to be cynicism about robots working in hospitals. The thought of scalpel-wielding robot doctors makes the blood run cold. But that's not what concerns Lord Winston in his new BBC1 series, Superdoctors. He worries about the doctor-patient relationship: "I just feel that robotic nurses and robotic doctors are completely contrary to what medicine is about." His clearly made points about doctors' duty of care ring true.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Thursday April 22 2004 The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett's students was Dennett's seminar at Tufts, not Gould's at Harvard. Dennett wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a "Darwinian fundamentalist". Dan Dennett is a sailor, with a billowing white beard and moustaches that he twiddles when thinking. He uses "salty" as a term of praise and has just bought a 42ft boat that sleeps five and could, if he wished, cross the Atlantic. His passion for sailing may be the best way to approach his philosophy. In both, un-charted and dangerous areas are to be navigated by explorers ingeniously equipped. Like all sailors, he has stories. One concerns a French couple he met when sailing off Greenland. They were on their honeymoon, sailing from France to Iceland, then Greenland, and finally, in one long reach, from Greenland to the Falklands.

Turing proposed his test in a spirit of down-to-earth pragmatism. He saw that, when faced with the question, "Is it possible to build a machine that can think?", Turing hoped that his test would cut through a lot of fruitless semantic debate. It was an engineer's solution, rather than a philosopher's. Perhaps inevitably, Turing's proposal merely redirected the philosophical debate. Instead of quarrelling about the meaning of the verb "to think", philosophers argued about the meaning of the Turing test instead.

Hilton Nunez felt more like an air traffic controller than the commander of six Hunter unmanned aerial vehicles. A division commander wanted a UAV to check for surface-to-air threats. A corps commander sought one to fly far ahead of advancing troops to gather intelligence for the next day's war planning. There were never enough UAVs to go around. "There was a constant battle over who would control the UAVs," Nunez says.

If robots are going to be part of our everyday lives, they'll need to fit into our homes rather than the factory floor. Few people would be comfortable living with a metal spider on tank treads, so the University of Zurich's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab) is building a robot toddler called "Roboy." Using "soft robotics" technology that mimics the human body, the 1.2 meter (3 ft, 11 in) tall humanoid robot is part of an effort to make robots that people are more comfortable with in day-to-day situations.

Genetic programming has 16 attributes of what is sometimes called automatic programming or program synthesis or program induction). One of the central challenges of computer science is to get a computer to solve a problem without explicitly programming it. In particular, it would be desirable to have a problem-independent system whose input is a high-level statement of a problem's requirements and whose output is a working computer program that solves the given problem. "How can computers be made to do what needs to be done, without being told exactly how to do it?" Genetic programming is a biologically inspired, domain-independent method that automatically creates a computer program from a high-level statement of a problem's requirements.

One of the central challenges of computer science is to get a computer to do what needs to be done, without telling it how to do it. Genetic programming achieves this goal of automatic programming (also sometimes called program synthesis or program induction) by genetically breeding a population of computer programs using the principles of Darwinian natural selection and biologically inspired operations. The operations include reproduction, crossover (sexual recombination), mutation, and architecture-altering operations patterned after gene duplication and gene deletion in nature. Genetic programming is a domain-independent method that genetically breeds a population of computer programs to solve a problem. Specifically, genetic programming iteratively transforms a population of computer programs into a new generation of programs by applying analogs of naturally occurring genetic operations.

The next time you beat your keyboard in frustration, think of a day when it may be able to sue you for assault. Within 50 years we might even find ourselves standing next to the next generation of vacuum cleaners in the voting booth. Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future. Visions of the status of robots around 2056 have emerged from one of 270 forward-looking papers sponsored by Sir David King, the UK government's chief scientist. The paper covering robots' rights was written by a UK partnership of Outsights, the management consultancy, and Ipsos Mori, the opinion research organisation.

If Daniel Nadler is right, a generation of college graduates with well-paid positions as junior researchers and analysts in the banking industry should be worried about their jobs. Mr Nadler's start-up, staffed with ex-Google engineers and backed partly by money from Google's venture capital arm, is trying to put them out of work. Its algorithms assess how different securities are likely to react after the release of a market-moving piece of information, such as a monthly employment report. That is the kind of work usually done by well-educated junior analysts, who pull data from terminals, fill in spreadsheets and crunch numbers. "There are several hundred thousand people employed in that capacity. We do it with machines," says Mr Nadler.