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.

Fintech labs, accelerators and hackathons are spreading around the world, from New York to London to Asia to Latin America. In New York, where it all started in 2010 with the FinTech Innovation Lab launched by and the Partnership Fund for New York City, the latest startup graduates have been announced from the 12-week mentoring program. Participants were: Digital Asset Holdings, secure distributed settlement and ledger services; EverSafe, protection for older adults from financial abuse and identity theft; MaxMyInterest, cash sweep to a client's highest yielding account; PierceMatrix, cyber-security third party risk management; Pay Your Tuition, helps high performing students obtain funding; Social Alpha, trading information from social media and news using natural language processing; Ufora, provides answers from large data sets in seconds. The FinTech Innovation Labs' 24 alumni companies have raised a total of $176 million in financing after participating in the program, and one alumni company was acquired last year for $175 million. Accenture's 2015 FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific in Hong Kong announced seven startups for this year's program.

A new breed of security cameras can supposedly detect terrorism and crime without a human judgment call--and mass transit agencies are shelling out big bucks for the product. San Francisco's Municipal Transit Authority, which oversees the city's MUNI trains, has signed a contract with security firm BRS Labs to deploy cameras to 12 subway stations that use algorithms and machine learning techniques to spot anomalous behavior. BRS Labs is a security firm that provides behavior recognition software for video surveillance. The company's clients include government, tourist attractions, military bases, and private industry; BRS's software issues real-time text alerts when cameras detect strange behavior. Servers connected to security cameras observe locations for weeks at a time and then establish a baseline of "normal" behavior based on this timespan; anomalous activities afterwards (loitering, abandoned packages, abnormally high/low numbers of passengers) trigger an alert.

Dr Milne, who has already climbed Carstensz Pyramid (Oceania) Vinson Massif (Antarctica), Elbrus (Europe), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Denali (North America) and Aconcagua (South America), will be the first mountaineer to use the IM-PACs (intelligent messaging, planning and collaboration) system. The technology, developed at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute in the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, has been designed to provide computer support to people and teams performing a range of tasks - not just expedition teams operating in extreme conditions, but also key personnel involved in planning and rescue services responding rapidly to emergencies. IM-PACs' foundations in artificial intelligence planning technologies supply a framework that encourages a methodological approach to any task and allows users to transmit and respond to information in ways that can adapt to the circumstances the expedition team finds itself in. During his ascent, Dr. Milne will be in regular contact with colleagues in base camp who will monitor his progress against his ascent plan. A laptop computer and satellite phone will allow details of his current status and progress to be sent over the internet to a support team in Edinburgh.

THEY certainly cannot be faulted for a lack of ambition. The scientists and engineers who gathered this week in Oxford for the first International Workshop on Complex Agent-Based Dynamic Networks are seeking to explain much of the world's behaviour through the use of "agents". In this context, an agent is a program that acts in a self-interested manner in its dealings with numerous other agents inside a computer. This arrangement can mimic almost any interactive system: a stockmarket; a habitat; even a business supply-chain. If the constituent parts can be understood, the reasoning goes, some insight into the whole will follow.

Many motorists dream of the day they can sit back and relax while their car drives itself. And while Google and other companies are working hard to make autonomous vehicles a reality, it could take years to create a car that can negotiate complex situations on the road – including wet weather conditions. Google's self-driving cars can't currently cope in heavy rain or snow – or find their way around 99 per cent of the US, an insider has admitted. A Google Insider has admitted that the firm's cars (pictured) are incredibly reliant on maps, can't cope with wet weather conditions and are unable to'see' potholes. According to MIT Technology Review, the current prototype cars are very reliant on maps to navigate and can't react like a human driver, dodging potholes and other hazards.

Brazil's World Cup may be in full swing, but teams of robotic players are busy warming up to be in with a chance of lifting another trophy. The mechanical teams are set to battle it out on the pitch in a less well-known football tournament also taking place in Brazil this summer. A group of five humanoid'Drake' robots will compete as a team at the RoboCup 2014, which kicks off in Joao Pessoa on 21 July. RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded in 1997. It aims to promote robotics and artificial intelligence research.

It looks like Spock and Darth Vader may have some competition in the mind control stakes. Researchers in the U.S. claim to have discovered the secret to mind control by creating the world's first ever human-to-human brain interface. Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the Washington University campus, causing Stocco's finger to move on a keyboard. University of Washington researcher Rajesh Rao, left, plays a computer game with his mind. Across campus, researcher Andrea Stocco, right, wears a magnetic stimulation coil over the left motor cortex region of his brain.

Computers and the Internet: Listening to Girls' Voices – Dorothy Ellen Wilcox concludes that "instead of socializing adolescent girls toward docility, non-hierarchical technology like the Internet may provide a discourse for development of higher-level cognitive skills and the ability to unmask inequities in power and politics."

A tantalizing development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could help boost the popularity ratings of selfie takers and online daters. Scientists at the institute's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have taught computers to predict, with near perfect precision, which photos of faces, nature scenes, or other objects people are most likely to remember. Though similar predictive algorithms in the field of machine learning already allow computers to predict information by automatically completing phrases people type into Google search or by recognizing people to tag in photos on Facebook, scientists have not until now been able to use these tools to teach computers to predict what will be memorable to people, a skill that even humans themselves lack, Aditya Khosla, a PhD student in computer science at MIT, told The Christian Science Monitor. For selfies and other portraits, this development means an app might one day tell people which one from a group of photos is likely to get the most likes on Instagram, or to attract more suitors on a dating site. The team in 2013 developed an algorithm that can slightly modify pictures of faces to give them a more memorable flair.