Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner used to spend every evening watching movies. Their favourites were cheesy – the type of film where someone says, "Secure the perimeter!" Why do I mention this in the context of Foundation? Because this adaptation of Isaac Asimov's novels started out as a thought-provoking series, but is now a "Secure the perimeter!" It has been two years since Foundation last aired, so if you have forgotten where we left off, that is understandable.

So far, it has been an encouraging year for science fiction. My favourite new offering to date is probably Hal LaCroix's Here and Beyond, but then, I'm a sucker for a good ark-ship story. In LaCroix's take on the trope, a vessel called Shipworld is heading for HD-40307g, "a habitable Super Earth hug orbiting a simmering red dwarf star". It is a journey of 42 light years – meaning that none of the 600 souls who begin the journey will actually live to see HD-40307g. Only the Seventh Generation will make planetfall. There are rules on board.

Hal LaCroix's Here and Beyond takes place on a spaceship journeying for centuries to a new planet Riches galore await sci-fi fans in July, with two of the books I've enjoyed most so far this year due to be published for all to read. Fancy a beautifully written vision of a world turning ever faster, in which the consequences of this speed-up play out in subtle but increasingly disturbing ways? Try Alex Foster's Circular Motion. Set in the not-too-distant future, this stunningly impressive debut novel imagines an Earth orbited by massive aircraft, which allow the sufficiently wealthy to pop from New York to London in an hour, or order in sushi from Japan. Earth's spin, meanwhile, is gradually accelerating, with days at first just a few seconds shorter but, nightmarishly, contracting to just two hours as the novel progresses, with all sorts of terrible consequences.

Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time was (largely) a hit with the New Scientist Book Club One of the wonderful things about science fiction is the broadness of its church, and this was really brought home to me by our two most recent reads. The New Scientist Book Club moved from the hard science fiction spacefaring of Larry Niven's classic Ringworld in May to the near-future-set time travel of Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time for our June read. The former takes its science seriously, diving into the maths and physics of its set-up with gusto; the latter – not so much. Culture editor Alison Flood rounds up the New Scientist Book Club's thoughts on our latest read, the science fiction classic Ringworld by Larry Niven The story of an unnamed civil servant who is given the job of supporting an "expat" from history – Commander Graham Gore, a (real) Victorian polar explorer from 1847 – The Ministry of Time is many things in one: a thriller, a romance, a piece of climate fiction (apparently), a science fiction novel about time. I couldn't put it down and loved all of it – apart, perhaps, from the ending.

When Pragmata was first announced five years ago, it wasn't clear exactly what Resident Evil publisher Capcom was making. The debut trailer featured eerie, futuristic imagery, an astronaut, and a blond-haired little girl, but there was nothing concrete or clear about its content. And when it missed its 2022 release window and was "paused indefinitely" in 2023, it wasn't clear if Pragmata would ever come to be. That all changed on 4 June, when a brand-new trailer was broadcast during a PlayStation showcase. The blond-haired little girl turns out to be a weaponised android, accompanying an astronaut called Hugh (of course) through space-station shootouts. I played about 20 minutes of the game during Summer Game Fest the following weekend.

June's new science fiction includes a space opera from Megan E. O'Keefe Do you like your world ravaged by unstoppable and deadly viruses or technologies? If so, then June is your month, because we have everything from a contagion that makes people lustful to a neural chip that lets us turn off sleep. We've also got an environmental apocalypse from Inga Simpson in The Thinning, and I'm definitely in the mood for a slice of feminist body horror from E.K. Sathue pitched as American Psycho meets The Substance. Elsewhere, we have Megan E. O'Keefe's new space opera, which sounds intriguing, and Taylor Jenkins Reid's look at the 1980s space shuttle programme, Atmosphere. Those dastardly scientists are at it again, this time developing a neural chip that allows you to turn off sleep.

Democratic strategist James Carville said on Wednesday he doesn't buy it when wealthy Jewish donors tell him they're ditching the Democratic Party because of antisemitism among its members. He says they're doing it for a "f------ tax cut." There are two truths about presidential candidates. One: There is no such thing as a perfect candidate. Two: It is very difficult to convince party elites that there are no perfect candidates.

For this week's Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. In the spring of 1940, Isaac Asimov, who had just turned twenty, published a short story titled "Strange Playfellow." It was about an artificially intelligent machine named Robbie that acts as a companion for Gloria, a young girl. Asimov was not the first to explore such technology. In Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R.," which débuted in 1921 and introduced the term "robot," artificial men overthrow humanity, and in Edmond Hamilton's 1926 short story "The Metal Giants" machines heartlessly smash buildings to rubble.

The Book Club gives their verdict on Larry Niven's Ringworld It was quite an experience, moving from the technicolour magical realism of Michel Nieva's wild dystopia, Dengue Boy, to Larry Niven's slice of classic science fiction, Ringworld, first published in 1970 and very much redolent of the sci-fi writing of that era. I was a teenager when I last read Ringworld, and a hugely uncritical sort of teenager at that, so I was keen to return to a novel I remembered fondly and see how it stood up to the test of time – and my somewhat more critical eye. The first thing to say is that many of the things I loved about Ringworld were very much still there. This is, for me, a novel that inspires awe – with the vastness of its imagination, the size of its megastructures, the distance it travels in space. I was reminded of that awe early on, when our protagonist Louis Wu (more on him later) recalls standing at the edge of Mount Lookitthat on a distant planet.

Although the Cannes Film Festival is the world's most prestigious movie showcase, its spotlight rarely falls on nonfiction film. Years go by without a single documentary competing for its biggest honor, the Palme d'Or, and there is no separate documentary prize. Juliette Binoche, the president of this year's jury, devoted part of her opening-night remarks to Fatma Hassona, the Palestinian photojournalist who was killed in an Israeli airstrike the day after it was announced that her documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk would be premiering at Cannes. But the film itself was slotted into a low-profile sidebar devoted to independent productions. The festival did, however, roll out the red carpet for The Six Billion Dollar Man, Eugene Jarecki's portrait of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, which premiered out of competition on Wednesday evening.