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.

Larry Niven is one of the biggest names in the history of science fiction, and it was a privilege to interview him via Zoom at his home in Los Angeles recently. His 1970 novel Ringworld is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club, but he has also written a whole space-fleet-load of novels and short stories over the years, including my favourite sci-fi of all time, A World Out of Time. At 87 years of age, he is very much still writing. I spoke to him about Ringworld, his start in sci-fi, his favourite work over the years, his current projects and whether he thinks humankind will ever leave this solar system. This is an edited version of our conversation.

A company say they have developed a Star Wars-inspired speeder bike that can zoom to 124mph. Poland-based Volonaut says their Airbike is the first'hoverbike' vehicle of its kind that does not use propellers to fly. Incredible videos show someone sitting on the device as it appears to effortlessly glide through the air. At one point it hovers remarkably steady as the rider lifts a hand to wave at the camera. The firm says: 'This groundbreaking design shares a lot of similarities to'speeder bikes' featured in popular science-fiction movies.'

Is your favourite sci-fi novel included here, or have we forgotten it? Almost exactly a year ago, I asked our team of expert science writers here at New Scientist to name their favourite science fiction novels. Personal tastes meant we ended up with a wonderfully eclectic list, ranging from classics by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler to titles I'd not previously read (Jon Bois's 17776 was a particularly wild suggestion, from our US editor Chelsea Whyte – but it's well worth your time). We New Scientist staffers tend to be sci-fi nerds, and we realised we hadn't quite got all the greats yet. So here, for your reading pleasure, is our second take on our favourite sci-fi novels of all time, otherwise known as the ones we forgot. Again, we're not claiming this is a definitive list. It's just our top sci-fi reads, in no particular order, and we hope you'll discover some new favourites of your own in this line-up. We asked New Scientist staff to pick their favourite science fiction books. Here are the results, ranging from 19th-century classics to modern day offerings, and from Octavia E. Butler to Iain M. Banks And if we still haven't got them all, then come and tell us about it on Facebook.

In George Lucas's classic 1980 film'The Empire Strikes Back', hero Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is frozen in carbonite by the evil Darth Vader. The fictional metal hardened around the heroic space smuggler as it cooled – sealing him in a state of'perfect hibernation'. Carbonite is of course a fictional material, consigned to the realms of the Star Wars galaxy far, far away. But according to one scientist, this scene is not completely the stuff of science-fiction. Dr Alex Baker, a chemist at the University of Warwick, thinks humans could potentially be frozen like Solo with a real-life equivalent.

Bora Chung's Red Sword is set on a disputed planet While there are no big names publishing new science fiction novels this May, there are some real gems nonetheless – including a big tip from me, Grace Chan's near-future Every Version of You. I want to press it into the hands of everyone I know. There are also two fascinating sci-fi-edged thrillers out this month, by Adam Oyebanji and Barnaby Martin, while Catherine Chidgey's creepy The Book of Guilt has intrigued me enough to make it my next read – if it's not ousted by Bora Chung's real history-inspired story of war on an alien planet, Red Sword, that is… Set in late-21st-century Australia, this novel (published in Australia in 2022 but out now more widely) follows Tao-Yi in a world where most people spend their lives in an immersive virtual reality called Gaia. Every morning, she climbs into a pod in her apartment to enter Gaia, where she works and socialises. In the real world, the unrelenting heat of the sun means there are no trees left and hardly any animals: this is a terrifying vision of the future.

For more than a quarter of a century since its release, 'The Matrix' has fueled modern fears that life is not all it seems. But according to a scientist, the classic movie's premise may not be completely science fiction. Melvin Vopson, an associate professor in physics at the University of Portsmouth, thinks gravity may be a sign that we're all living in a virtual simulation. Our universe is the'ultimate computer', Professor Vopson theorizes in a new paper. Gravity's pull – both on planet Earth and in outer space – is the universe trying to keep its vast amount of data organised, Professor Vopson claims.

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your in-box. Elon Musk, who's taking his chainsaw to the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of "These Truths" and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. "When he keeps saying, you know, 'We're at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,' he means SpaceX," she tells David Remnick.

Black Mirror is more than science fiction – its stories about modernity have become akin to science folklore, shaping our collective view of technology and the future. Each new innovation gets an allegory: smartphones as tools for a new age caste system, robot dogs as overzealous human hunters, drones as a murderous swarm, artificial intelligence as new age necromancy, virtual reality and brain chips as seizure-inducing nightmares, to name a few. It is a must-watch, but must we take it so seriously? Black Mirror fails to consistently explore the duality of technology and our reactions to it. It is a critical deficit.

When the sun is out, it's just about warm enough here in north-east London to read outside – which means it's time to crack out the best new science fiction and find a sheltered spot. I love the way the genre continues to tackle the biggest issues of our day, whether that's ageing or artificial intelligence. Top of my pile is Lucy Lapinska's look at how a robot might deal with being freed from human governance, but I'm also looking forward to Nick Harkaway's latest, set in a world where a drug can (for a huge price) stop you from ageing, but it will also make you grow very large. And I'm keen to try out Sayaka Murata's strange and disturbing vision of the future, Vanishing World. Amane lives in a society where children are conceived by artificial insemination and raised by parents in "clean", sexless marriages. When she and her husband hear about an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there.