Valve's brilliant shooter dumps scientist Gordon Freeman on a dystopian Earth crushed by the evil Combine alien invasion force. The visuals are wonderful, the physics are astonishing and the Orwellian setting of City 17 provides a nightmarish backdrop to the tense story of rebellion, sacrifice and shooting stuff. Set in an alternate post-second world war period in which an alien race known as the Chimera has infected and enslaved most of humanity, Insomniac's shooter series has the gritty muted look of a 1950s British sci-fi movie, and is notable in that it starts not in New York or London but in … Grimsby, a town criminally overlooked by mainstream action adventure games. The legendary X-COM series of strategy games has players controlling small squads of soldiers touching down at alien invasion sites to destroy the monsters and gather their artefacts for research. Combining tense tactical fights with resource management, the game was utterly gripping, and the reboot series has revived the turn-based combat genre for a whole new generation.

Aliens, astronauts, time travel--you name it, there's a dazzling sci-fi film about it. That makes compiling a list of the best sci-fi nearly impossible. It's almost impossible to know where to start--or where to stop. To understand where sci-fi films came from, you need to head back to the dawn of the cinema age. Right at the beginning, Metropolis, released in 1927, used groundbreaking visuals to create a reference point for all future urban dystopias--it's no fluke, for example, that the aesthetic of Blade Runner bears more than a passing resemblance to Fritz Lang's prophetic city hellscape. Then along came War of the Worlds (1953), a gripping tale of alien invasion adapted from H. G. Wells' classic novel. In 1964, Dr. Strangelove did more than most films before or since to ossify the fear of a nuclear holocaust. Below is WIRED's ever-evolving selection of the sci-fi movies everyone should watch, from the obscure to the hugely influential. You may also enjoy our guides to the best sci-fi books of all time and the best space movies. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. When Alfonso Cuarón wrote the screenplay for Gravity, he wasn't setting out to make a film about space itself. Rather, he was interested in exploring the concepts of adversity and human resilience, with space as a secondary background. But it was hard for audiences to not be wowed by the visuals in this Oscar-winning film about two scientists (George Clooney and Sandra Bullock) who find themselves stranded in space, and what they must endure in order to get safely back to Earth.

An alien species is headed for planet Earth and we have no reason to believe it will be friendly. Some experts predict it will get here within 30 years, while others insist it will arrive far sooner. Nobody knows what it will look like, but it will share two key traits with us humans – it will be intelligent and self-aware. No, this alien will not come from a distant planet – it will be born right here on Earth, hatched in a research lab at a major university or large corporation. I am referring to the first artificial general intelligence (AGI) that reaches (or exceeds) human-level cognition.

An alien species is headed toward earth. Many experts predict it will get here within 20 years, while others suggest it may take a little longer. Either way, there is little doubt it will arrive before this century is out and we humans have no reason to believe it will be friendly. While I can't say exactly what it will look like, I am confident it will be unlike us in almost every way, from its physiology and morphology to its psychology and sociology. Still, we will quickly determine it shares two key traits with us humans: consciousness and self-awareness.