There is plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it's solar-powered cities from Adrian Tchaikovsky or a strange future from M. John Harrison A father mysteriously slips through time in Joseph Eckert's Writing this as the UK swelters under an unprecedented May heatwave, perhaps it's small wonder that so many science-fiction authors are currently imagining miserable versions of an overheated future in which their characters are struggling to survive. I'm intrigued by the sound of sci-fi legend M. John Harrison's upcoming take on a dystopian future, but if post-apocalyptic hellscapes aren't your thing, I'm also happy to report that there are other options for sci-fi fans this month. Next, I'm going to explore Isabel J. Kim's sci-fi spin on immigration,, as soon as I can get my hands on it. I am excited about this book: M. John Harrison is a really classy writer, winner of all sorts of awards, and his latest novel sounds right up my street. It's set in a future years after an obscure "crisis" changed everything, in a world where the seas are full of new creatures.

Quantum Backrooms is a horror game in which the player explores eerie rooms. A quantum computer has been used to create a horror video game called - and it's available to play online. Peculiarities of quantum objects have long inspired philosophers and artists, and now game developers are getting the bug too. James Wootton at Moth Quantum and his colleagues developed, a horror game with labyrinthine levels generated by a real quantum computer . The game draws inspiration from "the Backrooms," a horror legend developed on internet forums that consists of moving through a series of endless rooms.

Just a week after an AI disproved an 80-year-old conjecture and astonished mathematicians, another conjecture that had stood for half a century has fallen, inspired by the same techniques, but this time written entirely by humans. Last week, an unreleased AI model from OpenAI disproved an important conjecture first posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, called the unit distance problem. The puzzle, which Erdős considered his "most striking contribution to geometry" and which many mathematicians had failed to unravel, concerns the number of similar-sized connections you can make between dots arranged on a flat surface. Erdős had set an upper ceiling on this number, which many experts had assumed was correct. But the AI model showed that this number could in fact be much larger, using an obscure trick from algebraic number theory to make complex structures with extremely high dimensions, which could then be used to arrange the dots in a very different arrangement than humans had considered.

Mathematicians have never been so sought after by the world's richest people. At universities across the world, academics are seeing their colleagues mysteriously disappear and join private companies. Some of these companies are household names, like OpenAI and Google, but others are newly formed and just months old, hoping to capitalise on a moment in which mathematics is seen as the secret ingredient with which to improve artificial intelligence - which may in turn transform mathematics itself. "Last May, I was honestly kind of grieving for my scientific identity," says Ken Ono, who in 2025 went on leave from a professorship at the University of Virginia to join Axiom Math, a start-up aiming to build a maths-focused AI. Ono had been asked by a different company, called Epoch AI, to help craft a set of hard-to-solve maths problems that would test AI's problem-solving ability .

The New Scientist Book Club read Silvia Park's near-future sci-fi novel Luminous in May, and had lots of good things to say (along with a few complaints) The New Scientist Book Club read Silvia Park's Luminous in May The New Scientist Book Club had quite a change of science-fictional pace in May, moving from the wilds of space in our April read, Kim Stanley Robinson's, to a much closer-to-home future in Silvia Park's . Like another of our reads this year, Sierra Greer's, this imagines a world where robots are integrated into society - and explores how we might deal with this on many different levels: emotionally, spiritually, practically, sexually. Set in a reunified Korea, it's a compelling blend of three storylines: a police procedural, in which detective Jun is out to discover what might have become of a robot girl who has gone missing; a ragtag bunch of kids on an adventure, in which Ruijie and her schoolmates find an abandoned robot boy in a scrapyard; and a tale of a dysfunctional family. Jun and his younger sister Morgan grew up with a third sibling, a robot who disappeared when they were young, fracturing their family. Author Silvia Park: 'No one is your enemy, not even death' Silvia Park, author of the May read for the New Scientist Book Club, 'Luminous' on emotional artificial intelligence, our inevitable love for robots and coping with grief.

Inspired by Shannon Vallor's book The AI Mirror, this compelling piece looks at how we are being affected by our deepening interactions with tech Traditional ballet with tutus and pointe shoes is my preferred night at the theatre, but I enjoyed a contemporary piece recently at London's Sadler's Wells East. The piece, Mirror, by the Alexander Whitley Dance Company, will also be at the city's Royal Opera House on 4 June. It is inspired by the book by Shannon Vallor, a professor in the ethics of data and artificial intelligence, in which she argues for and against the use of AI. Vallor wants us to find a middle ground between passively resigning ourselves to AI as a replacement for our agency, and seeing it as an existential threat that must be defeated. As a science journalist, I like the balance of Vallor's book, but, for me, this didn't translate to the dance piece.

The late Ian Watson's sci-fi The Embedding is intriguing - but dated Watson's death last month prompted sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson to read his acclaimed 1973 debut and find out what she'd been missing. The acclaimed British science-fiction writer Ian Watson, author of more than two dozen novels, died this April. His fame may have faded over the decades, but his debut novel The Embedding was greeted with acclaim when it was published in 1973. The Spectator declared it "the most spectacular thing in science fiction since the outstanding Solaris by Stanisław Lem". Watson's later work, both sci-fi and fantasy, included novels relating to Warhammer 40,000 games and a stint developing the script of A.I. Artificial Intelligence with Stanley Kubrick.

Mathematicians stunned by AI's biggest breakthrough in mathematics yet An 80-year-old maths conjecture that has eluded the world's greatest mathematicians has been cracked by an artificial intelligence model built by OpenAI. The result has stunned experts and is being hailed as a seismic moment for AI's mathematical ability. "This is a problem that I didn't expect to see solved in my lifetime," says Misha Rudnev at the University of Bristol, UK. "It's absolutely a bomb." Tim Gowers at the University of Cambridge wrote that the solution is "a milestone in AI mathematics" in a blog post accompanying the work . "If a human had written the paper and submitted it to the and I had been asked for a quick opinion, I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation. No previous AI-generated proof has come close to that."

AS A sci-fi fan, you learn not to dwell on the films that could have been. Whether it's Alejandro Jodorowsky's unmade Dune, Guillermo del Toro's cancelled take on At the Mountains of Madness, or the versions of Return of the Jedi that Davids Lynch and Cronenberg could have made, it's best not to torture yourself over cinematic what-ifs. That's why I had given up hope of there being a new instalment of the most underrated sci-fi film franchise of the 21st century so far. Though well received by critics and audiences alike, none of the four films have won Oscars or seem to have made much of an impact on pop culture. But then, earlier this month, we got confirmation that a fifth movie was on the way.

What do researchers of artificial intelligence, medicine and climate change have in common? They could all learn from the story of Rumpelstiltskin. As the fairy tale teaches us, knowing something's "true name", an ancient concept in folklore, gives us power over it. While this may not seem very scientific, psychologists have repeatedly found that your name changes how people perceive you . The same may be true for scientific terms. Take "artificial intelligence": while the technology is undeniably impressive, much of the drama around AI might have been avoided if we used the less grandiose name "machine learning".