New Year is a time of reinvention. In that spirit, I would like to shake up this preview of 2026's best sci-fi and science-related TV with a radical act: including a series that started last year. That may seem strange, but the second season of Fallout (Amazon Prime Video) aired in only mid-December, so, for my money, it counts. Set in a retrofuturistic US, generations of humans have lived inside radiation-proof bunkers sold to them by the shadowy Vault-Tec corporation. Last season, former vault-dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell) went surface-side to find her missing father, encountering cowboys and cannibals along the way.

Well, those little green shoots of recovery I forecast last year have flowered. This year is set to bring tighter scripts, cheaper projects (which is good, because studios can take more chances) and a more enjoyable cinema-going experience all round. On 16 January, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will deliver (honest) on all those promises exasperatingly kept back in 2025's 28 Years Later . There will be Cillian Murphy reprising his role from 2002's 28 Days Later, plus more from actor Jack O'Connell's "Jimmys", an acrobatic killer cult. There will also be Nia DaCosta in the director's chair - a young, much-lauded talent who not so long ago had the misfortune to helm The Marvels .

Megan Eaves-Egenes's Nightfaring explores our connection with the night sky Here in the northern hemisphere, January always feels like the longest, drabbest month of the year, so how lucky we are to have a host of new science books to enliven our days. This month, we can explore everything from what the arts bring to our lives to the unsung hero that is friction. Or what we lose when we light up our skies? Daisy Fancourt's Art Cure investigates the impact of the arts, including dancing, on our minds and bodies What if playing the piano, dancing, visiting art galleries or even lying in the mud listening to Wolf Alice at Glastonbury was good for the body, mind and longevity? Or what if it could help us develop brain resilience against dementia? In theory, she's well-placed to make the case as a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London and director of the WHO's arts and health initiative.

The ideas presented in George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan's The Neural Mind are fascinating, but the writing is far less compelling This is a book review in two parts. The first is about the ideas presented in The Neural Mind: How brains think, which are fascinating. The second is about the actual experience of reading it. The book tackles one of the biggest questions in neuroscience: how do neurons perform all the different kinds of human thought possible, from planning motor actions to composing sentences and musing about philosophy? The authors have very different perspectives.

Time flows ever onwards with reassuring uniformity - at least, that's how it feels to mere mortals unplugged from the weirder parts of physics. But everyone knows that the exception to this rule is the period between Christmas and New Year, in which time behaves strangely, moving like molasses until it lurches forwards as you near your return to work. If you usually misspend the twilight days of the year sitting idly in a fog of libations, you might be wondering how to occupy yourself. Fear not: staff and contributors have crafted a bucket list of all-time cultural greats to fill the long hours of the holiday season. It is an eclectic mix of books, films, television, music, video games, board games and more, designed to highlight some overlooked classics that you simply must try. The only thing they all have in common is their celebration of science, technology, the environment or any other topic you might find in . We hope you enjoy our favourites - if you choose to give one a go, your time will pass in the blink of an eye. Released in 2019, it broke from a stale formula of largely linear plotlines and choreographed cutscenes in the middle of gameplay, instead opting for narrative experimentation. You begin as a spacefaring alien in a solar system moments from destruction, stuck in a 22-minute time loop that ends with a supernova. It is also a physics lover's paradise: the game wrestles with quantum entanglement, entropy and non-Euclidean spaces. Its simulation of light bending around black holes is among the most accurate ever rendered in media.

From Mickey 17 and M3gan 2.0 to a musical about the end of the world, this was an eclectic year for science-fiction films. Some ideas are so compelling, so intuitive, one would sooner recycle them than take them apart to explore. So, in 1950, Isaac Asimov fixed up some puzzle stories into a fiendish, Agatha Christie-in-space sci-fi novel, I, Robot, while in 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey set a high bar for films about (or at least containing) artificial intelligence. There, ideas-wise, the story of robots in cinema pretty much starts to repeat on an endless loop. This year, The Electric State spun a yarn about a robot rebellion, M3gan 2.0 showed you can't keep a good killerbot down and Companion took the femmebot's point of view to give us a decent adult-themed Asimov pastiche. All three toyed with the usual notions around free will and indulged in handwringing about when to treat a machine like a person.

Author Simon Stålenhag has a new work out this month. December is traditionally a quieter month for new releases from publishers and that's definitely true this year, with a sparser than usual science-fiction offering to chew over. That said, there are some intriguing titles out this month, and I'm looking forward to the new book from artist and author Simon Stålenhag, another illustrated dystopia, as well as a mysterious-sounding Russian novel, and the conclusion of Bethany Jacobs's excellent space opera trilogy. Jacobs has written a piece for the New Scientist Book Club about how the late Iain M. Banks inspired her own world-building. The Book Club is currently reading Banks's classic Culture novel - do join us .

From drowned worlds to virtual utopias via deep space, wild ideas abound in Emily H. Wilson's picks for her favourite sci-fi reads of the year So: what were the best works of science fiction published this year? I will start with two new books that aren't actually new, but have only just been published in English. First up is Ice by Jacek Dukaj, originally published to great acclaim in Poland all the way back in 2007. It is an alternative history set in Europe in the early 1920s. A terrible winter grips the land, and the cause of it may be something very alien.

Lise Barnéoud's Hidden Guests shows how this fascinating new field brings with it profound implications for medicine, and even what it means to be human, finds Helen Thomson "We are composed not only of human cells and microbes but also fragments of others " My children were conceived using donated eggs, so you would be forgiven for assuming we share no genetic material. Yet science has proved this isn't entirely true. We now know that during pregnancy, fetal cells cross the placenta into the mother, embedding themselves in every organ yet studied. Likewise, maternal cells, and even those that crossed from my mum to me, can make their way into my kids. And things might get even more chimeric - I have older sisters, so their cells, having passed into my mum during their own gestation, might have then found their way into me and, in turn, into my kids.