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 .

I t seems like an anachronism now, in this age of live service " forever games ", that the annual release of a new Call of Duty title is still considered a major event. But here is Black Ops 7, a year after its direct predecessor, and another breathless bombard of military shooting action. This time it is set in a dystopian 2035 where a global arms manufacturer named the Guild claims to be the only answer to an apocalyptic new terrorist threat - but are things as clearcut as they seem? The answer, of course, is a loudly yelled "noooo!" Black Ops is the paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed cousin to the Modern Warfare strand of Call of Duty games, a series inspired by 70s thrillers such as The Parallax View and The China Syndrome, and infused with'Nam era concerns about rogue CIA agents and bizarre psy-ops.

A terrifying societal collapse worthy of Hollywood can never be entirely ruled out. But according to one former Google executive, it may come a lot sooner than we expected. Mo Gawdat, a tech entrepreneur and author who spent 11 years at Google, has given a bleak warning about the near-future of society. Speaking with The Diary of a CEO podcast, Mr Gawdat said we'll be living in a dystopia in just two years' time. Sounding worthy of George Orwell's novel '1984', the dystopia will last up to 15 years, the expert said.

Adam Roberts' Lake of Darkness opens as two space ships investigate a black hole The starting point for this novel was that I wanted to write utopian fiction. I hadn't done this before: all my previous novels have been straight science fiction. But utopia, the genre that imagines a better, or a perfect, world, is older than science fiction: the first utopian novel, the work that coined the term, was written by Thomas More all the way back in 1516. I was interested in what happened to the mode: More's Utopia generated lots of imitators. Through the 17th and 18th centuries, a great many utopian books, novels, tracts and treatises were written.

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.

When Charlie Brooker's Netflix series about tech-driven dystopias, Black Mirror, returns, it will do so with a surprising new twist: a mobile video game tie-in called Thronglets. Think Tamagotchi, but psychologically threatening. Netflix showed off both a sneak peek of the new season of Black Mirror and the accompanying life sim game from Night School Studios during a private event in March during the Game Developers Conference. Sean Krankel, cofounder of Night School Studios and Netflix's newly appointed general manager of narrative, says the team worked closely with Brooker to create "an artifact" from the show people could experience as an extension of its story. "The way I came back to the team and I was like, oh my God, imagine if you brought a Mogwai home and it effed up your life after you watched Gremlins," Krankel says.

When Y2K seemed like the world's most pressing technological concern, the Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was using a dictionary and a set of grammatical rules to teach a computer how to write questions. The program he built can make enquiries in Spanish, English, German and French, in 4.7tn possible combinations. When the artwork showed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last year, it still had 271,000 years of new questions to ask. Which is to say, Lozano-Hemmer has been working with generative technology long enough to have learned a powerful lesson: "There is no such thing as a neutral algorithm." This lesson was reiterated to the Bafta-winning media artist in a spectacular, humiliating fashion at Miami Art Basel a little over a decade ago.

In the second season of BBC mystery thriller The Capture, deepfakes threaten the future of democracy and UK national security. In a dystopia set in present day London, hackers use AI to insert these highly realistic false images and videos of people into live news broadcasts to destroy the careers of politicians. But my team's research has shown how difficult it is to create convincing deepfakes in reality. In fact, technology and creative professionals have started collaborating on solutions to help people spot bogus videos of politicians and celebrities. We stand a decent chance of staying one step ahead of fraudsters.

In the second season of BBC mystery thriller The Capture, deepfakes threaten the future of democracy and UK national security. In a dystopia set in present day London, hackers use AI to insert these highly realistic false images and videos of people into live news broadcasts to destroy the careers of politicians. But my team's research has shown how difficult it is to create convincing deepfakes in reality. In fact, technology and creative professionals have started collaborating on solutions to help people spot bogus videos of politicians and celebrities. We stand a decent chance of staying one step ahead of fraudsters.

In the second season of BBC mystery thriller The Capture, deepfakes threaten the future of democracy and UK national security. In a dystopia set in present day London, hackers use AI to insert these highly realistic false images and videos of people into live news broadcasts to destroy the careers of politicians. But my team's research has shown how difficult it is to create convincing deepfakes in reality. In fact, technology and creative professionals have started collaborating on solutions to help people spot bogus videos of politicians and celebrities. We stand a decent chance of staying one step ahead of fraudsters.